Two Out Of Three Ain't Great, But C'est La Vie!

I was really looking forward to this dinner.  One of UD's great beef tenderloins on the grill, accompanied by oven roasted sweet potato fries, sauteed spinach and mushrooms, and oven roasted broccoli, sprinkled with freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano.  Sounds good, nes cafe?  However, on this evening, I was destined to be disappointed.  The disappointment was the sweet potato fries.  As happens in many meal preparations, something can be forgotten for just a short period of time, and bam, disaster!  The SPFs met a very ugly end my friends.  But, as Julia Child once said in a brilliant two part quote,

"One of the secrets, and pleasures of cooking, is to learn to correct something if it goes awry; and one of the lessons is to grin and bear it, if it cannot be fixed."

In this instance, I needed to heed part two of her very wise quote.

The local farm stand in this area of the Rocky Coast, has recently opened.  Yahoo!  So UD and I paid a visit, and came out with three heads of broccoli and a huge bag of fresh baby spinach.  I already had two sweet potatoes and 12 ounces of sliced button mushrooms.  Cremini mushrooms would be terrific here too.

I cut the broccoli in smallish pieces and sliced the sweet potatoes into fry size pieces.  The spinach and broccoli were washed and dried, and I grated some Parm Reg to sprinkle over the broccoli later.

I coated the broccoli and sweet potatoes with Extra Virgin Olive Oil and sprinkled them with Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper.  I had already preheated the oven to 425 degrees, and I placed the veggies on a foil lined baking sheet and popped them in.  I turned them after about 20 minutes, and then I will give the broccoli 10 more minutes and put the sweet potatoes back in to crisp up a little more.

The broccoli cooked for a total of 30 minutes and I put it in a dish and sprinkled the cheese on top.  I am letting these sit on the side, because the cheese will melt into the broccoli and it is actually delicious at room temperature.  So we are done with this.

UD has pulled the steak off the grill, and it looks great.  So while that is resting we will move on with the rest of the meal.

The mushrooms have been browning in 1 tablespoon each of butter and EVOO.  Once they are nice and golden brown, we add the spinach.  Don't worry about adding too much at once.  It is amazing how much it shrinks down in size.

Literally 1 minute later the sauteed spinach and mushrooms are done.  I neglected to say that the mushrooms had been seasoned with pepper only, because they brown better without the salt.  The salt tends to draw out the moisture in the mushrooms and keeps them from browning nicely.  Once the spinach is added in, make sure to add the salt.  And don't forget to taste as you go.  That will help you decide if you need more salt and/or pepper.

Get that in the bowl, and darn it, this is the moment I realized I hadn't been checking on the SPFs!

Mon dieu!  Disaster.

Then a little voice in my head said, "...one of the lessons is to grin and bear it, if it cannot be fixed."  So we put them in a serving dish, ate what was edible and ignored the rest.

  Lets recap, shall we?

Bien!

Deplaisant!

Bien!

A bientot!  See you soon.