Oh, restaurants.

How great are restaurants?? Not even fancy ones, but just plain ol’ restaurants.

It’s so comforting to know there is a place you can go at the end of a long day of work, where you can sit down and relax and tell someone what you want to eat. Then minutes later, they bring it to you and all you have to do is eat and enjoy. When you’re done, you just pay and get up and leave. No work. No dirty dishes. No risk of burning your food (or yourself) or making a disastrous mistake in your kitchen. Everything is taken care of for you.

God, I miss restaurants.

Nine days into our Whole30, The Husband and I are getting real sick of cooking. Honestly, I think the biggest challenge hasn’t been dealing with missing out on junk food, but rather having to cook every single meal. We’re running out of steam.

Million dollar idea for some Silverlake fitness hipster with time and money to spare: Open up a Whole30 restaurant. I’ll be there three times a week and I’ll hug you after every meal.

There is a restaurant close to our apartment that we both especially miss. It’s an upscale Argentinian place called Malbec. Their chimichurri sauce is the stuff a flank steak’s dreams are made of. I drive past it each morning on my commute to work, so I’ve been especially feeling it the last few days.

The other night, when it was time to play “What’s for dinner?” I was really craving some flavor. We had bought a package of sirloin strips at the market that was 30% off because its sell-by date was approaching. (Note: This is one of my favorite ways to eat healthy on a budget. If you know you’ll use it right away, get the discounted good meat at the market. Saves at least a few bucks each time.)

Flipping through our Whole 30 cookbook, I found a recipe for chimichurri steak kabobs and we had all the veggies needed. While I didn’t have the ingredients or the time to make the actual chimichurri sauce from the recipe, we bought a jar of it from a winery in Temecula a few weeks ago. Gods be good, it was Whole30 compliant.

We marinated the beef in about half the jar’s worth of sauce while we soaked the wooden skewers in water and cut up all the veggies. Assembling the kabobs took the longest time, but it was also really fun. I like playing with food.

In an ideal world, we would have grilled the kabobs out on the barbecue. However, we haven’t filled the propane tank yet for grilling season. I had to do my best using a grill pan over the stove, and it actually worked pretty well.

I personally like my beef on the rare side, so I just cooked the kabobs on a higher heat to get a nice char on the outside before finishing them on a baking sheet in the oven at about 375°. When they were done, I served them with a drizzle of the remaining chimichurri sauce.

 

This would go really good with some rice or diced potatoes. Or a nice crusty bread to soak up all the sauce and juices.

Mmmmmmmbread.

P.S. A mishap with my potholder (read: a hole at the top of it) led to a minor catastrophe during the making of this dinner (read: burning the shit out of the tip of my right index finger). As a result, I’m now doing all my typing with my right hand shifted over one key. It’s a miracle I was able to get this typed without every word being soekked kuje thos (spelled like this).

Note: This is a re-post from the Tumblr version of this blog. It originally ran on April 7, 2016.