Marinated Steaks

Author: Celia Jones

The chaotic kitchen with its overflowing cupboards and cluttered table was Mama's domain. Bustling around in her housedress and apron, she spent hours over the stove, her old Wearever Waterless pots always bubbling away, pumping out chicken and onion smells.

Despite the cozy atmosphere and Mama's hard work, Mama's culinary efforts often ended in disaster. That never stopped her from trying again. Whenever we had dinner with friends, she would always ask the hostess for recipes of the dishes they served. She would then write them down in the front blank pages of an old Funk and Wagnall's Encyclopedia. However, in my mother's hands, these dishes bore little resemblance to the originals. We got used to a diet of ship-anchor bread rolls, cardboard slabs of chocolate cake and meat that resembled hard tack.

Surprisingly, I can only remember one argument between my father and mother over food. The meat Mama bought from our butcher was sometimes tough. However, it often didn't matter what cut of meat she bought; she could transform fillet mignon into shoe leather. One night when Mama had made steak for dinner, Daddy complained that it was particularly gristly and rubbery-tasting. She kept insisting the steak was fine and continued gnawing away on hers to prove her point. Frustrated, Daddy picked up his steak and threw it at the kitchen wall, where it bounced off and flew back across the room. Reveling in a rare victory, my father said "See, it was tough"! His victory was short-lived. Mama paused a few minutes to look at the steak-sized grease stain on the wall and said, "Now, you'll have to repaint the kitchen walls."

The strange thing is that apart from this incident, no one in the family ever said that Mama couldn't cook. We just thought she was a bit too generous with some of the ingredients. If a cake recipe called for one cup of flour, one egg and a pinch of salt, she would use three cups of flour, four eggs and a couple tablespoons of salt. She cooked meat twice as long as recommended just to be sure. Mama didn't want to skimp when it came to food for her family.

I have a different cooking approach to cooking. Mainly, I believe that less is best. These days, I opt for meals that are quick, nourishing and tasty. One of my family's favorite recipes is steak, and with the cost of beef these days, I use thinner, smaller eye-fillet steaks, eschewing the fatty, thicker slabs of meat. To complement the smaller portions, I always serve a variety of vegetables and a baked potato with the meat. Marinating makes the steaks melt-in-the mouth tender and savory.

In retrospect, there is one cooking area where I strive to emulate Mama. She always said that you should cook with love, and we always knew that she did.

Marinated Steak Recipe

Ingredients

½ cup of teriyaki marinade sauce
2 cloves of crushed garlic
¼ cup of Sherry (sweet or dry)
4 fillet steaks, about an inch thick
2/3 cup sliced mushrooms

Instructions

Combine first three ingredients in a plastic or china dish.
Marinade steaks in this mixture for at least 30 minutes. Occasionally turn steaks to let marinade absorb in both sides of meat.
Spray fry pan with olive oil.
Place steaks and mushrooms into hot pan. Sear one side of steak until small globules of liquid appear on the top surface of the steak (about 5-6 minutes).
Flip steaks over and cook the other side for approximately 3 to 4 minutes. Only flip steak once to avoid drying out the meat.
Top steaks with mushrooms.

Serve steaks immediately with a mixture of steamed vegetables and baked potatoes.

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