Anybody who has dismantled a car or a motorbike will have had this feeling. You reassemble it and end up with a box of extraneous nuts and bolts.
Sometimes a similar thing happens with recipes. You assemble all the ingredients listed and methodically go through the recipe only to have several left over. Or something just doesn’t seem right. I won’t list them all here but this one of Gordon Ramsay’s comes to mind although funnily enough the problem is the opposite to the left over nuts.
Having eaten a carefully prepared a salad of seared tuna with a sauté of treviso from my signed copy of Gordon Ramsay’s Secrets, I and my neighbours felt something should have been left over. Out of the six to eight tablespoons of cracked black pepper perhaps about four to six tablespoons.
Now I like hot food as much as the next person. I want to weep over my green curries and beef vindaloo. But eight tablespoons of freshly cracked pepper coating four tuna steaks is too much. My brow is beaded with sweat. My neighbours I thought may drown. Certainly the flavours of the first three wines mentioned in the previous article were (I know, we should have gone for the really big boofy ones).
Anyway, if you dare this is what to do. Take two tablespoons Dijon mustard, 1 teaspoon clear honey and 2 teaspoons soy sauce and a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Mix and smear over four tuna steaks. Dip the steaks in the cracked pepper and cook in a frying pan.
Meanwhile, the treviso is almost perfect. Split four heads in half and griddle, coating with iceing sugar. The bitter mixes with the sweet…if you can get through the peppercorns.
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