Labor Day Filet Mignon with Red Wine Sauce

After scoring a whole beef tenderloin at a great price, I broke it down into some steaks, some bits for steak tartare, and a small pile of trim from which to make steak sauce. In general I'm a purist: on those very rare occasions when I eat steak, I want to taste the meat without a sauce obscuring the flavor. However, because filet lacks fat, it's pretty flavorless on its own and a bit of sauce can help perk it up. 

Below you see a six-ounce filet perched on a couple of slabs of ripe tomato, a pile of spinach sautéed with shallots, and a drizzle of red wine sauce intermingling with the tomato juices. I'm not a big fan of steak, but this was a decent dinner.

Filet, Red Wine Sauce, Fresh Tomatoes, Sautéed Spinach

As a base for the steak sauce, I had a pile of silverskin, fat, and some otherwise unsalvageable bits of meat leftover from cutting the steaks. These went into a pan with a bit of oil to brown thoroughly and to create a great fond (browned stuff) on the bottom of the pan. Also into the pan went a whole clove of garlic and a shallot that I sliced skin and all.

When making brown stocks and sauces, I always put the onion and shallot peels in the pan because they yield a nice brown color. Onion skins have traditionally been a source of a beautiful natural brown dye for wool and other clothing fibers. You should take advantage of the skins to help introduce a great brown color into your stock.

Browning Beef Scrap

Once the beef and shallots were deeply brown all over, about 10 minutes of cook time, I added a small sprig of rosemary, a single lovage leaf, a bay leaf, and a healthy pinch of coarse black pepper as seasonings.

After this, I deglazed the pan with two glasses of red wine, making sure to scrape up all the brown bits of the fond off the bottom of the pan and into the sauce. Then I added about a cup and a half of homemade chicken stock. The collagen in the chicken stock will help the sauce have great mouthfeel. I would have used beef stock, but all I had made recently was chicken stock. In the grand scheme, the red wine flavor will dominate whatever stock you use.

Reduced, Defatted Sauce

I let the sauce bubble away gently for 15 minutes and then strained the solids out of it. After this, I let it come down to about a half a cup in total. As the sauce came down, I skimmed the fat off of it. Traditionally, if I were making a beurre rouge, I would bring it down tighter and finish it with a lot of cold butter. Otherwise to make a red wine sauce with classic technique, I would knead cold butter with flour to make a beurre manié that I would whisk in to thicken the sauce.

But, we're in the process of losing a bunch of this COVID quarantine weight by minding our fat intake. So, I used a much lower fat way to bind the sauce. I mixed a little cornstarch with a bit of cold water to make a slurry. Then I dribbled this in bit by bit until the sauce thickened to my liking.

Last Time Outside for a Week

OK, so don't look too harshly on the indistinct grill marks on these filets. Even though I need to scrape the grill down good, I don't have a wire brush and I'm not running right out to Lowe's for just that. I'm not risking my health for something as inconsequential in the grand scheme as a grill brush. Even more important now to our health than COVID is the quality of our air. Have a look at the photos below.

The Wildfire Smoke Starting

Day Two, Dark Skies

Day Three, The Last Time We Saw a Little Sun

Day Three, Late Afternoon Red Skies

Day Four to Eleven, Choking Smoke

We should have seen the warning signs in the forecast from the NWS that included a red flag warning for violently gusty, hot, and super arid winds. I did see the warnings, but I never in my wildest dreams extrapolated them to spending the last eleven days closeted in the house with towels blocking off some doors.

We're used to fire season in the West. It's a natural artifact of our summer season in which we do not get rain for months on end. Each fall, before the rains begin and when the forests have desiccated all summer, we have forest fires. But what we don't have are 2020-style fires one-upping COVID for the Trauma of the Year award.

Back to the steaks which I saved for celebrating Labor Day. Given the constant northerly and easterly winds (our usual winds are SSW to NW in orientation) with wicked blasts sending loose things flying, I was not sure that I would be able to grill out as my Labor Day tradition dictates. I was afraid that a blast of hot, dry air would tip the grill over. Fortunately, when I went out to light the grill for its preheat, the wind was directly out of the north and the grill was in the lee of our next door neighbor's house.

I should have known that something was up when I found myself licking my lips and wishing I had lip balm, just like being in the dessert in New Mexico and Arizona. Although we have naturally low summertime humidity here in the Willamette Valley, it is a comfortable humidity that does not require us to maintain a steady stock of lip balm.

The first time that I licked my lips outdoors when lighting the grill, it tasted like a freaking ash tray, acrid and bitter. The reek of smoke was all around. After putting the steaks on the grill, I retreated to the house and only emerged to give them turns.

After turning off the gas, and bringing the steaks in for dinner, little did I know that that would be the last time I would go outside for over a week. I finally did relent and go to the grocery store on day 10, not having been shopping in 17 or 18 days and the cupboard really bare.

I also had no way of predicting that things would get worse and that of this writing, millions of acres are on fire or have already burned here in Oregon and we have the worst air quality in the world. This is unprecedented as far as I know, though one old-timer told us that the air has not been this bad since Mt. St. Helens erupted 40 years ago.

2020, we're screaming "uncle!" Do you hear?