Black-eyed Pea Salsa with chili powder teams up beautifully with Curried Steaks. Recipe below.
A couple of quick notes. First, for those of you who don’t eat red meat, this black-eyed pea salsa also livens up grilled fish or chicken breasts. Also, I’m doing two posts today, so be sure to scroll down for the second one.
The other day I realized that, as much as I love red meat, you wouldn’t know it to look at this blog. In fact, in the seven months Blue Kitchen has been open, I’ve talked about it exactly once, unless you count the two chili recipes that use ground beef. That is just plain wrong.
Growing up, ground was about the only kind of beef I knew, aside from the occasional stringy pot roast—burgers, meatloaf, spaghetti sauce, more meatloaf… I wasn’t introduced to the wonders of steak until I was in college, and then it was at one of those cafeteria-style joints called BEST STEAK HOUSE [or something equally overpromising] where you watch hairy-armed men tossing steaks on permanently charred grills with flames shooting up all around as the fat sizzled off. A steak dinner with baked potato and iceberg lettuce salad set you back maybe four or five bucks, and it was love at first gristly bite.
I have since graduated to better cuts of meat—and from medium-well to medium to medium-rare to rare. But the pure primal satisfaction that is steak remains undeniable.
Although one of my favorite ways to prepare steak is what I call my French bistro steak, seared in butter and the pan deglazed with red wine, I’m starting with this recipe because when I came across it in my files recently, I immediately wanted the black-eyed pea salsa.
Black-eyed peas are another food item very popular in the south [like last week’s okra]. Even though this salsa is named for them, there are lots of flavors at play here. When you first start cooking the green pepper and chili powder, the aroma will be less than encouraging. Don’t worry, though—when the other ingredients are added, it all comes together fabulously. And when it gets together with the steaks with their peppery curry marinade, the results are amazing. Continue reading “Black-eyed peas and big-flavored steaks” →
