Caviar and Codfish

I’m not a lover of beets. I’m not alone in that consideration; a lot of people don’t love beets. I imagine it’s nervous-making, publishing a beet recipe. The cookbook author must sit at the computer, just knowing that readers will skip right past it, onto something with potatoes, or carrots, anything but beets.

I’m don’t dislike beets so much that I’ll skip right past — I’ll read the recipe. Might even make a mental note to try it someday. But in all my years of cooking, I’ve only ever tried one beet recipe. Two, if you count this one today.

It’s not that I hate beets. I don’t. I flew over the moon when I tasted the smoked beets with halibut at Saul in Brooklyn. At Town House, too, the foie gras with beets nearly killed me dead, it was so good. I’m not a hater, no, but a non-lover, which means I’m game to have others serve beets to me, but I’m hard-pressed to exert my own cooking-energy on them.

Milk House Farm, however, has been showcasing beets at their farm stand lately. They grow a handful of different varieties, all gorgeous gems, and all impossible to pass up. Adding to that, I’ve been on a quasi-diet of small-portion, vegetable-heavy dinners, in the attempt to slim down to my ideal weight for our wedding (a hard thing to do, considering I can’t exercise because of my back — though, I’m happy ecstatic to report brag that I’ve lost 15 pounds already) so beets went into my grocery bag recently.

I found a recipe with beets and shrimp marinated in ginger from Jean Georges Vongerichten in the New York Times. New York Times recipes in general prove to be delicious, and recipes by Jean Georges hardly ever disappoint. So I cooked some beets. Roasted them, to be exact.

After they were roasted, I started to tweak the recipe. I added an orange, and swapped balsamic vinegar for the sherry. I sauteed rather than grilled the shrimp (since the shrimp is only cooked for a minute or two, it’s not worth starting up the grill) and dressed the beets a little sooner than the recipe called for.

It came together fabulously — I’d done it! I cooked beets. And I loved them. The in-your-face sweetness of beets works here, since it’s tempered by the ginger — whose pungent flavor lingers in the shrimp, in the dressing. I’d say you could have the salad of dressed beets and orange by itself, with a hefty sprinkling of chives, but the shrimp (browned and crisp, marinated just long enough for the ginger to saturate without overwhelming), perched atop the salad so that the juices drip and mix into the dressing, really completes the dish.

So, here’s the recipe. (For those of you smart people who haven’t skipped past to the next non-beet blog post by now.)

Gingered-Beet Salad

Printable Recipe

serves 4 (small portions)

adapted (heavily) from Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Gingered-Beet Salad recipe

4 medium beets, scrubbed well
1 pound large shrimps, shelled
1 tablespoons canola oil
1 2-inch piece ginger, peeled and grated (divide grated ginger into two lumps)
4 tablespoons balsamic vinegar (1 tablespoon will be used for shrimp, 3 for beet dressing)
2 tablespoons good, fruity extra-virgin olive oil
1 orange, segmented
kosher or good sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
2 tablespoons 1/2-inch-length chives

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Wrap the beets in two layers of aluminum foil and roast until fork-tender, about 1 hour and 45 minutes. Cool, peel and cut the beets into small chunks and set aside.

Toss the shrimps in a mixture made from 1 tablespoon of the oil, half of the grated ginger and 1 tablespoon of the vinegar. Marinate for 1 hour.

Make dressing for the beets: In a medium bowl, add some salt and pepper and balsamic, then slowly add in olive oil, whisking constantly to emulsify. Add beet and orange segments and mix well to dress everything evenly.

Take shrimp from marinade and salt and pepper all over. Heat a pan over medium-high (or a touch higher) heat with a little bit of canola oil. Add shrimp to the pan and cook until well-browned (about 2 minutes per side, or up to 5 minutes total).

Arrange dressed beets on a platter. Sprinkle with chives and season to taste with salt and pepper. Place shrimp on top of beets and sprinkle on a few more chives and some extra salt and pepper (if needed). Serve hot or at room temperature.

Life can be funny. A few weeks ago, I was hardly getting off the couch, depressed, angry, debilitated with pain. But just this Sunday, I was up and smiling, serving my homemade apricot sorbet and vanilla bean ice cream to customers at the Stockton Market, happy as ever, with my fiance by my side and some postcards at the front of the table reading “Half Pint Kitchen Ice Cream & Sorbet, owner/operator Robin Damstra.”

