Steak with Mustard Pepper Cream Sauce

One of our favorite special-occasion meals is steak with this yummy mustard cream sauce.  Whenever I mention that I'm making it I get requests for the recipe and I finally got around to taking pictures of the process during J's birthday.

I wish I could just post The Pioneer Woman's original recipe that I found a couple years ago... but for some reason she took it off her blog.  Maybe it's in one of her cookbooks now, or maybe she locked it away in her secret family vault or something.  Luckily for all of us, I had saved the recipe elsewhere.  And also, since I've made multiple edits to it, I feel like I can now post it as my own.  But just know that PW is the one who taught me this awesomeness.  She's pretty much my favorite blogger, by the way.

Steak with Mustard Pepper Cream Sauce
originally by Ree Drummond, tweaked by Jessica Aiduk

Some delicious cuts of steak
Some delicious butter
1/4 cup dijon mustard
1/4 cup whiskey
1/2 pint heavy cream
1 tablespoon crushed peppercorns

Preheat your oven to 400*.  Generously season your steaks with salt and pepper on both sides while you heat up an oven-proof pan with butter till it's sizzling hot (medium high heat.)  Sear the steaks on both sides until you get a nice brown crust... I like the many-flips-method (as opposed to 3-5 minutes per side) because I think it helps me get the steaks more evenly browned.

Then transfer your steaks (in skillet) to the oven for about 5 minutes if you like medium rare and your steaks are thick. It all depends on your steak and your preferences for done-ness.

Take the steaks out and transfer them to a plate, tent with foil.  Put the skillet back on the stove over medium low heat and whisk the dijon mustard and whiskey together... scraping up all the flavorful butter-and-browned-bits from the steak.  Add your heavy cream and crushed peppercorns and whisk for a few minutes until well combined and bubbly.

[ side note: when doing some research for a friend about cast iron skillets (hi Bethanne!) I discovered that many cooks think it's perfectly fine to occasionally wash a skillet with hot water and soap... and an occasion where you're making a cream sauce in it is probably a good example.  Especially since I'm likely to make blueberry pancakes the next morning.  And blueberry-mustard-cream-pancakes are not so yummy.  So yes, soap and water and then a quick coat of olive oil and you're good to go.] 

Top the steaks with the sauce and serve with his favorite creamy carrots and fresh homemade bread.

And that's how we do "Happy Birthday Jesse" around here!  It's also how we usually do "Merry Christmas Eve" and pretty much any other occasion where I'm planning steak but it's too cold for the grill.  Enjoy!