Valentine's Dinner a la Momofuku

Valentine's Dinner! As you know by now, since moving into my new apartment I've been making a great effort to utilize my kitchen & stop being a culinary invalid. Valentine's Day plans were no exception to the new rule. One of the besteststststst dinners I've ever had with Dennis was at Momofuku Ko, and I kiiiiinda wanted to do dinner there again. But dammit, it is all the way in New York. :( So we resolved to bring the Momofuku to my kitchen by trying out recipes from the official cookbook.
Most of the recipes looked extremely advanced, so we opted for the rib eye since it seemed the most feasible for our rudimentary skill set.
So all you do really is chop up some garlic and green onions.
You pat down the raw rib eye with kosher salt & freshly ground pepper. Then you sear each side on a cast iron skillet, bake it for a few minutes, and finally baste it with butter, garlic, green onions, thyme.
And then voila! A gorgeously seared, juicy piece of steak! AAAHHH!!! SO AMAZING! The recipe also called for maldon salt which I found at the Silverlake cheese store for $11, and then proceeded to forget all about. Oh well! The steak was still delicious & now I have really expensive salt in my pantry.
We paired the steak with this Mentaiko Kimchi Udon recipe from this blog, Momofukufor2. Mentaiko is pollock roe and when combined with kimchi makes a tangy flavor. We used these skinny udon noodles, but it still turned out great. Except that D found out that he's not much of a fan of mentaiko. I guess more for me, then. :)
Yayyyyyyy, dinner complete bon apetit.
If you're a fan of the Momofuku restaurants, I highly recommend picking up the cookbook. It's David Chang's story as well as detailed first-person instructions of how to make all of his signature dishes at all of his restaurants, including the pork buns, ramen, and shaved foie gras! Momofukufor2 is the blog of a woman in Canada who is cooking her way through the Momofuku cookbook, Julie & Julia style. Very inspiring!