Gale’s Root beer, round steak, parsnips and orange
Jamie Andrade: I was very excited about the root beer. My brother and I went through a phase last year where we cooked with it a lot (P.S. it’s amazing when you simmer polish sausage and sauerkraut with a bottle of root beer).
I like to think I have a pretty good sense of flavor and thankfully, I know how to prepare most of the ingredients individually so I had a ton of ideas what could work together. I know round steak is a tougher cut of meat so it either has to be slow cooked or thinly sliced, immediately I knew I wanted to stuff it. Honestly, I went into it with a few ideas based on what I had tried before. For example, I make this amazing rosemary orange chicken, so I marinated the steak similar to that. Then I stood for a minute and looked at the rest of the ingredients, then just jumped in and started chopping! After a few attempts, and with the help of some wonderful tasters — my husband, brothers and mother — I was able to perfect the recipe. It’s surprising how something can come together so harmoniously when the four ingredients seem at first like nothing you would ever think to combine.
TerrieAnn Jones: My first reaction was that the only time I cook with round steak is in the crock pot, but I wasn’t going to win a contest by using a crock pot. And ... there are only two vegetables I do not like: beets and parsnips! So, I knew I had my work cut out for me.
The parsnips I knew I wanted to puree and combine with the orange, but I had never cooked with parsnips before so I looked up parsnip purees online. All of the recipes had heavy cream or lots of olive oil in them. Well, that wasn’t going to work for me. So, again I started creating. The puree was a one-try creation.
The meat took a few tries and a few tastes by my husband and a friend, but the end result was a creation that has my 7-year-old daughter asking “when are you going to make that beef for me again” and had my girlfriend practically licking her plate and probably would have had I not busted her trying.