I like to buy a whole Angus fillet and cook it first before cutting it into fillet steaks, this way you can keep the juices and really preserve a lot of the flavour. It also presents a perfect opportunity to do what any male wine millennial, or any male for that matter – likes most… marinade. Like making hot-sauce, there is perhaps no time more satisfying to a man than when given the chances to marinade something. There’s a certain feeling of alchemy in preparing the meat that really doesn’t come with other pre-preparation chores like peeling potatoes or rolling pastry flat.

The ingredients for getting a steak ready are quite simple: rock salt, English mustard, lemons, pepper, red wine, olive oil, chopped garlic and mixed spices. Adding lemon juice helps seal the steak and within minutes the pinkish colour will disappear and the fillet will start to gain a more cooked sort of colour. At this point I roll the fillet in a bed of rock-salt before smothering it in a healthy dose of English mustard mixed with spice and crushed garlic. Once done, leave it to soak in a pool of red wine on top of a bed of diced onions allowing the blood and fermented juice to comingle.

At this point it’s time to pour yourself a glass of wine and get down to preparing a simple salad (feta, tomato, cucumber, rocket, red lettuce and sesame seeds with a balsamic glaze always goes down well) together with some baked vegetables (onions, courgettes, egg-plant and butternut are perfect.)

After about 3 hours of marinating or so – once the guests arrive; you can chat and get the barbecue going for about half an hour. The veg will take about an hour to cook and the meat will take 15 minutes (if you like it burnt and bloody); 20 minutes if you want it medium rare… so stick the veg in in a pocket of tin-foil – and half an hour later gather people around as it’s always a bit of excitement to watch the meat go on.

Generally if the steak is sealed – leaving it on one side should do fine; and at a medium temperature it should cook through. At this stage you can heat the marinade up, add a lamb stock cube and a cup of water along with some diced mushrooms and pepper and you have a great red wine and mushroom gravy.

The perfect wine for steak on a summer’s day is a Shiraz Viognier – especially if you’ve used mustard, and garlic as they really complement and bring out the spice flavour. Some people would argue cab – but I think that that would more be for an evening event if there’s a chill in the air.

For our Angus Fillet I chose the Graham Beck Joshua 2003 – which turned out to be a perfect accompaniment. It may not have been March 14th, but any chance for steak and red wine is something to smile about.

Cheerz!

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STEP 1 – Install Xampp – ApacheFriends has made it really easy by giving us a simple windows installer to download. If your interested in developing with Perl, Tomcat, you can download their Add-Ons by clicking the links. Once you download, just give it a click and follow the on-screen instructions. I recommend you install Xampp at the default c:\xampp (if you do not, remember to replace the code below with your installation directory). Here’s a video to show you how simple it is…don’t be fooled, it takes a little longer than the video shows.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

STEP 2 – Install Ruby – Thanks to RubyForge, you can download an easy one-click Ruby installer to use here. Once you download, click to open, and follow the instructions. I recommend you install Ruby at c:\xampp\ruby so it falls in line with your other programming languages, etc…

STEP 3 – Install Rails – Fortunately, the Windows version of Ruby comes with RubyGems already set up. Open your Command Prompt (start-> run-> cmd -OR- start-> programs-> accessories -> command prompt) and type the following commands.

Do the gem update from the bin directory in rails. For my installation:

cd c:\ruby\bin
gem update
You may be prompted several times to choose which gem. Pick the highest version for (mswin32)
gem install rails --include-dependencies

There may be some delays, and the install could take a while. If you encounter an error trying to use the gem command, just restart the Command Prompt.

STEP 4 – Create a Rails App – While your still in Command Prompt, type the following Command (without the brackets, and change “your-app-name” to whatever you wish to call your application)

rails C:/xampp/htdocs/<your-app-name>

STEP 5 – Configure Apache – With your Xampp installation, http://localhost (localhost:80) defaults to the Xampp browser control panel, which displays your status, tests, etc.. We want to be able to use Ruby, without disrupting this service, or interfering with our standard Xampp settings. Open your Xampp directory (in our case C:\Xampp) and browse to Apache\conf\httpd.conf and open the httpd.conf file in a text editor or other text editor of your choice.

Scroll all the way to the bottom, and add the following:

Listen 3000
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
#################################
# RUBY SETUP
#################################
<virtualHost *:3000>
ServerName rails
DocumentRoot "c:/xampp/htdocs/<your-app-name>/public"
<Directory "c:/xampp/htdocs/<your-app-name>/public/">

Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride all
Allow from all
Order allow,deny
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi

</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
#################################
# RUBY SETUP
#################################

Finally – Check it Out – Point your browser to http://localhost:3000 and you should see the “Welcome Aboard” from ROR.

If your also looking for some editors. A nice simple free PHP editor with great extensions is “PSPad“. For hardcore coding, I recommend Zend(free for 30 days). For a nice simple free Rails Editor, “RoRED“, something a little more intense I would say go with the free “NetBeans” (don’t forget the .jdk).

Update 04/15/09

I now dual boot to Linux to play with ROR vs. fighting to install ruby on rails on a windows machine. I found it to be an endless battle of debugging.

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