I recently attended a BBQ at Wine Tonite headquarters, for an afternoon of football, food, and Lodi Zinfandel wine. If you’ve every had a BBQ or a similar get-together with wine/food geeks, then you know that excess is the norm. There was way more food and wine that we could handle. On the grill, Ed cooked up some awesome wine marinated leg of lamb, and I contributed to the carnage by bringing hangar steak and kabobs. Read Ed’s write-up for more details, I’ll just provide some quick commentary on the food I made.
Chimichurri has been on my “to-make” list for a couple of months, so I immediately knew I wanted to do something with that. I found a lot of variety in different recipes, but I ended up going with this recipe because it had some heat and also made use of mint, which is sometimes omitted.
This recipe couldn’t be easier. It took 5 minutes using the food processor, and it is killer stuff. As my eloquent father says, “I think you could put chimichurri on dog shit and it would taste good.”
For the beef, I bought a flank steak and a hangar steak at Whole Foods. The flank steak was $13/lb and the hangar steak was $8/lb, and knowing what I know now, I’ll buy the hangar steak over the flank every time. It’s not as pretty (not the fat line that runs down the middle), but in addition to being much less expensive, it is much thicker with better marbling, making for a much juicier, tender, and overall enjoyable steak.
I used some of the chimichurri + additional olive oil as a marinade for the steaks, but I also rehydrated some ancho chiles (dried poblanos) and seeded and chopped those and threw them into the mix. Who knows if it made any difference, but now I can call these “Ancho Chili Chimichurri Hangar Steaks”, which sounds more impressive. That’s what we’re really going for, right?
I let the meat hang out in the marinade for a couple hours.
Then I moved on to this recipe I found for Indian kabobs. I wanted to find some sort of recipe that I could match up with the spicy yogurt that I used in the Indian BBQ potato recipe, but use the yogurt as a dipping sauce.
I couldn’t find Indian ginger paste, so I ground up a mixture of ginger, garlic, and salt until it was almost a paste. Also, for the green chile paste, I couldn’t find an Indian varietal, so I used Thai green curry paste as a substitute.
There were a lot of onions in the mixture, I would cut the amount down by 25% or so next time. The excess of onions caused a few of the kabobs to fall apart as I tried to form them around the skewers.
The yogurt dipping sauce is as easy as the chimichurri, and man it’s good.
The picture below is very poor, and it isn’t the most elegant looking dish, but don’t let that deter you because these were fantastic. People kept asking me for the recipe, I felt kinda stupid saying that it was just the first recipe that comes up when you Google “Indian kabobs”. The dipping sauce goes well with kabobs, especially since these had a bit of heat on them as I used my crazy hot cayenne.
Broderick took this photo of the hangar steak. I wish my photos captured how good something was as his photos do.
