Fireplace Steak

Before the cold weather made way for summer, and before our wood pile dwindled down, I motivated a fireplace dinner! I got the directions from a neat book, The Magic of Fire, which is full of information and history about open-fire cooking.

We started with something pretty basic, coal-grilled steak. In the picture here, you can see a pair of flat-iron steaks sitting on our BBQ grate, which is resting on two bricks. Red-hot coals have been shoveled out onto the hearth between the bricks. I built the fire on/between two logs—instead of on a metal fire-grate. This makes a hot coal factory in the heart of your fire. Check that thing out! It's a fire with a job to do! A real working-class fire. A few fresh logs on top ensure that there are bright flames, which suck air up the chimney so any smoke from the cooking, which is right at the opening to the fireplace, gets sucked up the chimney and out of the room.

We have also roasted red bell peppers and a whole yellow onion in our fireplace. The red bells were good, pretty much what you've come to expect from roasted red bell pepers, which are standard fare in fancy sandwich shops these days. The yellow onion, however, was a really interesting treat. It sat right on a shallow layer of coals, but got most of it's heat from being close to the blazing-hot heart of the fire. I had to reach in with long tongs to turn the onion every two minutes. The papery skin protected the onion, but the intense heat of the fire carmelized it. An onion is pretty impenetrable, so it got a faint, delicate smokey flavor without getting too smokeified. After you pull it out with tongs, and strip off the outer burned skin, the only tricky part left is to slice up a hot, squishy, whole cooked onion! If you have any suggestions, share them, please.

Lastly, I'd like to point out my fancy leather fire-seat. That's a Moroccan "poof." My friends, Dawn and Simon, want to import stuff from Morocco. That's where Simon is from, and his family is all still there. Hopefully I'll be able to point you to a Moroccan import website soon!