A lot of things got me from point A to point B, but let’s just take a second to say holy crap, guys! I’m starting a business. My very own ice cream business! It’s a dream I’ve had for a very long time, since the days (before graduating college and trying to get a “real job”) when I worked at ice cream shops, scooping away, eventually becoming manager, and learning how the back offices worked, and building up a secret desire to one day have a little back office in an ice cream shop of my own.

And holy crap, guys, it’s happening. Way better than I would have ever imagined back then, too. The Half Pint Kitchen ain’t no franchise. It’s a bonafide, artisanal, homemade-ice-cream-gelato-and-sorbet shop, where the dairy is from local, well-raised cows, the eggs are from chickens that run around in nearby pastures, and the fruit is from my favorite local orchards (we’ll talk about that in a minute, but suffice it to say, there’s been a lot of fruit around here, as I scramble to process and prolong our fleeting harvests.)

The ice cream is churned in a 500-pound behemoth of a machine, shiny, and Swiss-made, and bought through a deal that I cannot believe we were lucky enough to secure. It’s an Ottfreezer and it churns out 4 quarts of ice cream in about 12 minutes. It’s helped me to understand the feeling that a machine can be not merely a prized possession, but your baby. It makes me feel like a proud parent, smiling at it while it churns away. I’m pretty sure the amount of time I spend polishing its every nook and cranny isn’t healthy.

It’s all pretty darn magical. Especially the fruit. There’s hundreds of pounds of fruit sitting around me right now and the smell alone makes me dizzy with joy. Apricots. Peaches. Nectarines. Right now, the middle of July, is their time to shine. You don’t need hundreds of pounds, just a few pecks, or a bushel, to feel like summer is worth sweating for, worth sweltering through, if the reward is sweet, ripe, juice-dribbling stone fruits.

Usually, I gobble up all my summer fruit before getting the chance to really cook with any of it. In years past, there were a few sorbets, a crisp or two, but mostly my fruit was just for eating. This year, though, I’m buying in bulk. I have enough fruit to make into ice creams and sorbet, to eat to my heart’s content, and even to plan a few personal cooking adventures besides.

Squishy-ripe apricots, poached in a simply syrup chock full of vanilla beans, thyme, and lemon rind, was the first recipe I tried after halving and pitting enough for sorbet. I’ve been ordering vanilla beans by the pound (and there’s over 100 beans in a pound), so I’d also been looking for some exciting things to do with the beans, and this fit the bill. The recipe says to serve the poached apricots with crème fraîche, but of course I’m switching that to crème fraîche ice cream (which I don’t have pictures of for you yet, but I will soon, promise). They would also do fabulously in the bottom of a martini glass, filled to the rim with ice-cold gin or vodka.

The finished poached apricots may be an acquired taste — they are lemony, and thyme-y, and very vanilla-y — but I’m absolutely enamored of them. I’ve loved anything incorporating hardy herbs like rosemary and thyme with lemon and something sweet ever since I tried this recipe a few months ago, and I could wax poetic about the fragrant, citrusy taste, but I think it’s best to just call it what it is: when you mix lemon with thyme (or rosemary) and add in something sweet (sugar, or honey, or agave) the result will remind you of 7-Up. 7-Up, fancied up. 7-Up, for grown ups, sophisticated, not cloying, or boring, but tasting just enough of 7-Up for it to remind you of the soda and make you smile, and then smile even more because you realize it tastes way better than the soda. If you hate 7-Up, you may not like this. But if you are like me and drank a lot of 7-Up as a child, it’ll be fantastic. I keep a mason jar filled with vodka, a little honey, lemon rinds, and a few rosemary sticks in my freezer at all times. You’ll never want to have a vodka and regular-ol’ Sprite again, that’s for sure.

The poached apricots are better after a few days. The day you cook them, they taste like apricots in flavored syrup, but in a few days, the flavors will meld. The apricot juice will incorporate the syrup, and the syrup will saturate the apricots, resulting in a tender, silky apricot that’s redolent of citrus and tastes very refreshing. It leaves a wonderful taste in your mouth. And smells like 7-up perfume. (Am I losing you? Please, don’t go. Trust me on this one. I told you it’s an acquired taste, but it’s really, really, really good if you give it an honest try!)

