Thai Beef Salad

Thai Beef Salad, my dinner tonight, pictured with a wicked hot Thai pepper out of the garden

I love this, and it is a perfect way to prepare leftover sirloin, which is common in my house because I love grilled steak. (My other favorite way to use leftover steak is a steak sandwich with mayonnaise on squishy white bread. And potato chips.) Most of the ingredients are right in the Central Texas garden in fall and winter.

Chopped up hot pepper, onion, mint, sacred basil, cilantro, and cucumber

You will need:

Leftover grilled sirloin, rare (buy grass-fed if you can find it. It has TWICE the flavor of conventional, and more omerga-3 oils, and JUST DO AS I COMMAND!)

Lettuce

A sweet onion (a 1014 or a Bermuda or a few shallots)

10 strands (or more) of Cilantro

A fat sprig or two (or four) of Mint

Sacred Basil if available, one sprig (or 3)

A cucumber

A carrot

Fresh hot peppers (2) or ONE SMALL THAI pepper (!)

Pickled hot peppers if you don’t have fresh

One clove of garlic

Fish sauce (one or two teaspoons)

Lime or lemon or Meyer lemon (all the juice of one)

Tablespoon of sugar

Adding the sliced rare sirloin

This salad is fun to make because everything is cold, there is no rush and no worries about overcooking anything, you can just kind of zone out while you are chopping.

Thinly slice clove of garlic and fresh hot pepper. Then thinly slice roughly a quarter of the sweet onion (less if it is big) and the cucumber and toss all the chopped up things in a bowl. Add pickled hot pepper if your fresh pepper isn’t spicy.

(HAVE I MENTIONED THAT ONE SMALL THAI PEPPER IS ENOUGH TO MAKE IT VERY, VERY HOT?)

A bed of just-picked Red Oak Leaf and Buttercrunch lettuce

Put the carrot through the fine grater and add. Deleaf and chop up the cilantro, mint, and Thai basil and add. Slice up the leftover sirloin as thinly as you can without undue strain, and toss in the rest of the stuff. In a separate bowl, mix the sugar, lime juice, and fish sauce. Pour over the salad and toss. Serve on a bed of lettuce.

SEEDLINGS!

Perky young lettuce with sinister frond of Bermuda grass sneaking up on it

I actually had to WRITE actual COPY for publication this weekend, causing me to be a useless space case for three days while I attempted to FOCUS my MIND (which still doesn’t tend to happen naturally until the 8 hours before deadline.) During the time that I was sweating on the creative throne to give birth to my brain-children, I grew oblivious to the outer world, causing me to rush outside on Sunday afternoon and realize that not only had my seeds SPROUTED, but they had started to DIE of thirst and neglect as well.

Snow Peas sprout in the back, and arugula sprouts in the front

I frantically watered all my beds (Sunday was HOT) and all is well, no one died and all the wee seedlings recovered. Phew!

REMEMBER TO KEEP THOSE SEED BEDS DAMP!

SEE how the evil carrot seedlings group together?

OOPS! Time to Get A-Plantin’ Heh Heh

Red Wheelbarrow full of screened compost and bag of LADYBUG Fertilizer

You remember how I said that we were supposed to get MORE RAIN? Well, it hasn’t happened; even though that storm system circled back on us, and we have has 20% and 30% rain predictions every day for days and days. HARRUMPH.

Where was I?

Anyway, I sat on my front porch in my underwear, and it WASN’T HOT! It was only like 85˚. Really comfortable. And I made a list of what I want to plant this Fall:

Snow Peas

My collection of OLD SEEDS

Carrots

Broccoli

Cauliflower

Lettuces

Arugula

Spinach

Cabbages

Cilantro

Oregano

Dill

Italian Pasley

My Seedling Purchases from THE NATURAL GARDENER

Fennel

Beets

Catnip

Mint

Swiss Chard

Artichokes

THEN, the next day, I got my old seeds out of the icebox (I keep them in a Ziploc Bag in the potato drawer) and figured out that I HAD most everything  SEED NEED-WISE.  I only needed to buy 2 packages of carrot seeds and a package of cilantro seeds. But I still needed to buy all the transplants (cabbages, broccolis, cauliflowers, herbs). Also I want to buy a few potted geraniums to keep in the kitchen windowsill.

So I took a trip out to JOHN DROMGOOLE’S NATURAL GARDENER (Out in BFE!) (That means “Bum-Fuck Egypt“) to buy the three packages of seeds, and to see if they had their transplants in yet. AND THEY DID! I was quite surprised, because it seemed to me to be a little early. But WHATEVER, amirite? So I bought everything I needed that they HAD (they did not have Geraniums, or “Melody” spinach plants, or Russian Kale which I forgot to mention. Mmmm…Kale).

Then, all of a sudden, instead of feeling like “I am ahead of weeding schedule!” I am all like, “DOOD, I had better get planting, all of a sudden I am BEHINDHAND!”

(Heh heh. I said BEHIND HAND!!)

So now I am going to intersperse this post with PICTURES so I can SHOW all the PLANTING I did today! Here Goes! (Oh, and it suddenly occurs to me that this post isn’t very informative; forgive me, I am really tired! I will elucidate of planting all the various vegetables tomorrow….after I weed a bed and finish planting.)

The New Carrot Bed pictured with two loads of screened compost dumped on it

Three packages of carrot seeds: carrots must be planted thickly and then thinned drastically. Why not just plant fewer? Because they don't like to germinate unless they are in a crowd.

Compost all smoothed out, and carrot seeds scattered and watered in

Snow Peas planted along the fence in bottomless cups, arugula planted in the front. Of course you just have to take my word for it!

Broccoli plants and smoothing rake. If you ever tried to rake leaves with this kind of rake, it is not for that. It is for smoothing soil in garden beds.

Broccoli Bed with mounds of screened compost prior to smoothing

Broccoli plants all planted up!

Catnip and Oregano (Greek and Italian) planted in pots

Lettuce, both seeds and plants, all nicely planted

Cilantro seeds all planted in the (former) Chard Bed

Fennel and lettuce planted in cups for later, pictured with the cauliflower and cabbage seedlings that are going to have to wait for me to WEED a BED to put them in.