It's What's For Dinner

Argentinians love beef. My family is from Argentina; ergo, I love beef.

I try to eat less of it than I used to. I take tips and inspiration from my vegan and vegetarian friends. I agree with our local newspaper food blogger extraordinaire -- if you can't go the all-veg route, cut back on meat consumption. Buy more local ingredients. (And, in my case, stop eating my all-time favorite food: fast food fried chicken. Because what goes into the making of that crap is a nightmare with more ethical and environmental offenses than I care to think about.)

But back to beef.

We were home, you see, visiting my beef-eating Argentinian parents, and lo and behold, there are pounds of meat in the second freezer. So my mom sent us home with about a pound and a half or two of this milanesa-cut beef (neither locally procured nor hormone-free, I'm sure). We invited friends over for dinner the night after we got back. They loved the breaded-and-fried milanesa (we paired it with a beautiful salad courtesy of my sister), but the four adults only consumed about 2/3 of it.

We fried up the rest tonight -- egg wash and whole wheat bread crumbs. (Low on crumbs, we bulked it up with cornmeal this time.) We paired our milanesa with chard (!) from our own backyard (!).

It was lovely low-ish carb dinner.

And then I went and ruined it. At work earlier today, I'd Googled 'sweet potato' and 'gorgonzola' -- two ingredients in our possession, both needing to be cooked sooner rather than later. The first item to pop up yielded this rather rich gratin, and we promptly served ourselves small portions and tucked away the rest.

I'd make this again, but I'd cut back a bit on the brown sugar (at Mike's request) and on the butter (because we wouldn't have missed a little butter).