Mix the apricots with some yogurt, or crème fraîche, or hardly sweet sour cream ice cream (full fat here; you need big, thick creaminess to combat the intense taste of the syrup; you’ll only eat a very small portion so don’t worry about the calories) to temper the sweetness, and drizzle a bit more of the syrup over it all. It’ll be wild, I swear, completely new. It would really surprise dinner guests. Ask them what is reminds them of; I wonder how many would recall 7-up. (Because, truth be told, it could just be me.)

You’ll have a lot of syrup left over, which I don’t consider a bad thing, as it’s great as a mixer; but you could mess with the recipe and use less water. I multiplied the recipe by 5, and dramatically reduced the sugar, so I’ll give you my recipe and the original one, too, in case you’d like to make a lot, or try and deduce how much sugar you’d like to put in by looking at the two versions (I would try and figure it out for you, but I’m terrible at math. Like, really terrible. Like, can’t subtract if the numbers are double digits terrible.)

And don’t forget to try that martini. You can be sure I’m having one. To celebrate my burgeoning business, and, more importantly today, to nurse my backache after the discogram I had yesterday. Because there’s nothing that will dampen your Holy crap, guys, I own an ice cream shop mood than learning that your doctor is going to stick really big needles into your spine and ask which needle hurts most. I’m going to need a couple of those martinis.

Poached Apricots in Vanilla-Thyme Syrup with Crème Fraîche

Printable Recipe

serves 4, from Gourmet, May 2001

1 vanilla bean, halved lengthwise
3 cups water
2 cups sugar
5 (3- by 3/4-inch) strips fresh lemon zest
2 large sprigs fresh thyme
10 fresh apricots, halved and pitted (1 3/4 pound)

Accompaniment: crème fraîche

Scrape seeds from vanilla bean with tip of a sharp knife into a 2-quart saucepan and add pod, water, sugar, zest, and thyme sprigs. Bring to a boil, stirring until sugar is dissolved, then add apricots and simmer, stirring once or twice, until tender, 2 to 6 minutes (depending on ripeness).

Spoon syrup over warm apricots in bowls and top with dollops of crème fraîche.

Bulk Recipe: Poached Apricots in Vanilla-Thyme Syrup

Printable Recipe

enough for 4 quart-sized Mason jars

4-5 Madagascar bourbon vanilla beans, halved lengthwise
8 cups water
generous 3 cups sugar
15 (3- by 3/4-inch) strips fresh lemon zest
8-10 sprigs fresh thyme
60 medium fresh apricots (or 75 small ones)

Scrape seeds from vanilla bean with tip of a sharp knife into a 6-quart saucepan and add pod, water, sugar, zest, and thyme sprigs. Bring to a boil, stirring until sugar is dissolved, then add apricots and simmer, stirring once or twice, until tender, 2 to 6 minutes (depending on ripeness).

Pour apricots and syrup into 4 quart-sized mason jars. There will be some syrup left over, you can save that for flavoring cocktails or mineral water.

Store jars in the refrigerator and use within a few weeks. (I’m not sure how they would freeze, but you could always try.)

I owe you a “proper” carbonara recipe. I mentioned my fondness for authentic carbonara, like months ago, and then there was not another peep from me on the subject. In the meantime, I’ve made “proper” carbonara a handful of times, and even gave an impromptu presentation on carbonara to the employees at the local gourmet market where I buy my guanciale. I just haven’t photographed any of it, since proper carbonara is usually our harried-day dinner, for days when we don’t want to shop, or cook, and certainly aren’t about to pull out the tripod and start taking photos.

So for now, we’ll have to compromise with a summer squash carbonara, since I couldn’t resist photographing these zucchini. It’s not “proper” — far from it — but it does adhere to certain carbonara principles. First, I used guanciale (pig jowl) as the pork ingredient. This rule is often — shockingly! — thrown out the window. I see recipes using bacon and pancetta calling themselves carbonara in cooking magazines all the time. Some of them even mention that if you don’t have pancetta, you can substitute bacon. Pancetta? Pancetta is a substitution in itself. Shouldn’t it read if you can’t, for the life of you, find guanciale you can substitute bacon? Yes, I’ll answer that myself. Yes, that’s what it should say. And while we’re on the subject, I find pancetta too salty for carbonara; I’d rather use bacon, a lightly smoked one.

Here’s what you can do if you can’t find guanciale: buy a fresh pork belly and turn it into bacon yourself, going light on the smoke, or cure it instead with lots of pepper and juniper berries. Or, okay, this is better: find a butcher who can get you all kinds of cuts of meat (or, find a farmer and buy a whole pig — if you have a big freezer — or go in on a share), then use the jowl to make guanciale. Or you could just mail-order guanciale. Don’t worry if you need to buy a whole lot of it at once. It freezes flawlessly. And it’s worth the cost of shipping.

