All posts by Gina Kleinmartin

Mom’s Steak.

When my mom was a young mother in the 50’s, she spent a lot of time cooking and making up recipes. One of her meals was a potato salad that was a little different from the common one of the time, and a steak marinade.

Oh, her steak. Her steak made at least 2 vegetarians want to eat meat again.

All summer long, she’d make this steak and this potato salad, and even though she died a few years ago, I get to feel like we are home again when I make them.
I recently was asked if I’d be willing to share my mom’s steak marinade, and since I was making it for today anyway, I figured why not. And like that woman who had her fudge recipe on her tombstone for all to enjoy, I know my mom would love to live on in other people’s cooking. Even if they change it to fit their tastes, like she changed recipes to fit her.

The steak is simple. There were no amounts in my mom’s recipes- she eyed everything and tossed stuff together, except in the rare occasions where there was a single measurement (4 eggs, ½ cup A1, ½ c breadcrumbs, LOTS of garlic powder). SO I measured my ‘eyeing’ when I put this together the other day (it needs to marinade 24-48 hours).  So you mix this, pour it over steak, forget it, and cook it.
Cook extra. There is nothing better than this steak pan fried to reheat on bread with mayo as a sandwich the next day, and I try to save about 1/3 of a cup of diced streak to throw on a pizza at a later date. It has SO MUCH FLAVOR.
I am not much of a meat eater. But I could eat this all day every day and be very happy.

You did good, mom. <3 you and miss you.

Go here for the Potato Salad

Ok, so

all the flavors!

½ cup A1 sauce

4T soy sauce

2 T Worcestershire sauce
2 T olive oil (Not the good stuff)

1 tsp garlic powder

½ tsp oregano
½ tsp savory

¼ tsp thyme

¼ tsp sage
¼ tsp black pepper
1/8 tsp rosemary

Mix this, pour over steak in a non reactive bowl. Cover with red wine (old stuff, not fresh (but hey, you want to open a new bottle to do this, more power to you!)


Fridge it for 24 hours at LEAST.

Cook however you like.

raw meat waiting for the wine
pan frying on a ridged grill
resting before being cut

(My mom would mix and match these as she had them. do not feel obligated to use all of these if you don’t want. That goes for the whole thing. If you don’t have an herb, skip it, substitute it, go wild!)

Mom’s potato Salad, steam, and some sauteed spinach

We do have *just enough* leftover to add to a pizza and to make small sandwiches… yay!

My Mom’s Potato Salad

When my mom was a young mother in the 50’s, she spent a lot of time cooking and making up recipes. One of her meals was a potato salad that was a little different from the common one of the time, and a steak marinade.

The potato salad? At a grill out, I made a huge batch of it. One of the guests who tried it then brought *every new guest* over to it telling them to eat it, because it was so good.

I don’t think it’s *that* good, but it is extremely tasty. It’s a kind of bland plain 50’s potato salad (no pickles, no celery, no mustard, yes eggs) with Bacon added.

Y’see, my mom had married a kid of German descent, and her Mother in Law made the traditional hot potato salad that has bacon in it.  My mom looked at it and said ‘that would be good in plain potato salad’. And it is. I mean, how could it not be? So, it’s a plain, fatty potato salad with bacon. And eggs. Yeah. You eat it because it’s fatty. Mmmmmmm, fat….

All summer long, she’d make her steak and this potato salad, and even though she died a few years ago, I get to feel like we are home again when I make them.


I recently was asked if I’d be willing to share my mom’s steak marinade, and since I was making it for today anyway, I figured why not. And then I can’t picture the steak without this salad, so you have both! And like that woman who had her fudge recipe on her tombstone for all to enjoy, I know my mom would love to live on in other people’s cooking. Even if they change it to fit their tastes, like she changed recipes to fit her. So go ahead, add the pickle and celery and whatever else you think would work. I have actually in the past *drained the bacon grease* into the salad as well.

You did good, mom. <3 you and miss you.

Go here for Pia’s Steak.

For this you need

I use my Instant Pot and do my potatoes and eggs at the same time. Makes it harder to get salt in the potatoes, but harder to mess up.

4 cups of potatoes- salted, boiled, cooled, diced

2 hard boiled eggs- boiled, peeled, and diced (I do both of these in the instant pot. These were small so they got 7 minutes. I then peeled then, diced them and salted them.

1 finely chopped onion (about 1 cup of onion.)

1 tsp salt

½ teaspoon black pepper

5 sliced cooked diced bacon (I used three extra thick slices and drained them this time)

~1 cup mayo (add more if you like it gooey. I do.)

And the proof this dates to the 1950’s, after all the above is mixed well, paprika! It’s not just to decorate it. A nice hot paprika adds nice flavor to it.

And there you have it.

Pia’s steak, her potato salad and sauteed spinach. Dinner was silent because no one wanted to stop eating…

mulled white wine for February

There is mulled cider and mulled red wine. You may have even mulled white wine. But for the heart of Winter that is February, we like to make a batch of this Carpathian warm white wine, that isn’t as heavy as mulled.

The syrup doesn’t take long to make and will store in the fridge for a while, so you can have it a glass at a time if you’d like. There is no long cooking of the wine (just heat to warm, 120 degrees ish) so it’s still full of alcohol and crispness. And we take a batch camping, because warm, creamy wine by an outdoor fire is perfect…

This is one of my favorite drinks. I hope you enjoy it as well.

White Wine spice:

First you make a simple syrup. This is a basic technique fro many bar drinks, and it isn’t called simple because of how easy it is to make, but it could be. (don’t have the whole spices? Use what you do have)

In a 1 quart pot (about)

1 cup of water

½ cup white sugar

Boil for 7 minutes.

boiling sugar water.


Add

¼ of a cinnamon stick (about)

3 cloves

Small slice of peeled ginger root (about 2x the width of a quarter)

3 allspice berries

Peel from ½ a lemon AND ½ an orange

ingredients

Heat gently (no boil) for 5 minutes.

after 5 minutes simmering

Strain out the solids.

Add

1 tsp of vanilla

Strained, and vanilla.

That is literally all. Store it covered in the fridge for a few weeks To use, one full batch will do a 950 ml bottle of white wine. Just warm the wine with the syrup until it’s a drinkable temperature (do not boil or cook for ages) and serve. 160 ML (about 2/3 a cup) of the syrup will flavor a 750 ml bottle of wine. And about ½ a tsp will do a single glass of wine, but feel free to change that to taste.

In classic storage in the fridge, waiting wine