Valentine Skillet

 

Photo of "downtown" Valentine, Arizona because this
dish was more delicious than beautiful.

We do not go to Mexican restaurants on Cinco de Mayo and we do not go to any kind of restaurants on Valentine's Day. Neither is worth the trouble, especially as our home-cooking options have increased and improved over the years. We both remember our sad efforts to find a nice meal out one Valentine's evening in Tucson.

On this, the 110th anniversary of Arizona statehood (about which we wrote extensively for Celebrating the States in 2010), I prepared a dish with Arizona roots -- something from the Valentine State. As is often the case on this blog, I credit Pam for doing the hard part -- finding a great meal idea -- while I merely cook it.

The dish she suggested was Skillet Beef Tamales, which had been contributed to the Taste of Home recipe site by a reader from Arizona. I started to think about how I might spend part of Monday morning doing some prep work, because I do enjoy making tamales for special occasions (and nacatamales for really special occasions). As much as I was starting to look forward to this, I was just as happy to find that this dish is more skillet than tamale -- by which I mean it is a single-pan dish perfect for a weeknight celebration.

And that single dish was the heaviest of indispensable cast-iron skillets -- perfect for browing the local, grass-fed beef (using olive oil instead of the called-for cooking spray and adding a generous dash of black pepper). I then covered it to finish essentially steaming the combined ingredients. The result: instant comfort food. We will make it again, probably with more spices, but we both agreed it was quite tasty as-is. We enjoyed it just as much for lunch the following day.

And some geography ... 

Regular readers (and I think we do have some) will not be surprised to know that looking for a good image to put at the top of this article sent me on a bit of a digression through "Arizona Valentine" rabbit holes. As my beloved and I had learned long ago, Arizona is called the Valentine State because of its February 14, 1912 statehood. What I did not realize -- or had forgotten -- is that Valentine is a town, or perhaps more accurately was a town. The town is named for a Robert G. Valentine, who had served as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. The town that bears his name is on the site of a school that taught Indian and white children in separate (and probably not equal) buildings for which the Hualapai children had been made the bricks. 

I learned this from the Valentine page on TheRoute-66.com, which means we will have an opportunity to visit it when we take the Great Hayes-Boh Route 66 Mother Road Trip in a few years.