Alright, the second principle, one I’m particularly fussy about: Never let the eggs touch the pan. Whether you whisk the eggs with cheese beforehand or leave the yolks whole to be added to individual bowls before serving, you never want them to touch high heat. High heat ruins the consistency of the sauce or — worse — scrambles the eggs. If you are cooking for someone with a compromised immune system, you could cook the eggs and cheese (slowly!) to 175ºF in a double boiler, like custard, but a compromised immune system is the only excuse for doing that, people. I’ll know if you do it any other way. I’ve got my eyes on you.

By taking your pasta and other ingredients off the heat before tossing with the egg, you ensure that the sauce won’t overcook. Immediately start mixing once you add the pasta and sauce together, and the eggs will cook just the slightest bit, transforming into a silky sauce that’s lighter than a butter sauce, thicker than olive oil.

The final principle is that there must be a lot of freshly ground black pepper. You’ve got to taste the pepper, rather than using it as a background seasoning. Black pepper gives kick to that silky egg sauce, really makes it. Without enough pepper, the sauce tastes too eggy, and that’s not what carbonara is about. In the best carbonaras, unwitting diners can’t even taste eggs in the dish.

In this version, though, it’s okay to go a little easier on the pepper (but still use a healthy amount), since you have so much flavor in the caramelized, sweet, soft, beautiful squash. You want to cook the squash until it’s deeply browned. You’re not looking for crisp tender vegetables here; they should be soft, heavily caramelized, and end up tasting almost as silky as the creamy egg sauce itself. My opinion about zucchini and yellow squash is that it’s a vegetable too often served under-cooked. It’s best when you cook it until the insides are soft and fluffy, like vegetal mousse. Cook it with care, or you’ll end up with mush. The less you mess with the squash, the better; using your spoon to mix it around too often will result in broken pieces with all the insides spilling out. Shaking the pan mixes things up gently. Now would be the time to start perfecting that cheffy toss-and-flip thing with the skillet.

I cut these squash on a diagonal, to mimic the shape of the penne pasta (a tip from Jamie Oliver). It proved a good shape to use since it left a lot of surface area exposed for caramelizing and cooking into browned, tasty goodnesss and the small, similar shapes in the pasta bowl made for easy eating. Each forkful had zucchini and pasta both, a bowlful of perfect bites.

Jim’s away for a few days, so I didn’t have anyone to share with, which was a little sad since we share almost every meal together. But, honestly, having an extra serving was a-okay by me.

Summer Squash  Carbonara

serves 4 // adapted from Jamie Oliver

4 small-to-medium summer squashes (preferably zucchini and thin yellow squash, but any will do)
1 small chunk of guanciale (2 – 3 ounces)
2 big thyme sprigs

2 egg yolks
2 heaping tablespoons crème fraiche (and I mean heaping)
1 healthy handful of parmigiano cheese
lots of freshly ground black pepper
kosher salt

1/2 pound penne pasta
more cheese to taste
chives, optional
good olive oil, for drizzling

Cut the squash lengthwise in half, then cut halves at an angle into slices roughly the same size as the penne. Or, you can leave smaller squash whole and cut into round slices.

Cut guanciale into small chunks and add to a skillet over medium heat. Once the guanciale has begun to render its fat and is looking sort of translucent, add in the squash and bump the heat up to medium-high. Strip the leaves off the thyme stems and add leaves to the pan. Cook until squash is totally tender and deeply caramelized, about 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, put up a pot of water for the pasta, adding ¼ cup of kosher salt to the water.

In a small bowl, whisk together egg yolks, crème fraiche, and cheese. Add a lot of pepper and a big pinch of salt.

Cook pasta according to direction. Drain, then add pasta to the pan with the cooked squash (make sure the squash is already browned to perfection before you add the pasta in). Stir everything together gently, then remove from heat.

In a large bowl, add the egg mixture. Now, add in your pasta, gently stirring as the pasta is going in, and keep stirring (or tossing) everything together so that the egg mixture warms up, but doesn’t cook. (You need to keep everything moving so enough air circulates that it begins to cool down the pasta. If you add the pasta and leave it for even 30 seconds to do something else, the sauce is likely to lose its silky consistency.)

