eat. shop. love. nyc.

Update: I made dinner and let’s just say I’m never making baked onion rings again. They lacked the necessary moisture and crunch that I’ve come to associate with onion rings. The compound butter for the steak turned out to be absolutely delish, and I’m so glad I have leftovers to spread on toast or mash into potatoes another day. End update 9:11 pm.

I couldn’t sleep today. I passed out around 10 pm and woke up at 4, unable to sleep another wink. So I started thinking about what I would make for dinner tonight, and began taking mental inventory of ingredients I had on hand: steak and gorgonzola cheese. I’ve had a couple steaks sitting in my freezer for a few weeks now, and I also have some leftover gorgonzola from a salad I made over Thanksgiving, which has been surprisingly robust and remains unmoldy to this day. (I take care to wrap all my cheese in a paper towel, and change out the towel every week.) I am desperate to use both ingredients, so I typed “steak gorgonzola” into the Epicurious search box on my G1 and this recipe for Rib-Eye Steaks with Gorgonzola Butter and Crispy Sweet Onion Rings popped up. Brilliant! Like my mother, I always have garlic and onions on hand; I don’t think any proper Korean goes without. As such, I already have all the ingredients (or passable substitutes) except for the buttermilk, and that can be remedied easily.

But then I read that the onion rings need to be deep fried, and that’s just not going to happen in my tiny, poorly ventilated Manhattan apartment where the smoke alarm goes off when I so much as use the toaster. While I have made it a habit to set up a box fan blowing directly up into the smoke alarm whenever I cook, I have a feeling that deep frying might set off the alarm no matter what, and while I prefer fried onion rings, I really don’t want to have to open the windows and the doors and fan frantically with the outside temperature running at a nippy 20 degrees.

I like the idea of using buttermilk batter instead of the usual egg, so after some online sleuthing, I found that the most well-reviewed buttermilk baked onion ring recipes called for a breading of crushed potato chips or saltines. I don’t have any chips right now, but I do have Saltines and bread crumbs, so here is my Steak with Roasted Garlic Gorgonzola Butter and Baked Onion Rings recipe, adapted from the Epicurious, Food Network, and Cooking for Engineers recipes. Continue reading →