Good morning. I found a short little piece of skirt steak at the market and it cost me $10 to take it home. I salted it hard and seared it in a cast-iron pan, and then finished it off the heat with a couple of tablespoons of cold butter, tilting the pan so it foamed along the sides and I could spoon the fat repeatedly over the crusty beef.
I let the meat rest on a cutting board while I made the recipe for guacamole (above) that Florence Fabricant scored from the chef Josefina Howard back in the ’90s. Then I made a quick salsa of halved grape tomatoes, diced red onion and seeded, sliced jalapeños dressed with lime juice, salt and pepper, and a simple crema of mayonnaise thinned with buttermilk and a little more lime juice.
There were some flour tortillas in the fridge, so I pulled those out, along with a hunk of Monterey Jack that I shredded onto the cutting board, next to the steak. I poured some of the fat from the pan into my crema, which broke it slightly — and deliciously — and then wiped out the pan so I could make quesadillas with the cheese and sliced steak.
These, topped with the guacamole and salsa and drizzled with the crema, were among the best things I’d eaten in a week of fine meals, and I commend them to you this weekend, a kind of series of no-recipe recipes with an actual recipe embedded within them.