Serve with a garnish of chives, a drizzling of olive oil, and pass around extra cheese at the table.

I haven’t been cooking lately. There’s been a lot of tears, lying on the couch for inordinate amounts of time, missing the sun, and the strawberry picking, not swimming in the river, or going for walks with my dog, but, no, not cooking. There was a birthday, and a bridal shower, but I hardly remember either in the haze of my pain medication. But, still, no cooking.

Some of you know I was in a car accident in 2008 that left me in chronic pain. A few of you know it’s been flaring up lately. And a poor precious bunch of you are around to take care of me. It sucks. There’s no way around it. I’m in it and, try as I might, I can’t do anything about it. So I haven’t cooked. But I’m taking steps to drastically change my life, to make my schedule bend around my pain, instead of trying to keep white-knuckling to do everything like a normal, healthy person would. I’m optimistic about that. I’m excited. Excited to be broken down, to finally accept that I can’t pretend pain doesn’t exist anymore, disabling me. Good things are going to come of this.

One of the most depressing things about not cooking is not having anything to talk to you guys about. I mean, there was this awesome get-well present.

But I haven’t done any cooking past pitting the cherries and apricots as I eat them.

And there was this salad, made with the best snap peas I’ve ever tasted, but that didn’t turn out to be anything special — particularly heart-breaking since I wanted so badly to showcase those peas.

Finally, to top off the extent of my cooking over the past few weeks, there was this shrimp dish. You could call it cooking, to simmer something on the stove top for five hours (even if it took less than five minutes of active prep time). But it didn’t feel like cooking.

The fact that is doesn’t feel like cooking, despite the wonderfully homey, lovingly cooked quality of the dish is probably a good thing, if you aren’t me, and you don’t want so desperately to be able to perform a recipe that has a long do-to-list, spending hours doing your thing in the kitchen.

The “five hour” part of this recipe is for the soffritto. You can do this the day (or week) before, and then the rest of the recipe would come together in about four minutes — maybe six if you need to shell the shrimp yourself.  It’s a good example of how to cook for Anita’s Dinner on a Deadline project, where one of the key ways to keep down your weekday meal prep time is to have a well-stocked larder.  This soffritto is a stand-by in my larder — the star of my larder, really. I use it for countless things beside this shrimp, including mixed in to plain pasta, or in this peperonata rustica. It’s beautiful, full of caramelized flavors, and has luscious, garlicky depth. Having this stuff around has made this painful time more manageable for me. And if it can cheer me up, then you can trust it’s special.

Shrimp with Soffritto

Printable Recipe

serves 2//soffritto adapted from Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc Cookbook

for the soffritto:

3 cups finely diced Spanish onion (about 1 pound)
1 cup extra virgin olive oil
Kosher salt
1 (28-oz) good-quality whole peeled tomatoes, drained, finely chopped
2-3 cloves garlic, finely minced

for the shrimp:

12 – 16 jumbo shrimp, shells and tails removed, deveined
4-6 tablespoons kosher salt
freshly ground pepper
2 tablespoons butter

Combine the onions, oil, and a pinch of salt in a small dutch oven or heavy bottomed pot and set over medium heat. As soon as the oil begins to simmer, reduce the heat to low. The onions should stew slowly but eventually caramelize; adjust the heat as necessary so that the oil continues to bubble gently — never too vigorously. As the onions release their liquid, the oil will become cloudy, but once the moisture has evaporated, the oil will clear. Cook for about 2 ½ hours, of until the onions are a rich golden brown (a shade darker than golden raisins) and the oil is perfectly clear. Check often: if any of the onions caramelize against the sides of the pan, scrape them back into the oil.

Add the tomatoes to the caramelized onions and cook for another 2 ½ hours, or until the onions and tomatoes begin to fry in the oil: the onions and tomatoes will begin to fry in the oil and small bubbles will cover the surface. Gently stir the mixture. Turn off the heat, add a pinch of salt and the garlic, and left the soffrito begin to cool. (You can cool completely, cover, and save in the refrigerator until you want to use. The soffritto stays good for a couple of weeks.)

Meanwhile, mix together 4 cups of cold water and salt in a bowl, stirring to dissolve the salt. Add shrimp to the bowl and let stand at room temperature for 10 minutes. Drain the shrimp, rise under cold water, and pat dry on paper towels. Sprinkle with pepper.

