Excellent new kit...

Pictured like this, it looks as though it belongs in a hairdressing salon rather than in a kitchen...but appearances can be deceptive. This is the piece of kit par excellence for tenderizing steak, and I can tell you that it works wonderfully. Technical Dept first came across reference to something like this some years ago, when he was chatting with a rather garrulous australian assistant in Jack O'Shea's (the butcher, all-too-briefly based in Montpelier Street), who blithely passed on the information that they had a commercial-sized one of these down in the basement, and all of their meat, pretty much, was subjected to it before being sold. It works a little like those pin-things that were so popular about thirty years ago, where you could leave an impression of your hand, or face (or whichever parts of your anatomy you felt like representing) by pushing against the pins, and leaving a 3-D reverse image of yourself in the bed of pins. In this instance, however, you push the pins down, and use them very efficiently to puncture the fibres inside the meat you are tenderising - it takes three or four pushes to tenderise one steak (and I tend then to turn it over and do it again from the other side, just to be sure)...and, that's it. Thereafter, a half-inch thick steak takes a minute on each side on a hot grill, and will be tender and succulent, and mouth wateringly good.

I don't know for how long domestic versions of this have been available, but TD was on the case, and I found one of them for me under the tree, last Christmas. It has the clear advantage of my being able to buy sirloin steaks of less than optimal quality, and by tenderising them with this thing, as a result of which they're pretty much as good as the best. These days, I tend to buy a complete entrecote at Metro - generally South American in origin - and then cut it into steaks for freezing...which means that a tenderised-to-be-perfect sirloin steak comes out at around one euro twenty a head. Which has much to be said for it.

Tonight's dinner:

Fettucine with lemon sauce

Rabbit, boned & rolled, stuffed with prosciutto and celery; mirepoix of vegetables.

Vanilla ice cream, 'rippled' with griottes.