Love and Olive Oil

Spicy Thai Steak

Spicy Thai Steak

I’ve made it my goal to sift through my skyscraper of food magazines. The ever-growing pile that sits in our living room. It had been nicely arranged on the shelf, but when my dishes and props collection rapidly expanded during the shooting of my cookbook, the magazines were relegated to the corner to make room for stacks of plates. The intention was to go back through them, rescue the forgotten recipes, and recycle.

That was 6 months ago.

Although I have been shamefully lazy in completing this task, I do have to say that the system I discovered puts the 3-ring-binder of olde to shame. Enter, the iPad, and the recipe management app called Paprika. It’s not a free app, but it’s well worth the cost.

Typically, when a new issue of my favorite foodie rag arrives, I flip through it once, dog-earing any recipes that sound appetizing. If it happens to be a Monday night, when I’m usually planning our weekly meals, I’ll include a few of those recipes on the menu. But then? What about the rest of the recipes that I may not have flagged the first time or used during that week? Lost and forgotten. Buried in a pile of glossy paper.

Thinking about all those lost recipes makes me sad.

One of these days, I’ll actually make it through the pile. Saving and categorizing all of the appetizing recipes by magazine, category, season… whatever makes sense at the time. And then, during future meal-planning sessions, I can simply scroll through the digital skyscraper (which is so much more manageable than the glossy paper one), picking and choosing based on what we have on hand, what needs to be used up, what is fresh and seasonal at the market.

This was one of those recipes, forgotten the first time around, and rediscovered. We served the spicy beef (seared in a heavy skillet, but it could also be grilled as described in the original recipe) with a cellophane noodle salad, tossed with a dressing of soy sauce, fish sauce, sesame oil, and spice. Lost. And found. Cooked. And thoroughly enjoyed.

Now if I could just get through the rest of the pile…

Spicy Thai Steak

Did you make this recipe?

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons basil leaves
2 tablespoons cilantro leaves
4 peeled garlic cloves
1 tablespoon sambal oelek or other Asian chile sauce
1 tablespoon Asian fish sauce
1/2 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest
1/2 teaspoon finely grated lime zest
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 flat iron steaks

Directions:

In a mini food processor, combine the basil, cilantro, garlic, sambal oelek and fish sauce and pulse until finely chopped. Add the lemon and lime zests and oil and pulse until fairly smooth.

Rub the marinade on the steaks and let stand at room temperature for at least 30 minutes or refrigerate for up to 24 hours.

Preheat a heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Sear the steaks for 3-4 minutes per side, or until medium-rare. Remove from heat and lightly cover with foil. Let rest for 5 minutes before slicing.

Recipe from Food and Wine.

All images and text © / Love & Olive Oil

Did you make this recipe?

Let us know what you think!
Leave a Comment below or share a photo and tag me on Instagram with the hashtag #loveandoliveoil.

There may be affiliate links in this post. We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

Leave a Reply to Larissa Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

32 Comments

  1. This sounds lovely. Going to give this a go. thanks for sharing this recipe.

    Simon

  2. I absolutely love Paprika, though I’m still in the process of importing all of my recipes and that’s a bit tedious. Can’t wait until it’s done, though!

    And I’m totally with you on the magazine stacks. My wife is about to start randomly throwing them away!

  3. This looks amazing! I can’t wait to try it.

  4. Hi my name is Jill and I am a food magazine hoarder! I also hoard catalogs, travel mags, home decorating mags and anything I find in my travels. I have piles in the living room, piles in the family room, in the kitchen and in all bedrooms. I have a secret stash of old Vanity Fairs down in the basement bedroom. I even have some of Andy Warhol’s Avante Garde mags on my living room coffee table. Can I just say that your post and all the subsequent comments make me feel like I have a tribe? And your steak looks and sounds delish!

  5. So, Tuesday night my hubby and I checked out the amazing app that is Paprika and we downloaded it to the mac and my iphone (not yet on the ipad, since the mac is in the kitchen). OMG! I grabbed a handful of printed out recipes and we found them on the websites. Some of them were just a click and they were saved. Others, we had to copy into Paprika manually, but that was as easy as dragging the parts of the recipe into the heading buttons! My hubby was even getting into it – for recipes that didn’t have a picture, he found them on Google Images and dragged them into Paprika. So freaking easy!! I love it! We also went through the recent magazines that had dog-eared recipes and saved those to Paprika. Syncing with my phone was easy peasy! Thank you so much for letting us know about Paprika! It is awesome!
    I can’t wait to use it to create a shopping list!

  6. Bookmarking this. Looks like a Nathan meal to me!

  7. delicious! i’m your newest follower (:

  8. This sounds delicious, and you have given me another reason why I need an iPad.

  9. Recipes–saved, unsorted, and ready to try out “some day”-they are like all my other possessions. I periodically weed out the ones I haven’t used, but then I read magazines (and blogs like yours) and the recipes pile up again I’m trying to get into a state of mind to read and enjoy the blogs I subscribe to without pressuring myself to try out every recipe. Just enjoy.

