Artichoke and Tomato Steak Salad for a mid-week brain chatter crisis

This is about a mid-week, no-fuss, hunger-satisfying, forget-about-the gourmet dinner.  Plain. Austere almost.  With a hint of defiance: don’t you dare add anything else … it is what it is, and it is meant to be what it is meant to be!  What you see is what you get.  Get it?  It’s what you crave at the end of a busy day when thoughts have been flurrying at great speed, and any reasonable answer is irritatingly AWOL,  and all you need is nourishment to end as interminable volleying of nagging ideas.

When you have finished eating this, you know you will have made a big dent in that uncharismatic brain chatter … and that, in itself, is cause for celebration.  Pillows and a good night’s sleep beckon …

Steak, tomatoes and artichokes.  A tiny bit of olive oil, and salt and pepper.

Here are the artichokes …

Clean and prep them, and quarter them and then cut them into eighths … and pan fry them in plenty of olive oil, until they are tender.  Set aside.

Cherry tomatoes … cook them in plenty of olive oil with a couple of cloves of garlic and a few rosemary needles.  Sprinkle salt and tiny amount of sugar (tiny).

A couple of very nice, juicy steaks … that I was about to cook using only a little bit of olive oil and salt …I was lucky in that I had this fantastic salt from the Cecchini Butcher’s store …

Because the steaks were so ‘thick’, I cooked them on their sides as well …

This is what they looked like when I turned them over.  The oven was on at 100°C …

I put them in the oven, directly in their pan, and left them there for five minutes.

After removing the steaks from the oven, I covered them with this rather droll looking pan lid (it belongs to a wok).  The idea is to allow the meat to ‘cool down’ a little, which makes it more tender, and allows some of its juices to flow into the pan.  And the juices are of course … a sort of gravy.

I sliced up the steaks …

Got my serving dish ready …Placed the slices of steak on the serving dish, and then added the artichokes …

I then added the cooked tomatoes, as well as the juices from the tomatoes and the steak.  A good sprinkling of salt and pepper and …

Dinner is ready.  A bit of bread to mop it all up … a glass of red wine.  Some water too, on the table, to refresh ourselves.

Some days are like that: antsy and annoying and energy-depleting … and cooking, which is normally such a delight, can seem very daunting — punishing even.  This is the just the sort of recipe for THAT kind of day: it that is so quick and easy to make (30 minutes?), and tastes so rewarding, that it ends up cranking up our serotonin levels.

By the time you’ve dabbed that last little bit of bread in the last bit of sauce on the plate … you remember how lucky you actually are — and the problems that have been assailing you all day fade into the background.

Tomorrow is another day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-OoIvgtuzs