Why hello there, and welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophe, where we whip up a mess of facts and figures about lunches and dinners. That was a slant rhyme, it works. I’m your lacking-lyricist Jon O’Guin, and today’s topic is…well, to be frank, I haven’t planned it out very well, but I’m sure we’ll figure out something. We better, because I also don’t really have a recipe for today. If you don’t care about how we got here, here’s a link to what “recipe” I’ll work out eventually. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

Cram it

One thing that several people have asked me, over the years, is “Jon, why don’t you pre-write posts?” And my answer has always been “so I can stay somewhat adaptable and timely”. By that, I mean that, as a writer, I personally find myself having to rely on mercurial inspiration, and the chaos of day-to-day events, for how and what to cover.  If some notable story or idea comes crashing in, I want the freedom to react to it in a timely manner.

For instance, we all know the most important news of the last week: MORE BTS! ARMY for LIFE! (A.R.M.Y? I am still very much on the periphery of K-Pop fandom.)
Also, if you legitimately think that IS the most important news of the last week, I hope you are A: non-American, or B: underage.

The downside to this style is that my family isn’t particularly good at communication, in a variety of little ways, and thus sometimes I can find that “having remained flexible” means “have put myself in a lose-lose situation”. For instance, I recently bought the food to make 5 dishes for the site, and then ended up unable to cook 4 of them because a series of other projects sapped my energy to cook on the days when I was “allowed” to. (By which I mean that there are a couple meals a week that are “locked”: Thursdays we eat at restaurant A, Sundays Restaurant B, and we have a place we order from probably every third week or so on Saturdays.) This then cascaded: the food didn’t go BAD until after trash day, so we didn’t to throw it out, so I couldn’t get more food, AND a sudden announcement that we would be having company this past weekend completely restructured my schedule for the week and weekend.

Why did we randomly get company in the tail-end of September? Well, for a not-so-random reason: tomorrow happens to be my 32nd birthday, so my brother and his fiancée, who we hadn’t seen since before the lockdown, decided to come up and see us. Which meant we had to clean out what would normally be our game room, and had, over the course of lockdown, become a storage room.

There are 8 dozen eggs here. We threw away 16 dozen eggs that had gone bad. The room was basically 1/4 alcohol and eggs.

Between the clean-up, some other responsibilities, and the visit itself, my schedule was shredded. That is not to say that I hated the visit, or anything so negative: we had a very nice time, played several board games that we all enjoyed, to the extent that at one point, my brother did maybe the third or fourth legitimate spit-take I’ve ever seen an adult perform, he had to laugh so hard and so suddenly. It was a great time, but it left me with a dilemma; at 1 PM Sunday afternoon, I had two options: I could either clean out the fridge, go grocery shopping, and whip up an entire recipe by like, 2:30, which would be on the later end of the acceptable window for a late lunch before our Sunday meal…or I could not, and be forced to come up with something for today. Luckily, I had ONE option that would work, that I had been struggling to find the exact right time to act on: Steak Hash. Why? Well, because of where the steak comes from, and why we had it. And for that, we need MORE EXPLANATION.

The Opposite of a Surprise Party

So, I’ve mentioned the tradition before, but just to remind everyone/fully explain it, for the last…20ish years (and probably longer, but that’s really only as long as I can specifically remember it happening), my family has the “birthday dinner” tradition: wherein one of your “birthday presents”, as it were, is a free imaginary coupon that you can redeem (with some prep time and discussion) for one dinner at the restaurant of your choice, with the guests of your choice*. (*The guests paradigm has been…wobbly. It’s typically used for “your significant other” or “your current roommate/best friends (when we were teens)” since becoming adults, we haven’t often included non-family members/significant others in the process.) There’s also an expiration date of indeterminate time/exchange on the offer: I have personally lost at least 2 birthday dinners due to scheduling issues, and had others turned into just more money, in order to have an absurd amount of alcohol at my parties.

