Cheever Sauce

My timing is the worst because this would have been a great post for Valentine’s Day. Something about this meal felt incredibly romantic. Is red meat still considered an aphrodisiac?  The sweet blueberry sauce was also giving off its own intoxicating, amorous aroma. Everything in this dish came together beautifully, so despite the Super Super Easy tag, it was still Super Super Special. 

 I totally stole the idea for this dish from the steak meal of all steak meals in Italy…a dish I didn’t even eat firsthand, which can be found at Aqua Al 2 in Florence. As a food blogger it’s pretty embarrassing to admit I have never been to Italy. And I realize going abroad to Florence is like a right of passage for most girls raised in Connecticut, but in college I had shit to do, which didn’t include going abroad. I’ll make up for it when CheeverSauce goes international and I’m cooking pizza out of my own Tuscan wood burning stove. 

 Nevertheless, I heard this steak was pretty amazing, and a highlight of everyone I know who’s made the trip to Florence,  so it’s been on my list of food to cook on my own as the concept sounded easy enough to guess and replicate. Turns out, it was even easier to replicate then planned. The whole thing came together with minimal ingredients in 15 minutes, and I sided it with a raw kale and blue cheese salad because…well…nothing beats the combination of blue cheese and red meat. 

Onwards to the recipe:

WHAT a beauty right? I was casually shopping at this organic grocery store next to my apartment the other day, and when I sauntered over to the produce section to find what local veggies they brought in for the day, to my delight I see….PURPLE VEGETABLES. 

First of all, call me a culinary delinquent but never in my life have I seen purple string beans and purple peppers. And these weren’t produced in some biotech lab in Texas, these were locally farm grown!! I could hardly contain my excitement and knew I immediately had to use these veggies in my next post.

I prepared them in a salad so I could eat them raw and in all their purply glory. The kale looked amazing as well and was eager to make a raw kale salad since I had only been eating the green cooked.  Kale is a “meatier” green when raw, and I love it in salad because I feel it gives it more substance. (P.S. One cup of raw kale offers more than a full day’s recommended value of vitamins A, C and K. It is also a source of calcium, magnesium, iron, potassium, phosphorus, copper and manganese - aka time to get on the kale bandwagon)  I threw in some yellow cherry tomatoes, (for both taste and aesthetic reasons) toasted some sunflower seeds and made my own sunflower lemon dressing in a mason jar, which topped the salad of perfectly. 

How to make…