Spanish-Style Steak with Smashed Potatoes

Woohoo!  I got to try another dish from Chef’s Plate!  Remember when I first blogged about them in August 2015 about the two meals that I received?  That was my first experience with DIY food delivery meals and since then, I have also tried the service from Fresh City Farms!  Because of the ingenious referral program from Chef’s Plate where you send a code #freeplatesfromstenoodie to your friends and they get four free meals to try out Chef’s Plate, I was able to redeem my referral points recently and obtain two plates for free!

I’ve been receiving the weekly plate e-mails as well informing me of what plates would be available the next week and also eyeing to see what plates I would want to try.  This select week was perfect because there were actually two plates I wanted to make and eat!  One of them is this Spanish-Style Steak with Smashed Potatoes and a Watercress Salad.

Arrival of this big box always makes me so happy because it’s filled with lots of fresh ingredients in which to make new dishes of food!

My family and I hardly make steaks at home so I was definitely intrigued by this recipe and wanted to cook up this Spanish-style steak at home for my mom and I to enjoy.

As usual, Chef’s Plate delivers the ingredients of the plate in a box with an ice pack so that all the groceries are kept fresh.  Everything is already pre-measured and portioned out so all you have to do is follow the instructions on the recipe card in order to make the dish.  For this dish, it requested for 30 minutes of prep and the difficulty level was ‘Hard’.

Spanish-style Steak recipe

I think this plate was considered Hard in difficulty level because there were a lot of rather tedious individual steps that you had to make in order to prepare each part of the meal: the marinade, the smashed potatoes, the salad, and the steak.

The ingredients that this recipe requires

Here are the pictures showing you somewhat of how this cooking process occurred:

A fresh orange to use for its juice and the rind

After chopping up the parsley leaves and mincing the garlic, ready to mix the marinade for the steak!

I love that the meats used in these Chef’s Plate recipes are all fine quality, fresh, and raised without the use of antibiotics!

Marinating the steak with the orange sherry sauce

This was so fun and a new way to cook potatoes! Halve them first, boil in water until soft, and then mash with your palm or the side of a cup! This is how we ‘smash’ them. Then we cook them on both sides until golden and crispy. Awesome!

Cooking the steak on medium heat

Parsley leaves and orange zest stirred in with the remaining orange sherry sauce and pan juices from the steak

Simplest presentation

Finally, it was time to eat!  It’s always a little hard to plate the food nicely because I’m not trained in this and really don’t have a good eye in terms of plating food (yet), but I definitely appreciate beautiful food presentations in restaurants when I go out to eat!

The smashed potatoes are an interesting way of making potatoes.  After you have boiled and drained the potatoes, you use the bottom of a cup or the palm of your hand (they did a good job heeding us about the heat of these potatoes because they were very hot!) to smash the potatoes before frying them under medium heat.  I found out that you cannot smash them too hard otherwise the entire potato will mash up and you will have lost its form.

It makes two servings!

These smashed potatoes were actually delicious because the recipe instructed not to move the smashed potatoes around when they were being fried in the pan.  This resulted in a very crispy and fragrant potato with perfect pan marks.  Yum!  They were so good!

I really enjoyed the watercress salad.  We actually boiled the watercress a little bit because my mom didn’t want to eat them straight out of the Chef’s Delivery box and uncooked (hygiene reasons).  After mixing it with the remainder of the sherry vinegar and olive oil, the watercress was actually so crunchy and it made for a really great salad!

Medium rare… but turned out to be more medium than rare

Lastly, the Spanish-style steak — this was marinated with the orange juice, garlic, paprika, and sherry vinegar, and made for a really refreshingly citrusy steak.  The 4 minutes that they instruct you to cook the steak for on each side may be too much if you like medium rare steak.  We found that 2 minutes on the second side of the steak already made it well done.  It was still quite tender for the most part and the beef tasted good!  There wasn’t too much fat in it.

Overall, I enjoyed this dish from Chef’s Plate.  I’m again grateful that I got to try a new dish and make a new recipe!  Fun all around! 😀

We actually boiled the watercress a little bit because we didn’t want to eat it raw

Have you tried ordering from Chef’s Plate yet?  When you click on this link to order and input this code #freeplatesfromstenoodie, you will also get four free plates in your order.  Give it a try!  There’s really no harm in doing so.  The website is safe, you can pick your own plates, and they are a reliable and safe service.  I trust them!

If you have tried plates from Chef’s Plate before, let me know in the comments below about your experience!  I’d love to hear it! 🙂

(One more plate from this delivery to review soon!  Stay tuned!) –> Posted!