Swiss Steak - Cuisine at Home Style

My favorite cooking magazine is Cuisine at Home. The recipes in there are usually extremely good and easy to make. As an added bonus it is published in Des Moines, Iowa. A weird coincidence is that it is published at 2200 Grand Avenue, exactly 4 blocks from where I am building my Plastic Surgery office!

I've written quite frequently about my love of minute steaks (cube steaks). The last time I wrote about them was this February. I was extremely pleased to see that in the April issue, Cuisine at Home did a whole special on cube steaks. I decided to try their recipe for Swiss Steak.

Cuisine at Home jazzed it up a little bit by serving it over goat cheese polenta (another of my favorites) and adding a chowchow relish over the top. They also made their own cube steak from top round. You know how much I like do it yourself style food!

I cut the recipe in half because there are only 3 of us. I also changed a few little things to suit my kitchen.

Cuisine at Home Swiss Steak

1 top round steak, trimmed and tenderized with either a hammer or a Meat Needler, and cut into 4 pieces
1/4 cup flour
olive oil
1/2 cup diced onion
1/4 cup diced carrot
1/4 cup diced celery
1 clove minced garlic
1 T tomato paste
1/4 cup brandy
3/4 cup frozen or canned pearl onions
14 oz can diced tomatoes
1/2 cup chicken broth
1 T Worcestershire sauce
1 t paprika
Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 325. Dredge the steak in flour and sear in olive oil in a Dutch Oven. Remove the steak from the pot and add in the onion, carrot, celery and garlic. Saute for 2 minutes. Add the tomato paste and cook for another minute. Finally deglaze the pan by adding in the brandy. Simmer until almost evaporated.

Dump the rest of the ingredients into the dutch oven, cover and bake in the oven until tender. Cuisine at home suggests a cooking time of 1 hour.

Here is the right kind of steak to buy

Goat Cheese Polenta

Combine 3 cups of water with 1 cup yellow cornmeal and bring to a boil, stirring often. When it is boiling reduce heat to a simmer and cook about 5 minutes. It should thicken up considerably to look like polenta. Remove from heat and whisk in 4 oz goat cheese, a little cayenne pepper and salt to taste.

Chowchow Relish

Saute 1 1/4 cups diced yellow bell pepper, 1/2 cup diced red onion and 3 cloves minced garlic in olive oil until softened. Remove from heat and stir in:
2 T fresh chopped parsley (I substituted cilantro because I had some around)
2 T honey
1 T fresh lemon juice
2 t mustard
salt and pepper to taste