My wife and I got extremely lucky last night. Our twins, who just so happen to be sick, crashed out hard right before 7pm. This left me with enough time to throw together something fun for dinner.

I had  some corn, some arugula, an avocado and 2 bone-in rib eyes (from Whole Foods) sitting in the fridge begging for some love, so I broke out the skillet and got to work.

First off, I shucked the white corn and removed the kernels to go in to the skillet with some olive oil and salt+pepper – nothing too fancy here as I cooked them until they started to soften and brown around the edges. Once cooked through I set them aside, so they wouldn’t melt the other parts of the salad.

Set the corn aside and heated the skillet back up for the steaks. A little bit of olive oil and some salt+pepper on both sides of the steaks and in to the skillet they went (of course I let them rise to “room temperature” before cooking). About 5-6 minutes on the first side at level 7 on my electric range from the late 80’s.

As the steak seared on the first side I broke down the avocado and diced it up in to small cubes and pulled out a few handfuls of arugula. I also broke out some pine nuts – because arugula and pine nuts go so well together…

Flipped the steaks over and set the lid on top of the skillet (ruh roh – we’ll discuss this mistake later) and got to work finishing the salad.

Tossed the arugula, the corn, the avocado, the pine nuts with some olive oil & salt+pepper and mixed it all together (and luckily I remembered to clean up some of my salad mess in kitchen while the steaks kept searing).

By the time I turned back around to the steak I realized – DOH – I left the lid all the way on the pan, so now my steak was taking a sauna/steam bath. The steak was nice and seared on the first side, but was looking a bit forlorn now that it had been steaming itself. Remember – if you cover the pan/skillet then leave the lid cracked just a bit, so it doesn’t steam to death.

After pulling the steak out and serving the salad we ended up with a very lovely dinner. And of course, this paired nicely with a lovely gin+tonic before heading to bed to await the cries of sick twins in the middle of the night.

I’ve been wanting to make this salad for a long time and am finally glad I found some time. I hope you all can learn from my mistakes or are encouraged by a father of sick twins to find time to make something yummy for dinner too tonight.

The Results

Up next – tales of my favorite gin+tonic recipes…