Eating healthy (my definition of healthy) is really easy to do, no matter what kind of special day it might be.  The wife celebrated a birthday with me last night after work and the special event was dinner, prepared at home, fully in compliance with our ‘eat no added sugar’ mentality.  Years ago on the cooking show “Good Eats”, Alton Brown introduced us to the wonderfully decadent dish Steak Au Poivre.

Steak Au Poivre literally means steak with pepper–lots of pepper. The cut of steak is the filet. Amazingly, all of the pepper that you encrust your filet mignon with does not make this a spicy dish. You salt the meat, dredge it in cracked black peppercorns, fry it in butter, deglaze the pan with cognac, then make a heavy cream reduction sauce.  To finish you rewarm the steaks in the cream sauce.  Right after tasting this dish for the first time, some French chef dreamed up the word ‘decadent’.

Since at our dinner table we can’t just eat meat, I also made a cooked puree’d salad, with a beef broth dressing.  Actually it is listed in the soups section of the food website at WWW.cooking.com, but the recipe for leek, asparagus and herb soup was every bit of a salad that you could eat without teeth.  It should probably have “Cream Of” in the name, because there is two cups of whole milk in my version, and this soup actually held its own against the desert-like main entree in our dinner.

You start the soup ahead of the steak if you want to eat your steak hot, it takes a while to make, but doesn’t take any kind of special skill or tools in the kitchen.  It did come in handy that we have a vita-mix now to do the pureeing, but it could have been done in two batches in a regular strength blender. After dinner i bottled a full quart of leftover soup.  I don’t know why I didn’t bring any of that to work today for lunch….hmmm.

There was just no sense in having a desert last night.  The richness of those two dishes made for a very full belly, although it was the kind of dinner that you really wish didn’t fill you up at all.  I can say that it put the birthday girl to sleep very soon after dinner, and that is high praise for food that does not include lots of sugar or starches. An after dinner coma usually comes from whatever that turkey-chemical is or the blood sugar crash, but without either of those things when it happens it is from pure satiation.  Decadent!