Cookbook: Food Fast by Marie Claire (Donna Hay)
Recipe: Peppered Beef and Cucumber Salad
Each time I see this theme, “Cool” I have the urge to add “…as a cucumber”.
Not sure why it springs to mind. It’s not a phrase I tend to use, but because it kept popping into my head I decided to use it as inspiration for the recipe choice for the theme.
I toyed with the idea of cucumber soup for a while, but I’ve never really liked having more than an appetiser’s worth of it, so this salad presented a much better option.
Ingredients
550g rump or topside steak (I actually used eye fillet tails – if you can get them they are about half the price of eye fillet)
oil
cracked black pepper
salad
150g baby english spinach leaves
2 lebanese cucumbers
2 shallots, (green onions) chopped
2 tablespoons chopped flat leaf parsley
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
1 tablespoon sesame oil
Method
Brush the steak with the oil and sprinkle with pepper.
Cook on a hot barbeque (hopefully one a bit cleaner than mine – oops!), under a grill or on a hot frying pan for 1-2 minutes or to your liking. Place the steak on a plate and cover for 2 minutes to rest the meat.
While the steak is cooking place the spinach leaves on serving plates. Slice the cucumbers with a vegetable peeler and combine with shallots, parsley, vinegar and sesame oil.
Slice the meat and place on spinach.
Top with the cucumber salad and serve.
The verdict on this one was that it was very simple, but also very clean cool and fresh. Possibly needed a bit more in the way of flavour for the salad dressing and I would consider adding szechuan peppercorns to the beef to spice it up a bit. Perfect though for a hot summer’s night.
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