Sesame oil, soy sauce and sherry give a subtle Asian taste to Seared Tuna Pepper Steaks. Recipe below.
The vent above our stove in the new kitchen has us cooking more seafood these days. And that has me looking for more recipes and ideas. Last week, I saw beautiful tuna steaks at the store. So I nabbed a couple with no real game plan, knowing I’d figure out something to do with them once I got them home. We have tons of cookbooks—well, actually more like pounds, but anyway lots—but I turned first to the binders.
The binders started out as a binder, one of those blue cloth-covered ones with maybe one-inch rings. And for a long time, that was plenty. Occasionally, we would clip a recipe from the newspaper or photocopy something from a library cookbook, and into the binder it went.
Then came epicurious.com. Does everyone go as nuts as I did when first stumbling on this site? From my first visit, I was hooked. There were recipes, thousands of them. There was the advanced search feature that let you specify cuisine, course, key ingredients, cooking technique… There were even dictionaries—one for food and one for wine, for crying out loud.
I visited every day, sometimes several times a day, checking out the Recipe of the Day [an evil feature designed to keep you coming back for more] or just doing random searches based on any ingredient or food substance that popped into my fevered brain. And like crack or eBay or any other addiction, it interfered with my work. Well, maybe a little. Not that it mattered—my creative director at the time was a fellow foodie, so as long as I shared my findings with him, all was good.
Perhaps most telling, though, I printed out vast quantities of recipes. Scads of them. Reams of them. The single blue binder was replaced by two, these with three-inch rings and dividers with tabs. This seemed like an ambitious step at first, even foolish. But soon these were swollen and ready to call for reinforcements.
And then the obsession stopped, as quickly as it had begun. Oh, I still love epicurious.com—I have a permanent link to it in my blogroll. But now I use it responsibly. I log on, find the recipe [or more often, a basic technique based on a few recipes], then get out.
And the binders are still around. They continue to grow, but at a much slower pace now. So when I came home with the tuna steaks last week [remember how this rant started?], I flipped through the seafood section of one of them and adapted this recipe from one I found there. It originally appeared in Bon Appetit, sent into the Too Busy to Cook column, one of my favorite sections of the magazine. Because as much as we love to cook, we’re all often too busy, aren’t we?
The sauce for this dish adds only a subtle asian taste, allowing the tuna flavor to shine through. For anyone who has not eaten fresh tuna, by the way, it is nothing like its canned brethren. It is dense and meaty in texture, with a clean, non-fishy taste.
Seared Tuna Pepper Steaks
Serves 2
2 6- to 7-ounce tuna steaks [each about 1 inch thick]
1/2 tablespoon coarsely cracked black pepper
1 tablespoon sesame oil
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1/4 cup dry sherry
1 tablespoon chopped green onion tops or chives
Sprinkle tuna steaks on both sides with black pepper, pressing gently to adhere. Heat a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add sesame oil and heat until shimmering, then add tuna steaks and sear until brown outside and just opaque in center, about 3 minutes for the first side and 2 to 3 minutes for the second. If the tuna’s a little pink inside, that’s okay—good, actually. Transfer tuna steaks to plate and tent with foil to keep warm.
Add soy sauce and sherry to skillet. Reduce heat and simmer until mixture is slightly reduced, scraping up any browned bits, about a minute or so. Plate tuna steaks and spoon sauce over them. Sprinkle with green onion tops or chives. Have salt at the table, in case anyone wants some, but the soy sauce brings plenty to the party.
Also this week in Blue Kitchen
So much for old saws. You know the one I mean: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” Meet the high school teacher who taught the jazz world a thing or two at What’s on the kitchen boombox?
Yep. I had that very same problem, but I wasn’t nearly as organized as you about it. I would print out a couple pages and then tuck them into a cookbook. It’s kind of fun, I’ll be flipping through say, The Naked Chef, and wham, there’s a recipe for Beet Gnocchi. It’s like being a culinary Indiana Jones.
