I’ve been using instagram more and more these days and I have to say I really like it. Still a bit tricky to get photos from my SLR to my instagram account, but I think I have come up with a decent workflow and in the process I’ve actually discovered some pretty great apps for photo editing, which are slowly replacing my mac editing tools, including photoshop. Heresy! Well, I don’t like editing photos to death. If the photo is decent, a few little tweaks should be enough. Granted, I’m no professional photographer, but I do enjoy it a lot an have picked up a trick or two along the way.

Working in RAW mode is ideal, but takes a huge amount of disk space and processing power, so I like to stay in RAW format for only the initial stage of the photo editing process. I do shoot everything in RAW format. I like to have the ability to correct any white balance issues after the shoot and I also love having extra dynamic range to adjust exposure without worrying too much about clamping. Also, the sharpening and a few aberration corrections that can be done in RAW mode are very appealing as well. But after those few things have been corrected, it’s time for me to go into JPEG mode and never look back… until now.. some of these iPhone apps store images in your phone using the PNG format, which allows some of these apps to store the editing history into the file, which is great. It’s like a PSD (the photoshop file format) so, any editing step can be tweaked after the image has been saved. My favorite one of these apps is Snapseed.  For Watermarking, I use eZy watermark lite.  I also use dropbox to transfer my photos from my computer to my iPhone. And that’s about my current iPhone photo editing toolset.

Back to the food. Rib eye, yes, anytime please. Saw these baby carrots at the store, had to have them. Coffee and steak, yes. A few radishes and some julienned green onions just to top it all off. I don’t think this recipe needs a lot of explaining. It’s delicious and very straight forward to make as it’s the case with many recipes featuring tender beautiful meat like rib eye. Here’s what I did and I hope you enjoy:

Ingredients (makes 2-3 appetizer size portions):

1 Rib Eye Steak (thick, about 1in)
Salt + Pepper to taste

Reduction:

2 Tbsp Madeira
1/2 Tbsp instant coffee
1/3 Tbsp Tamari
1/2 Tbsp Brown Sugar
1 Tbsp Butter

Garnishes:

4 baby carrots
1 radish thinly sliced
1 green onion, green parts only, julienned
Nori cut into thin strips

1. Make the reduction. Add all the liquids and the sugar into a small sauce pan. Medium heat. Reduce until syrupy. Remove from the heat. Add the butter at the end. Set aside.

2. Prepare all the garnishes. Slice the radish with a very sharp knife. And the same goes for the green onion. In a pot of boiling water, blanch the baby carrots until tender. About 8 mins. Remove from the water and into an ice water bath. Remove the skin with your fingers. Should be very loose. Dice to your liking.

3. Prepare the steak. About an hour before this all goes down, have the steak at room temperature, salt it generously, and allow to rest for that time. Before searing, make sure the steak is dry (with a paper towel) Either sous vide (about 20-30 mins at 125F and then sear it in clarified butter) You can also cook it traditionally, just make sure your steak is at room temperature, sear on a skillet with clarified butter or any high smoking point oil, and finish in the oven till core temperature is 120F, remove form the oven and let it rest for 20 mins. The carryover heat will get the core to the proper 125F.

4. Plate it. Drizzle the reduction over the plates. Cube the steak and place it on the plate with care, it will be bloody. Drizzle some more reduction over the steak cubes. Add the carrots, and the rest of the garnishes carefully. Use tweezers if possible. Make sure to have all your components ready before you compose the plate. Will be a lot easier that way.

That is it! Thanks for visiting!

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