Asian Spiced Flank Steak With Basmati Rice and Mango Salad

You can serve the steak atop the salad...

Or make the salad all by itself...either way, these dishes are terrific!

         If there is a first for everything, today’s Chewing the Fat qualifies.  The first in this case was my discovery that one of my go-to heroes of the kitchen seriously let me down.  I went to his well-thumbed cookbook.  I found a chicken recipe that had a lot going for it –combining lemons and curry.  It looked relatively easy, involved a quick yogurt marinade and a simple roast in the oven.  It was awful.  A dreadful color, it took ‘tangy’ to a place I couldn’t get away from fast enough.  But lo and behold, what was under the chicken was fantastic! A wonderful rice salad with crunchy cashews, fresh mint, ripe mango and crisp haricots verts folded into fragrant basmati rice was a total winner.  So for the first time ever, I decided to share the salad with you and forget all about the chicken.  What to serve with the rice salad was a no-brainer.  I’ve collected any number of steak recipes and it seemed to me that a recipe for Asian inflected Flank Steak would be a perfect accompaniment to my hero’s terrific rice salad.

White Bean and Roasted Shrimp Salad with Cherry Tomato Vinaigrette

         If ever a cookbook cover said it all, it’s this: Brilliant Simple Food to Make Anytime.  That’s what Tyler Florence’s “Tyler’s Ultimate” (Clarkson Potter 2006) says and it couldn’t be more true.  Take for instance this deliciously satisfying dinner salad.  It would be appropriate to serve in the dead of summer but it was a wonderful treat in January.  It could be the centerpiece of a ladies lunch but we used it as dinner for the two of us men.  And as far as ‘simple’ goes, it calls for just two baking sheets and is on the table in a half hour.  Now that’s brilliant.