YiMT: Teriyaki Steak Frites

Today's recipe is super easy! I love doing all kinds of recipes, including the really complicated ones, but sometimes you just need something that doesn't involve 16 ingredients and 12 steps.

This is the kind of recipe that tastes best after a loooong day at work and with a nice cold beer.

And it's a Rachel original! That's right, folks! I put it together off the top of my head while at the grocery store shopping for dinner yesterday, which explains why it's so simple and why half the ingredients are pretty much pre-made. While I'm sure every cooking enthusiast would someday love to make their own honey teriyaki sauce or criss-cut sweet potato fries, sometimes, it's just not in the cards.

This recipe is somewhat based off the concept of "steak frites," a common dish in France which consists of, essentially, a burger patty on a bed of French fries. Seriously. Sometimes the patty is seasoned, sometimes it's covered in marinade, sometimes you get some sauteed onions or a green side salad or some sort of vegetable somewhere on the plate. Sometimes. All of the time, however, you can expect beef and fries. Mmmm. Tasty.

This picture is only vaguely relevant.

I literally had no idea what I was going to eat last night for dinner. I was pretty tired of making fancy salads, even though I had started doing things like adding hard-boiled eggs, bacon, and green pepper to mix things up. And walking into a grocery store when you don't know what you are going to buy or even eat that night is normally a Very Bad Idea. Often, it leads to walking out of a store with chocolate, ground beef, fennel, cake frosting, and a six pack of Sam Adams Boston Lager. All things that one will likely need at some point, but nothing that will instantly make a cohesive meal that anyone would want to eat. At that point, it's probably best to just content one's self with a fancy salad and a couple bottles of Sam Adams. Seriously. So, to say that I walked out of the local Star Market with a complete meal in my arms is somewhat of a minor miracle.

Here's what I purchased:

• 2 1/2 lb Angus beef patties
• Ken's Steak House Honey Teriyaki Marinade & Sauce
• 10 oz package of sliced baby bella mushrooms
• 19 oz bag of frozen sweet potato criss-cut fries

Here's what I actually made (and how much):

Teriyaki Steak Frites

Ingredients:

(for 2 people, so basically doubling what I originally did)

2 1/2 lb Angus beef patties (the lower the fat content, the better -- it means less fat splattering while cooking)

2 small handfulls of sliced baby bella mushrooms

Honey Teriyaki sauce

1 covered baking sheet of frozen sweet potato criss cut fries

Ground black pepper

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to cook sweet potato fries (following directions supplied on whatever package you purchased).
2. Sprinkle some black pepper on both sides of the 
3. (Aside: I discovered today that my new apartment does not seem to have a grill, a stovetop grill, a skillet, or really anything that would help drain the fat while cooking a burger. So I had to use a small frying pan. Bummer, dude. Guess who's going shopping this weekend?) Grill patties until the outsides are browned but the insides are still pink. I would consider this "medium rare," but perhaps that's just how I cook. This will take about 15 minutes depending on the size/surface area/thickness of the patties.
4. Transfer patties to new, clean frying pan. Add sliced mushrooms and pour, roughly, a few tablespoons worth of Honey Teriyaki sauce. Continue to cook on medium heat for about 5 minutes, or until insides of the patty are only slightly pink (my definition of "medium," but others would likely say "medium well"). Reserving some of the pink color will help to preserve the flavor of the meat. 
5. While cooking the patties, follow the instructions on the package of the sweet potato fries so that they are cooking at the same time. This should help you finish both parts of the meal at about the same time. I find that baking the fries for a couple minutes longer than most packages suggest usually gives that crispness that I like so much in fries of any sort.

Ta-da! It's not the prettiest meal in the world, but it's darn tasty and leaves one feeling really, really full, so it's a keeper, in my honest opinion.

One thing I really like about this is that they teriyaki flavoring is not overpowering. I feel like that might be due to several factors, starting with the fact that it's a "honey teriyaki." Secondly, I don't like things to be drenched in whatever marinade I use, so I didn't use that much. The sauce that you see piled on top of the mushrooms and meat in the picture above, but not pooling up on the plate? Yeah, that's ALL the teriyaki sauce I used. Finally, the flavors from the meat and mushrooms balance really nicely with the salty sweetness of the teriyaki sauce.

Fun fact of the day: while googling "teriyaki" to make sure I spelled it correctly, because my spell check doesn't seem to know up from down, I briefly glimpsed over the "teriyaki" Wikipedia page which explains that it's actually a cooking technique in Japan which involved grilling food in a sweet soy sauce marinade. Sounds like I actually used the teriyaki sauce the correct way and everything. Maybe. I think. Cool. I love learning little things like that, even if they might be obvious to other people.

See you next time when I'll actually post about the fruity desserts like I promised! (I just need to take some pictures of the desserts first!)

Peace, love, and burger patties,

Rachel