Archive for February 21st, 2006

2006.02.21

Meat Purse

Meat PurseI have a tradition that whenever I go on a weekend trip to Tahoe with friends I always make what I call Meat Purse. This year I also made a variation that Redge dubbed Meat Wallet. Here is the basic recipe and variation will follow.

Meat Purse
Serves about 4-5 people.

Ingredients:
Flank Steak (one good size)
Spinach (one bunch)
Basil (one bunch)
Gorgonzola (one tub (cup?))
Garlic (one clove)
Large Sewing Needle or Suture with Cotton Thread (you can sometimes get this from the butcher)

Cut off stems from spinach and basil. Mince and put in a bowl along with chopped and crushed garlic. Pour gorgonzola in bowl. Mix and mush everything together. Set aside bowl; this is your stuffing.

Stitched Meat PurseLay out flank steak. Cut off excess fat. Fold in half and start sewing the steak until there is only a two inch (4-5cm) hole. Take stuffing and shove everything into the pocket of the flank steak. Finish stitching the steak closed. For the “purse” effect tie two corners with the remaining string forming a handle.

Set the oven for apprx. 350 degrees. Put Meat Purse on tray that will drain and put in the oven for apprx. half an hour. I’ve never perfected this part, so your temperature and time may vary.

Variations
1: Instead of gorgonzola you can use feta or blue cheese. If you use feta I recommend adding a bit of salt to the stuffing. By the way, you can never have too much cheese…
2: Add other items to the stuffing. I sauted some mushrooms once, and I would imagine a bit of bread might work nicely, too.
3: Marinate the meat. I take a bunch of garlic cloves and put them in a bottle with soy sauce and let it sit for months in the refridgerator. I’ve used this mixture once marinating the meat in the soy sauce and using one or two of the cloves in the stuffing.
4: You could brown the meat a bit ahead of time if you’re so inclined. You could also parch the spinach ahead of time; I’ve encountered some cases where the spinach was too wet even after cooking.
5: I doubled the recipe and stitched two flank steaks together face to face.

Meat Wallet
One original variation on the Meat Purse that was original to this trip was Meat Wallet. It’s basically exactly the same as Meat Purse except you take two pork tenderloins, stitch them, stuff them and don’t stitch them closed. They take a little less time to cook but otherwise the recipe is the same.

I’ll post pictures of both when I get some from the others who were on the trip!

2006.02.21

Egyptian Rattle Screw: ERS

(This post originally appeared on my old website back in 2003. This past weekend we played a couple rounds up in Tahoe and I thought I’d repost the rules.)

Egyptian Rattle Screw is a fairly simple card game similar to War but with an actual element of chance. We often called the game Rat Fuck back in college because it was so easy to get destroyed by opponents with only a handful of cards. The pacing is fast. After the jump are the rules as we played. I had a great time playing ERS with gTodd and Nate, and whoever else was along at the time (often Fraggle, Joy and/or Zapski, and even my sister learned to play).

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