My Husband's Father's Day Menu

Bill's Father's Day Menu

Aloha Java Grilled Rib Eye with Green Beans and Roasted New Potatoes seasoned with Magic Mediterranean blend

My husband of 31 years, Bill, is an unabashed meat and potatoes kind of guy. Yes, he will acquiesce to a dinner of balsamic pan roasted cod and cauliflower with a side of lightly dressed butter lettuce, but at heart, he wants red meat. He grew up in New York City, where his mother was a less than creative cook and served shoe leather-fried breaded fish at dinner on Friday nights. Fresh veggies were hard to procure in 1960's NYC and the canned variety were staples in the MacKenzie's Bronx kitchen. The California delicacies avocados and artichokes are not in Bill's culinary vocabulary, which means all the more for me when I serve them! But I still manage to serve plenty of heart and health friendly meals. You have no excuse, living in California. That's not to say that rib eyes are bad, but everything in moderation...

With Father's Day coming up on Sunday, I felt it important to ask Bill what he wanted for dinner. Because I'll be catering a graduation party that day, I prepared his menu earlier this week as we watched the Warriors win their 3rd NBA Championship. I think Steph, Kevin, Draymond, Andre, Klay, and the entire team, will agree that this is a championship menu!

Aloha Java Grilled Rib Eye Steak

Ingredients

2-4 rib eye steaks, well marbled, and preferably grass fed  

1/2 cup Aloha Java Blend

1/4 cup honey

2 teaspoons salt, more to taste

Instructions 

Combine the Aloha Java Blend, honey and salt in a small bowl. You may increase the amount depending on how many steaks you're going to prepare, just taste and add as you do so.

Rub the AJ-honey mixture on to the meat and marinate it for 1/2 hour at room temperature. You can also do this a day in advance (recommended), keeping the steak in the fridge. Bring the steak to room temperature before proceeding. 

To prepare, you've got 2 choices:

You can get the grill going and cook the steaks over white hot coals, or on a medium high gas grill

or

Pan grill on the stove top in a skillet or grill pan (I love my Le Creuset stove top grill pan, BTW)

No matter which cooking method you select, be sure to monitor the heat and adjust as necessary to avoid scorching or burning; you're cooking with some sugar, after all.

I like my steak cooked to between 125-130 degrees for medium rare. Be sure to use a instant read thermometer to assess the temperature by inserting it into the thickest part of the steak. The meat will continue to cook after you remove it from the heat, so don't wait until it reaches 190 degrees; unless, of course, you like it like shoe leather, in which case, you've joined Bill's mother's club.

Allow the steak to rest for about 10 minutes and then slice on the diagonal and serve with roasted new potatoes and sauteed greens beans.

Now, you've got a winner of a Father's Day dinner!

A Memory of Taste and Place

Jard sur Mer, Vendee, France

Jard sur Mer, Garden on the Sea, and we are there together. We will eat oysters plucked right from the sea and mussels bathed in garlic, butter and white wine, a baguette for each of us to soak up the briny, luscious liquid. In the morning, before our afternoon feast, we will walk to town together from our home, Villa des Lutins (Home of the Elves), to le boulanger to purchase the baguettes, warm and fragrant from the ovens, and as long as sabers so that we will have a sword fight with them on our return home. They may drop on the ground, but we just flick off the dust and pretend that nothing happened. It is an imaginary sword fight after all!

After our lunch under the pines, we will bike a la plage (to the beach), with towels and sunscreen and a bit of refreshment, cheese and croutons from the baguettes, in the baskets. The beach is a bit stony, not like the smooth sugar sand of the Del Coronado or the coarser black sand of Kona Village, but it lends us a beautiful easterly view of the ocean, one we are not used to seeing from California. A friend may offer us a ride in his petit bateau but for the most part we float in the water, dry on the shore and relish the hot sun on our bodies.

We celebrate Bastille Day on the quay that surrounds the small harbor, the windmill standing guard as fireworks dazzle the mid summer night, the most amazing display of light and spark either of us has ever seen.

Another day, we arrive early at le marché aux poissons (the fish market) in Les Sables D’Olonne, a short drive up the coast from Jard. We select ocean fish just caught that morning, each one just the right size for each of us to savor after they have been roasted on the open grill in our jardin (garden). The scent of charred wood, sweet pine and grilled fish fills the air. The air is as nourishing as the meal itself. We de-bone and filet our whole fish and heap mounds of ratatouille onto the plate, the juices from the vegetable mélange and the fish mixing to make a flavor uniquely ours, our Jard flavor, our Jard fragrance. I drink a dry Loire white, you a local beer. To help settle our satiated tummies, we stroll into town pour la crème glacée (for ice cream). My favorite is Pêche Melba, served with a crunchy petite gateau and a spritz of kir. You select chocolate, plain and simple.

You learn to love the simplicity of our life in Jard, the walks to town for bread and to visit the vendors who arrive in the square with their poulet, viande, legumes et fruites, and fromage. We develop a lazy, regular routine that may include a bike ride out through the fields of flowers that surround the village, or we may decide to attend mass at the ancient Catholic church, neither of us sure what the priest is saying or whether the mass is in French or Latin. It is a sacred, peaceful time and we give thanks for being alive and in this place.

Our most special time is a la plage, no matter where we have been on our travels. The beach has always held sway over us both. Is it the soothing repetition of gentle waves kissing the damp sand or the full throttle surge of vigorous, almost angry, surf tumbling down, battling to be the arrive first on that shore? I am the gentle waves, longing to just be; you are the tumbling surf, always surging, always searching, always challenging yourself.