Melt the butter in a frying pan that will hold the shrimp in a single layer over medium-high heat. When the butter starts to foam, add the shrimp. Cook the shrimp for 2 minutes on one side, then flip and cook for 2 minutes on the other side, until the shrimp are browned and cooked through. Transfer the shrimp to a platter.

Ladle a few spoonfuls of soffritto over the shrimp and serve. (You will have a lot of leftover soffritto, but I don’t that’s a bad thing.)

Well, it’s not every day that I open up a cookbook and see my butchers, Emil and Joe, staring back at me (downright dapper in their striped aprons). Such an event is a rare pleasure, really — one that I never imagined (or even thought about) having, but one I won’t soon forget.

And it’s not only Emil and Joe, but the lazy canal that slunks its way through Lambertville, the trout fishermen that I spy sitting along the water on my way to work in the early morning, and a beautiful ode to the Stockton Indoor Farmers Market — my market!! — spread among the pages of the Canal House cookbooks, a subscription cookbook-cum-food magazine, that comes out three times a year.

This is my home, and it’s not just me rhapsodizing about the beauty, and food, and good people along the Delaware River; Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton do too! That’s good company, indeed.

But even if you don’t live here, I imagine the Canal House cookbooks would be a rare pleasure, anyway. You’re invited into the lives of Hirsheimer and Hamilton, to where they live and what they eat; their memories, and snarky sentiments; their metaphors and declarations. The recipes are homey, familiar ones; recipes you can’t read without imagining friends around the table, happy faces, happy bellies; recipes that are a breath of fresh air alongside all of the restaurant chef books that are so popular now.

Take this recipe for steak with parsley butter. It involves little more than mixing some fluffy butter with herbs and grilling a steak. Anyone one can put the whole affair together in mere minutes. All you need is a bowl, a knife and a cutting board, and a grill (or pan) to cook the steak.

The hitch is finding the best the ingredients. It’d do good to search out a nice steak. If you live near me, you could get a rib-eye from Maresca, or a big old cowboy steak from Dee and Ben, which is what we opted for last weekend. Good parsley, too, will pay off big time — try to find some that’s a shade of deep, forest green, with pretty little white tips on each leaf. Homestead Farm Market sells my favorite parsley around here (the cheapest, too: a big bouquet of parsley runs around one dollar).

Without good ingredients, this recipe might not wow you; there’s few flavors here, so they really need to shine. If you have the parsley, but can’t find, or don’t want, the steak, this parsley butter works magic with a bowl of fresh pasta, or topped on fried eggs and toast, or in a myriad of other dishes. With the steak it’s particularly magical, and I’m a little blue that I didn’t invite friends over to share when Jim and I made this, as the cowboy steaks from Highland Farm Market can certainly feed a crowd. Recipes likes this want to be shared with a full table, if only so you can be that enviable hostess, cool as a cucumber after making such a deceptively easy dinner, and soak up all the oohs and ahhs from your guests.

Steak with Parsleyed Butter

Printable Recipe

adapted from Canal House Cooking, Vol. 1

feeds 2-3, with leftover butter

for the butter
8 tablespoons (1 stick) softened butter, preferably from a local dairy, or a high-fat European-style butter
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
1 shallot, minced
Half a bunch parsley, leaves chopped
Salt and Pepper

for the steak
1 large (2-3 pound) bone-in rib-eye
Salt and pepper
An hour or two before cooking, take the steak out of the refrigerator and season liberally with salt and pepper.

Beat the butter in a bowl with a wooden spoon to make it smooth and a bit creamy. Add the garlic, shallots, and parsley, and season with salt and pepper. Stir to combine. The butter can be used right away, or covered and refrigerated for up to 3 days or frozen for up to 1 month.

Prepare a hot charcoal or gas grill.

Grill steaks on the hottest part of the grill until a good browned crust has developed on the first side, about 8 minutes. To ensure a good crust, resist the urge to move or fiddle with the steaks while they are cooking, but if flare-ups threaten to burn the meat, you’ve got to move it to a cooler spot on the grill. Turn the steaks and grill the second side for 5 minutes.

Move the steaks to a cooler spot on the grill to finish cooking them, turning occasionally, until the internal temperatures reach 120F for medium-rare, and 140F for medium, 5-15 minutes longer depending on the thickness of the steaks and the desired doneness.

Pull the steaks off the grill and let them rest for 10-15 minutes. Cut the steak from the bones and slice the meat. Serve both the bones and the meat, and top with parsleyed butter.