  10. I have a completely useless way of archiving recipes. I tried the binder thing so I have loads of those lying around, then I have half of them digital and the other half is still in magazines in piles and piles… The problem with digitizing is that all needs to be scanned or entered, right? And that’s just a daunting task. Possibly worse then doing the binder thing.. But I love your thai steak!

  11. i use the Evernote app to store all of my recipes (including this thai steak), which i can then tag and access from the web, iphone, ipad, etc. its free!

  12. Please keep sifting through those recipes, because this looks absolutely scrumptious. And I’m looking more to reading more like it on your blog…
    So yummy!

  13. I just checked out the Paprika app – genius!!! I have a box of magazine pullouts, paper recipes etc. Rather than scan them each individually, manually organize them in my computer…I can locate them on the magazine’s website, download them to Paprika and it will do the rest? Even make shopping lists and mealplans? Amazing! My only complaint is that I would want the app on my Mac, iphone and ipad…I’ll have to purchase all three apps for a total of $30 in order to be able to sync them all. I’m sure it’s well worth it to actually be able to use the recipes I’ve saved/dog-eared/ripped out over the years. I am also in the process of letting my paper magazine subscriptions expire in favor of ipad subscriptions. Less clutter in my house is always a good thing!
    Thanks for the tip about Paprika!

  14. Normally in an Asian beef salad this piece of steak will be sliced, mixed in with the glass noodles and tossed with more julienned vegetables. What you’re doing here is food to table in less time, a good option.

  15. My name is Anna and I am a magazine addict. The stack you talk of is a familiar sounding issue at our place. Eventually they will be sorted and I will cook from them….promise :)

    This Thai steak looks a lovely tasty mid week dinner.

  16. I’m another one who has endless piles of recipes that I want to try. I’ve yet to find a way to make them work to me but I feel like I’m missing out on gems like this!

  17. I have so many buried treasures of recipes. I have the torn out of mags, emailed to myself, bookmarked online and in real books; I pin them on my Pinterest boards as a message to myself…good to know about Paprika!

  18. Ah that’s me and my magazines! I have way too many stacks of unread magazines….but when I am subscribed to like 10….it’s bound to happen!

    I love the flavors of this steak and that it’s healthy! Definitely on the must make soon list. :-D

  19. Love this- it sounds like a great way to enjoy steak!

  20. YUM! This is one beautiful steak *siiiigh*

  21. I totally feel you on this! I have struggled with the organization of recipes as well, since one of the main difficulties is the complexity: bookmarked recipes online, torn out recipes from mags, printed out recipes emailed from friends- it’s enough to drive anyone batty!
    I sort of solved it by stopping taking old mags from Freecycle, reducing subscriptions to 2, and going through old mags again when they’re in season again (still delightful!), but that leaves the bookmarked digital ones in the dark. Sigh. I have no iPad device that could do the work for me, so will continue to troll the web for others’ successful systems…
    and this steak does look amazing- way to go, Lindsay!

  22. This steak looks amazing – I love anything with Thai flavors!
    My magazines are out of control, I need to figure out a way to deal with them!

  23. Lindsay, isn’t this the problem for all of us who love food and food magazines. Recently I have been scanning just the articles/recipes I really like and then giving the magazines away to a friend. My magazine piles were getting a bit our of hand as well. Your steak looks very tasty.

  24. I’m the SAME WAY.

    And that steak makes me want my mommy.

  25. I want to make it my (belated) New Years Resolution to cook more recipes from my ever growing pile of magazines/virtual stack of bookmarked blog pages. I always say there aren’t enough meals to cook them all in, but if I ate something different every day for the rest of my life I could probably squeeze them in :-)

  26. Oooh, now that looks like one perfectly spicy, tender steak :)

  27. I need to use Paprika! My mountain of magazines is ridiculous too. This steak looks yummy! I love that you served it with cellophane noodles too.

  28. I’m waiting for iPad 3 to come out to get Paprika. I’ve heard great things about it!. I’m so notorious for having a huge stack of recipes to try — on the computer and off. I’ll definitely be downloading that app! The steak looks so amazing, tender, and juicy. I even said to my coworker this morning that I wanted steak for lunch haha, you knew what I was thinking ;)

  29. i am right there with you, lady–i’m a food magazine HOARDER. it’s a little bit scary just how tall that pile has gotten over the years! i just recently bit the bullet and completely overhauled/organized my collection, but now that you mention Paprika, i am totally intrigued. i’ve heard of it before, but just haven’t downloaded it yet. i mean, $20 is a small price to pay to for uber recipe organization–seems totally worth it. i need this!

    also, i need some steak. can you come over and feed this delicious meal to me? thanks a bunch!

  30. This looks SO good Lindsay! I’ve had those stacks of magazines to deal with too. So refreshing to rip out the favs when the stack gets out of control.

  31. I love my system for organizing… have them in a zillion binders all separated by category & then subcategorized from there. Of course I have a pile that need to be filed!!

    Looks like great steak!

Did you make this recipe? Leave a Review »