ONE QUARTER ALCOHOL.

Hence the title: an O’Guin Birthday dinner is the opposite of a surprise party, but rather something you know is coming and work out the details of for some time. They are also fairly rarely ON our birthdays: normally, there’s some party or event at that time, and the dinner ends up being at a later date. And each of us uses our dinner in fairly consistent ways: Nate tends to go to the same place every time, I tend to try somewhere fancy and new, and my mom’s tends to get assigned at an ad hoc basis: we find some moderately expensive place we like in say, June, and she announces that the meal will count as hers, or that “we’ll have to come back for my birthday dinner”. Stephen…used to have a place he always went to, but with him and I not living within 200 miles of each other for the past 13 years, I don’t know what he’s done. Complicating all of this is that the last 3-4 years have been a big mess in terms of working this stuff out. This year, the pandemic has consumed all of our birthdays (Stephen and Nate are both in April, my mom’s birthday is May), two years ago Dad was on hospice for Stephen and Nate’s birthdays, and passed away 3 days before my mother’s birthday…meaning that LAST year was the anniversary of his passing, and 2017 was when he was first diagnosed, so the pattern has been heavily frayed. BUT, last year, in July, we had Nate’s dinner, because he and I were trading off being in plays, and therefore not having free weekends for the first half of the year, that was the first window we got, so we went to El Gaucho’s.

Spanish for “The Gaucho”.

El Gaucho’s, if you don’t know the establishment, is a high-end steakhouse chain in the Pacific Northwest, first rooted in the Puget Sound area (founded in Seattle, spreading to Portland, Tacoma, Bellevue, and Vancouver). It’s at a weird level of “expensive/fancy enough to be mind-blowing for those unaccustomed to it”, and also probably somewhat pedestrian to the ACTUALLY wealthy. Like, you can pretty regularly buy gift cards to it 20% off at Costco. It reminds me, in a way, of something author Seanan McGuire noted about Disney World, how they perfectly price themselves to be “cheap enough that even a low-income family can save to afford a once-in-a-lifetime vacation”, but the more well-off can spring for a much more plush experience. My family used to go once a year or so (it was a common choice for my father’s birthday dinner as well as Nate’s), though I think I’ve only personally been about 3-5 times. (The Tacoma location wasn’t popular until around when I started High School, so I had one or two trips before I left for college, and then a couple trips once I came back to the area.)

I like to describe the Tacoma location as “what you imagine a restaurant that doubles as a vampire den would look like”: it’s designed to model the old steakhouses of the late 1800’s and 1900’s, dark wood paneling, black leather booths. The main floor of the restaurant is actually down a story from the entrance, where the windows have heavy dark blinds, and the walls are thick brick, so you step from the sunny bustle of downtown Tacoma on a Saturday afternoon into a much darker and quieter space, and then (typically) descend into an almost cave-like structure. Is it day? Night? Who cares?

The last time I was there, we sat on the balcony for the first time (for me), and it was startlingly brighter.

The restaurant has the kind of high-end service one would expect, as well. I know at least for a time that your reservation was tied to an account that included multiple details about your life, so that your server (and they would strive to get you the same server), would be able to ask cogent questions about how you had been since your last visit: are you still doing that hobby you mentioned, how’s your dog, etc, replicating the kind of precise attention to customers that used to be a hallmark of steakhouses.

We’ll talk more about the restaurant, and that specific dinner, on Thursday, as part of a further discussion on bougie dining, but the focus right now is on one of the ways we lower the sticker shock of eating there. (Which is no cheap date. The CHEAPEST steak on the menu is $45. The soups are $12. My brother and mother typically split a steak that costs over $130.)  and that is: recycling.

See, here’s the thing about steak: it’s never going to be AS good when you reheat it. So my family has figured out: don’t even try. Go for a second preparation that uses a vastly different texture. And yes, as some of you may be remembering today’s title with a sense of growing dread, that DOES mean that we make a Sunday-morning hash out of $130 steak.

