Maplewood chef makes beef tenderloin even more tender

Tracy Morewood’s special recipe, which is served with hot potato salad, was entered in the March Madness recipe challenge

Steak is a favourite meal at Maplewood, and Tracy Morewood, the Brighton long-term care home’s nutritional care manager, has a steak recipe that’s both delicious and easy for residents to eat.

Her tenderloin steak with accompanying hot potato salad tastes so good Tracy entered this meal in OMNI Health Care’s first annual March Madness recipe challenge.

To make this special steak, Tracy begins by mixing soya sauce, olive oil, lemon juice, minced garlic, herbs and spices to make a marinade for the beef.

After marinating for four hours, Tracy sears the meat in a pan for two minutes per side and then places it on a baking tray with sautéed mushrooms. The meat and mushrooms are put into an oven set to 350 F.

The tenderloin is cooked to medium rare and then left to rest for 15 minutes. The steak is then garnished with a dollop of garlic butter and a sprig of rosemary.

While the variety of ingredients in the marinade gives the meat extra flavour, the marinade also makes the already tender cut of beef even easier for residents to eat, Tracy says.

“I chose steak (to enter in the contest) because (the residents) love steak, but chewing most steaks can be a challenge,” she writes in her contest entry form. “But with this marinade, it cuts like butter.”

Accompanying the beef tenderloin is hot potato salad, which Tracy makes by combining still-warm boiled red potatoes, bacon, broccoli florets, red onions, green onions and spices with a sauce made from Dijon mustard, apple cider vinegar and buttermilk dill dressing.

Chris Weber, OMNI’s operations manager of nutrition and food service, says the March Madness contest, which saw 16 recipes compete in a bracket contest where votes were cast each week between April 14 and May 6, was close.

The winning entry was a Mediterranean omelette, created by Josephine Goddard at Country Terrace, which won “by a very thin margin,” Chris says.

OMNI launched the first annual March Madness recipe challenge in March in recognition of Nutrition Month in Canada.

Chris came up with the idea to encourage nutritional care managers and cooks to showcase their most-loved recipes and to highlight the high-quality meals served in OMNI homes.

Throughout March, nutritional care managers and cooks prepared their favourite meals, plated them and took photos that were sent to head office. The photos were accompanied by the name of each meal and its recipe.

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