Butter is exactly what steak needs

Dinner Saturday: grilled steak with chorizo butter with heirloom tomato, arugula and bread salad.

The chorizo butter is a tasty mixture of butter, dry-cured imported Spanish chorizo, roasted red peppers, parsley, garlic and smoked sweet paprika, combined in the food processor then formed into a log and chilled. We cut it into disks and used them to top the steaks we grilled. Butter on steak - now that's decadent! Tasty, and all pretty and orange-red and speckled. I still have half a log in the fridge to do something else with - I think it would be great on fish or chicken as well - maybe even more so, as they have greater need of a flavor boost than a good dry-aged steak does.

For the salad, I bought five different kinds of heirloom tomatoes at the market - red ones and yellow ones and "black" ones. They got chopped up with some scallions, and mixed with a dressing of dry vermouth, ground coriander, lemon zest, salt and olive oil. I brushed thick slices of day old Zingerman's rustic Italian bread with olive oil and grilled them, then rubbed them with a cut garlic clove and tore them into chunks. The bread and tomato mixture got tossed together with some arugula, torn basil leaves and toasted pine nuts, and c'est fini! I love bread salads - the bread soaks up all the yummy juices from the other ingredients, and it's lovely.

Looking on the wine rack for something to serve, I came across a bottle of 2000 Bordeaux (2000 Chateau Roland La Garde Prestige Premieres Cotes de Blaye FR) that I picked up in a mixed case some time ago. Nothing says Bordeaux like a hunk of dead cow, so that's what I served. Quite the enjoyable wine, and I must admit to a slight overindulgence and some tipsiness. I had been thinking to serve something Italian, concerned that with a salad as the side dish, I'd need a somewhat acid wine to match. But the salad is actually quite nice that way from a pairing perspective - since the dressing is made with vermouth rather than vinegar, the acidity in the salad comes only from the tomatoes themselves, making it quite wine friendly.

Dessert was a couple of storebought gelatos our dinner guests brought - a hazelnut chocolate and a dulce de leche. Both were very tasty.