Screeching begins.

This is, also, why so much of today’s post is focused on more personal history: the dish itself is stupidly simple, and not even all that complicated to talk about. “Hash” etymologically comes from the same root as hatchet, (because it’s a “ha-shay” in French, meaning “little ax”), from hacher, or “chop up”. So a hatchet is “a little chopper” and “hash” is “chopped”. That’s it. You chop up some stuff, cook it, and you have hash. This is also why you “hash things out”: it originally referred to using an axe to getting a rough shape of something you intended to carve out in more detail with better tools later. There wasn’t much  to talk about EXCEPT my family’s relationship with the restaurant…until last week on Youtube! THAT’S RIGHT, suckers, I DID pick this recipe in part because of my desire to remain timely! YOU THOUGHT ALL THAT WHINING WAS FOR NOTHING, BUT IT WAS A RUSE ALL ALONG.

Nice. Now, let’s make this thing, and come back Thursday when I have useful things to talk about.

Made a Real Hash of this Post

Now, you can use any fairly pre-cooked steak for this, or really any meat you want, we just use steak. So don’t think that this recipe NEEDS super-expensive steak. It’s really just a fairly simple way to use up left-over proteins, especially if they were swanky enough that you kind of want to let them shine on their own one more time.

El Gaucho works particularly well for it because it’s a steakhouse, so it already provides a lot of the stuff we want: This is going to be, essentially, a riff on Potatoes O’Brien with steak and eggs. So you need potatoes, peppers, and onions…ALL of which El Gauchos sells: you can get baked potatoes, and roasted peppers, and sautéed onions in big chunks, meant to complement the steak…meaning all you need to do is chop all those pre-cooked bad-boys up the next day. If you DIDN’T eat at a quite-expensive steak house and get the high-falutin’ sides, you can also just cook whatever elements you’re missing on your own: onions, peppers, and potatoes are notoriously cheap, and easy enough to lightly fry for 10-20 minutes to soften/crisp up before you go to heat the steak. But if you’re lucky like us, you really just chop everything up and toss it in a pan on medium.

Observe, cooking.

After about 10 minutes, with a couple tosses here and there, and a sprinkle of salt, everything will have heated up, the colors will be a lot richer and more robust, and the hash is basically ready.

It’s very colorful.

Once heated through, serve the hash, or, to be doubly fancy, while it heats up, fry some eggs to drape over the top, and serve.

A steak hash where the steak basically isn’t visible.

Boom boom boom. One super-expensive dinner adds several components to a fast and frugal breakfast. Then, just eat the left overs for another meal or two, and…well, mathematically, eventually the meals get at least KIND OF reasonable. In a “By the 4th meal of leftovers, technically the cost has dropped to around $90 a person”.  Look, it’ll get explained Thursday. For now, eat your hash, and stop panicking.

THURSDAY: WE DIVE DEEPER INTO BOUGIE MEALS, TALKING ABOUT EL GAUCHO, AND SOME BALLERS.

MONDAY: I THINK A BEEF DISH, BUT MAYBE A DESSERT: I HAVE LIKE, THREE BEEF DISHES LINED UP BECAUSE I SLOTTED THIS ONE IN, SO WE’RE GOING TO NEED SOME VARIETY.

Left-over Restaurant hash

Serves 3-4

Ingredients

8-12 ounces leftover protein (steak, chicken, pork, hell, tofu), cut into ¾” chunks

12 ounces cooked potatoes,  cut into chunks

AS many of the following as you like, roughly 4 ounces each: Mushrooms, Onions, peppers

2 tbsp vegetable oil

Salt and pepper to taste

Fried eggs (optional)

Preparation

1. Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat.

2. Add the potatoes and vegetables to heat through/fry for 3-5 minutes, then add the protein, and fry until warmed through, 5-10 minutes.

3. Top with eggs, if desired, and serve.