My big problem is magazines. I buy them, and then I can’t throw them away, so there’s stacks and binders and loose pages all over the apartment that I can’t figure out what to do with. I just hope I don’t end up a culinary Collyer brother. That would be embarassing.
beautiful photograph. your blog always is so refreshing to view. it must be the design and photographs but always seems to relax me.
anyways, this tuna steak looks perfectly flavor-packed. thanks for the recipe! just last night my boyfriend was saying that he wanted to eat more fish… this will be my first attempt to make that happen!
I have accordion folders. They were organized at one point, but they aren’t any. And I have binders. And they aren’t organized either. It’s a horrible, wonderful lovely mess.
I think my binders convey more organization than actually exists. For one thing, when I’m searching for a recipe in them, I’ll often find that I have duplicates of some recipes—and not necessarily ones I’ve ever cooked. Or I’ll run across recipes that I can’t imagine ever sounded good to me that need weeding out [probably from my epicurious.com addiction days]. And then there are the random stacks of recipes never three-hole punched and stored.
Ann—I love the idea of a culinary Indiana Jones—I, on the other hand, sometimes bumble onto things, more like a culinary Inspector Clouseau. The Collyer brothers piece was both amusing and a cautionary tale. When we moved, we ruthlessly went through our stacks of food magazines and tore out recipes that sounded good. Then Marion put them out at her office, where they were immediately snarfed up. In doing so, she launched an impromptu magazine exchange at work.
Linda—Photographic praise from you is praise indeed. Thanks!
kT—Welcome to the world of food blogging! As a huge fan of potatoes, I’ll be excited to see what you do with “god is in the potatoes.”
I love your binders, Terry – I wish I were organized and neat as you, my friend!
Ask João and he will tell you about the hundreds of print outs around the house. 😀
I too went crazy for Epicurious when I first found it. Nuts, indeed. The recipes had beautiful photos that hypnotized me, I wanted to make all of them!
My addiction got a little under control once I subscribed to Gourmet (and now I’ve switched to Bon Appetit).
When I saw this dish I didn’t imagine it would sound so easy to prepare. Wonderful suggestion.
not having a vent above my stove prevents me from cooking seafood as well.
As i live in an apt. i dont think ill be installing one anytime soon. I live in a studio, even something like popcorns seems to invade my every pore.
Patricia—I prefer Bon Appetit as well. More about food and cooking and less about restaurants and hotels [although the current issue is a restaurant one, as I recall].
Doug—Check out my recipe for salmon tarragon steamed on a bed of vegetables, in the December archives. Or any recipe that involves wet cooking methods, such as steaming or poaching. It’s much less likely to smell up the place than searing, sautéing, baking or broiling. Good luck!
Delicious looking photo. That drizzle of sauce is just screaming for some rice.
It was my husband who stumbled upon epicurious about 7-8 years ago. It does allow us to “nab without a game plan” — I love that expression. I have about 8 shoeboxes full of clippings and epicurious printouts. That’s my method. Not a good one.
I never organized my stuff into binders. I have folders, stuffed with recipes. Cookbooks with recipes on separate sheets stuffed into them. And a section of my kitchen cabinets devoted to cookbooks and Bon Appetit magazines. Epicurious has been, for me, more like an IV drip than a crack addiction. I don’t print out recipes from it. I store them in my (online) recipe box. (Which, for some reason, I fail to be able to access.) But it’s an endless ocean into which I dive on a regular basis.
I don’t have cookbooks, but I’ve got binders. Lots of binders. Plus, I think I’ve made this recipe for Jeff. Seriously. It looks lovely.
This is something I’d throw on the grill — sounds delicious. I used to have binders, but now I have an overstuffed computer program that catalogs all of the recipes I find in places where I can’t access them again online.
I have two huge binders, Main and Desserts. And big brown manila envelopes for Bread,First Course etc . And shoeboxes with cuttings which I will file…one day.
And stacks of magazines,Gourmet ,Saveur, and back issues of the UK Sainsbury Magazine (my favourite and Best-Value foodie mag of All Time. Alas, now I am back in Canada and cannot justify a $100 subscription rate.)
But lately, if I discover a new recipe and make it twice from the clipping and LIKE it, it goes into a new slim binder called Current. I can’t risk it disappearing into the Black Hole of the big binders….