I officially opened the 10 month grill season last weekend. The only thing worse than doing the propane exchange rigamarole at Home Depot: doing the exchange at Home Depot, getting handed an empty tank, looking at the guy funny but assuming he knows what he’s doing (after all that’s his job), going home to verify that yes, the new tank is empty, and going back to try to find someone who cares so you can finally take the new tank home and cook with it because it’s now 4pm and you haven’t had lunch yet.
One nice thing about amateur home cooking is that you can create that which you cannot find in a restaurant. In my case: I made fajitas with one of the several filet mignons in my freezer. You may say that is silly to use such an expensive cut of meat in place of a $3 flank steak in a cooking application where toughness really doesn’t matter, and you may be right, but that doesn’t change the fact that the “file-tas” were damn good. Now I just need to figure out how to work bacon into that equation…
I still have lots of tenderloin in my freezer since I did the ‘buy a whole tenderloin and cut it up into steaks’ bit. So far that investment has yielded 2 steaks au poivre, beef stroganoff for six, the aforementioned filet-tas, and a couple of cheesesteaks (from scrap meat). Maybe the traditional bacon-entwined preparation is forthcoming…