Hello and welcome to our Love-Tacular episode on “Making it with Darren.” I’m you host Darren Barr. Today, we’re getting closed to the ones we love. Valentine’s Day is around the corner. I want to show you some special, how to impress the one you love, your better half, whatever you want to call them. And we’re going to do something really cool. We’ve got a strawberry steak salad in the works today and then we’re also going to a cookie too which is like a cookie pizza or a cookie pie if you will which is really fun, really easy, “great way to get with cream” on the house.

So we’ve start it off. We’ve got a really nice skirt steak that we went and got earlier.
On the label, it can be called flat meat, or skirt steak or carne asada if you’re in a Mexican meat market. And what we did is we just threw it in a big bag with some Italian dressing and let that marinate for about an hour. We used Bernstein’s Italian dressing, any kind of Italian dressing will do. It’s a great stuff. So this have been marinating, we’re going to throw this meat on the grill real quick.

We’ve got our steak. That’s nice medium rare that we cut up to nice little bite size pieces. The worst thing is we’re trying to eat steak and we’re chewing off fat chunks in your salad so nice bite size pieces. And this is going to be the basis for our salad. So we’ve got some really nice spring mix. We looked at the Field Greens. Field Greens are really great for some reference salad but they call these little spiky things on them and it just doesn’t look as appetizing. So we’ve got a five little spring mix.

Now we’re going to start off with some nice fresh sliced strawberries, some really nice pieces that we just cut up here. Now, we’ve got some chopped tomatoes. We had some really nice vine ripen tomatoes. They looked like this. You could use Roman tomatoes, steak tomatoes, anything that makes you happy. We’re going to dump those in, and we actually have two tomatoes worth there.

And then we used three quarters of an English “hothouse” cucumber we use for cucumber salad. You can eat the skin on these. They’re really crunchy. It adds great texture to the salad. Let me just dump these in on top. And before we’re going on, we’re going to toss this portion of the salad really good. So that gets going.

And then, we’ve got our avocado and Mascarpone cheese which is going on next. So our avocado, we just like to slice and do a little around here. Twist it, pop off the top there. And we’re just going to slice out some nice little slices if this comes out here. And now onto our Mascarpone cheese, Mascarpone cheese is basically like a mix. It kind of tastes like a really soft sweet butter/like kind of a cream cheese style. It’s really rich. It goes great with steak. We’re going to take a little spoonful here, you just kind of drop that off there, drop it off. I don’t know if you guys can see this, great if you’re getting them, a shot of that. So, probably about four tablespoons worth of Mascarpone cheese in there.

And then we’re going to top the whole thing with some Blush Wine vinaigrettes. We’re just going to pour into our salad. And then we’re going to top the whole thing with our steak just like that. And then that’s it. And when you’re ready to serve, you guys can serve it out and the steak is all on top. That’s it. That’s my strawberry steak salad.

In a minute, you guys will catch up with us and we’ll move on to our cookizza, pizza cookie. I can’t wait.

Let this actually sit out for a little while so it’s really soft. We’ve got the oven pre-heated to 350 degrees. What we’re going to do is we’re basically just going to open this tray. We’ve got a nice little pie dish. Again, we’re going to just dump that out inside there. And then, with our hands we’re just going to kind of push it down, so it kind of fits in there, just like that. Now, you’re work it a little bit and what’s going to happen is we’ll bake this at 350. Throw this in the oven.

About 17 minutes, it looks amazing. So this is going to settle for a minute. Usually, you’re going to let this sit for about five minutes. You know it’s all puffy right now and raise is going to sink back down, but we still want it to be really hot.

So we’ve get some ice cream and my favorite, some ready whip, put them right on the top there, and a little there. I really like this stuff. Oh man, and that’s it. That is our cookizza and our strawberry steak salad and you guys have a good night.