Sunday: Post-Birthday Cleanup, Brat Bites & Flank Steak

We woke up this morning to the very exciting realization that there were still birthday cinnamon rolls in the house.

So obviously, breakfast was easy.

The kids had leftover cinnamon rolls and more of the bacon I made yesterday, and I made Chris an egg scramble. I like to prep his weekday breakfasts ahead when I can, so if I’m already standing at the stove making one, I’m almost always making tomorrow’s too.

I had some peppers left from one of our birthday weekend veggie platters, so I chopped those up and sautéed them with some cooked pork breakfast sausage I keep stocked in the fridge. Once everything was hot, I added scrambled eggs.

I made a double batch, so he ate one this morning and the other is already in the fridge for tomorrow.

Post-Birthday Morning

We spent most of the morning doing all the things that come after a four-year-old’s birthday.

Daphne wanted every new toy opened, assembled and immediately available for play, while I was trying to get the house cleaned up and back to normal after the weekend.

Nothing particularly productive happened in the kitchen, which was fine because we had plenty of food around.

Brat Bites for Lunch

Yesterday I had put some brats in the refrigerator to defrost, and they were ready to go by lunchtime. Brats seem to defrost really quickly in the fridge, which I assume has something to do with their higher fat content.

I sliced them into bite-sized pieces and cooked them up as brat bites for the kids in the oven at 400ºF for about 10 minutes. I made a box of Annie’s mac and cheese to go alongside them, and that was basically lunch with some vegetables and fruit.

Very little cooking, everybody ate something they liked, and more leftovers disappeared from the refrigerator. Chris and I ate the leftover beef stew from my parents’ house last night.

Costco Restock

Chris did the Costco run for me today.

For proteins, he came home with flank steak, two packages of ground beef and chicken breast.

Yes, that is a lot of ground beef.

There’s a reason.

I’m dealing with all of that tomorrow, along with the chicken, so I’ll show you what I’m doing with it then. But today I only cared about the flank steak because, since my parents hosted the birthday dinner last night, we decided to have our usual Sunday dinner at home.

And I actually showed the entire flank steak process in Stories today because this is one of those proteins my whole family loves.

My Flank Steak

For the marinade, I used:

• Olive oil
• Salt
• Pepper
• Garlic powder
• Smoked paprika
• Cumin
• Italian seasoning
• Chopped red onion

One thing I do differently with flank steak is marinate it in a large glass Pyrex instead of a gallon bag.

Normally I love a gallon bag for marinating meat, but flank steak has so much surface area. Laying those big pieces completely flat makes it much easier to rub the marinade over every inch of the meat instead of having it folded up inside a bag.

I covered it and let that sit while I dealt with my grill.

Cleaning the Grill

And my grill definitely needed dealing with.

When I grilled those frozen burger patties on Friday, I had quite a few flare-ups because they were greasier than the burgers I usually make. Before putting flank steak on there, I wanted to start fresh.

My grill-cleaning method is not particularly glamorous, but it works.

I put on disposable kitchen gloves and use a small metal spatula to work from the top down. I scrape the grates first, then the bars covering the burners, and continue working my way down until everything has fallen into the large drip pan at the bottom. Then I scrape all of that into a trash bag.

I finish by washing down the outside of the grill with soapy water.

Once everything was cleaned out, I heated the grill and steam-cleaned the grates one last time.

Fresh grill. Ready for steak.

Grilling Flank Steak

I like to keep my grill around 400°F for flank steak.

Once the meat went on, I flipped it about every three minutes and started checking the internal temperature as it got closer to done.

I’m targeting about 130°F when I pull it from the grill, and then I let it rest for at least 10–15 minutes before slicing.

And slicing matters with flank steak: thin, on a diagonal and against the grain.

It turned out so good tonight. There’s a reason I make this one over and over again. Every kid in my family will eat flank steak, which automatically makes it a winner.

Courtesy of Grandma

While the steak was grilling, I basically turned a collection of leftovers from my mom into all of our sides.

She had sent me home with leftover vegetables from a veggie platter, so I chopped up the peppers, added red onion and some cauliflower that was still in the bag, and then cut leftover corn off the cob from the birthday weekend.

I tossed everything with olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic powder and Italian seasoning and roasted it.

She had also made too many potatoes for the beef stew, so those went onto another sheet pan with olive oil, salt, pepper and garlic powder and into the oven.

And she had sent me home with cilantro-lime rice she’d made earlier in the week, so I reheated that too.

Basically, I grilled the steak and my mom provided the rest of dinner without actually being here.

We put everything out with avocado salsa and everyone built their plates.

Looking Ahead

We have enough flank steak left for Chris’s lunch tomorrow, plus another decent portion that I’m saving.

I’m already thinking flank steak nachos for a heavy snack one afternoon this week.

And tomorrow I’ve got those two packages of Costco ground beef plus all the chicken breast waiting for me in the refrigerator.

There’s a reason I bought that much.

More on that tomorrow.