So this is teriyaki steak with spicy mango salsa. It was my dinner tonight, and it was pretty tasty. Someday, if you’d like, it can be your dinner too.
Here’s how:
MANGO SALSA
-1 ripe mango
-1/4ish of a red onion
-1 lime
-1 bunch cilantro
-2 red chili peppers
1. Set the oven on broil. Put your chili peppers inside it.
2.Peel the mango and dice it up- make the cubes as small as you can, but don’t freak out about it. Those things are slippery little suckers. Dump your pile of mango cubes in a bowl.
3.Go check on your chili peppers. Hopefully, they’re nice and black on the broiler side. If so, flip them over. If not, give ‘em another minute or two and then flip ‘em over.
4.Mince your red onion. Seriously, as finely as possible. Unless you’re the type that likes large chunks of raw onion…but normal people should mince with a vengeance. Once it’s nearly pulverized, dump it in with the mango.
5.Back to the oven. Are your chilies now blackened on their other side? Good. Take them out and put them in a plastic bag or a Tupperware container— you’re trying to trap them with their own steam. This will make it exponentially easier to remove the skins once we get to step 8. (Foreshadowing! Not just for literature and the Twilight movies!)
6.Cut the stems off of your bunch of cilantro. Chop the leaves as roughly or finely as suits your fancy. Dump that in with the mango and onion.
7.Squeeze the juice of that lime over the whole thing.
8.Go back to your chilies. Remove their skins. (Hopefully the steam has done all of the work for you- the skin should slip right off.) If you like a mild salsa, split them open, scrape out the seeds, and discard. I recommend not doing that; I think this salsa is way better spicy. But to each their own.
9.Chop up the chilies—-again, pretty finely—and dump them in with everything else.
10.Stir it all up, and leave it to sit in the fridge for a bit- anywhere from 20 minutes to two days. It’s better when it sits at least an hour. The citrus keeps things from browning if you need to leave it longer. (The salsa in the picture is a day old.)
So. Now you have your salsa, and you can do lots of things with it. It’s good plain, or on swordfish, or in fish tacos, or, as you see here, served with steak. You want to talk about that steak? Let’s do it.
TERIYAKI SKIRT STEAK
This doesn’t even really count as a recipe. For one thing, I assume most of you at least sort of know how to cook steak. For another thing, you can use store-bought marinade—Soy Vey is pretty consistently delicious. So I’m not really getting too detailed here. But just in case you want an idea of how it went down:
1. Soak your steak in the marinade for up to an hour. Take a heavy skillet—cast iron is best—put a thin layer of oil in it, and put it on high heat.
2. When the pan is hot, remove the steak from the marinade, let it sort of drip and drain for a minute so that there isn’t too much extra liquid, and put it flat into your hot pan. Let it sizzle for a couple of minutes, turn it over, and
3. Let it sizzle some more.
Skirt steak is very thin and it cooks quickly. If you can’t find skirt, you can substitute flank (heh), but if you do that you’ll need to increase cooking time slightly. So anyway, when it looks done remove it from the heat and let it rest a few minutes.
Then slice it into long strips against the grain. If you do it with the grain, it’ll be tough instead of tender.
That’s it. You’re done. Put the steak on a plate, garnish with some salsa, and eat it up. You can throw some greens on the plate if you’re feeling fancy. I wasn’t.
Seriously, this recipe may look long and even a bit weird, but all the parts are easy and it’s really delicious. So go try it. For me. I wouldn’t steer you wrong.
xoxo,
Mintygreen
