Beets and Bourbon

It’s been a busy week around apartment 3B. I have a presentation coming up and worked tirelessly this week on analyzing country music for gender and racial bias. I’m also planning our wedding and designing the invitations etc. which is pretty time consuming! Despite all the business, since B has the week off from his medical school rotations, we squeezed in some fun. We traveled through so pretty heavy traffic to Brooklyn so we could scout around DUMBO for some good locations for our engagement pictures and also (mainly), to eat at Smorgasburg. My recorded time for studying that day? A big fat zero. Driving time? About four hours round trip. But, the end result? So worth it. I love Smorgasburg.

I should point out that Smorgasburg is a food flea market and it is quite possibly one of my favorite things in the entire state of New York.

We try to eat something new each time we go. The schnitzel from Schnitz on a pretzel bun sang out a sweet siren song of deliciousness. I was too focused on stuffing my face with amazingness to take a picture, but Schnitz’s website, luckily, had a great picture of the Sweet Onion. This beautiful thing is a chicken schnitzel with pickled red cabbage and beets. The texture? Perfectly fried. The flavor? Out of this world.



Butter and Scotch was our next stop because they were serving maple bacon cupcakes and toffee trifle with bourbon whipped cream. I’ve had good cupcakes, but these things were out of this world. Again, I was too busy eating to take a picture. The perfect combination of salt sweet maple bacon goodness was too overwhelming. And the trifle was most excellent as well.

We finished our remarkable lunch with a most unremarkable dinner, so I won’t spend any more time talking about it.

Last night, since we were on a bourbon and beets kick, B made bourbon rib eye steaks and I made roasted Parmesan and garlic potatoes and a beet and feta salad topped with blood orange and black currant vinaigrette. Deliciousness all around! I wish we could have cooked the steaks on an outdoor grill, but we don’t have one. Yet. We used the trusty Foreman grill and they came out great.

Bourbon Street Rib Eye (adapted from Allrecipes.com)
serves two

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup water
• 1/3 cup bourbon whiskey
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons packed brown sugar

• 1 tablespoon and 1-1/2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 2 (6 ounce) beef rib-eye steaks

Directions

1. Whisk together the water, bourbon whiskey, soy sauce, brown sugar, Worcestershire sauce, and lemon juice in a bowl, and pour into a plastic zipper bag. Add the rib-eye steaks, coat with the marinade, squeeze out excess air, and seal the bag. Marinate in the refrigerator for 2 hours.
2. Preheat George Foreman grill.
3. Remove the rib-eye steaks from the marinade, and shake off excess. Discard the remaining marinade. Grill the steaks for approximately eight minutes.

I’m thinking of playing around with a What’s on the Menu Monday feature so it will force me to meal plan and prep and stick to it!