The plan, as these things go, was to try and approximate the amazing lemongrass-infused, seared beef kabobs I had the last time I was at Rice Paper. I wasn't sure what cut of meat they used, but I suspected they might be short, mainly from the shape.

Plus, I had three of the boneless beef short ribs left. Plus, I'd heard you could grill them quickly rather than braising them for hours, and I wanted to try that.

So I chopped up some lemongrass and garlic, popped it in a zip-top vacuum bag along with soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, and sriracha, and sucked all the air out. I did this because I only had an hour and a half to marinate, and I wanted to move the process along as fast as possible.

For sides, I decided to do Szechuanesque green beans (green beans stir-fried with soy, garlic, and hot sauce) and my Basic Baby Bok Choy, which I've mentioned a couple of times - just whole baby bok choy stalks, leaves attached, stir-fried quickly with soy, vinegar, garlic, and ginger. And some short grain brown rice that I ended up overcooking because I put too much water in the rice cooker.

But back to the beef, because that's where the fun was. I pulled them out of the marinade and brushed as much of the garlic and lemongrass bits off of them as I could, then got my cast-iron skillet nice and hot and brushed it with some canola oil. I seared all four sides of the short ribs for 2-3 minutes per side, until they had a really nice, crisp, dark char. 

This, as is often the case with anything I do on the grill pan, smoked up the apartment a bit. So I opened the windows, opened the door, and for the first time in the entire near-decade I've lived in this building, enough smoke got into the hall, and stayed in the hall, to set off the building fire alarm. Which does not get turned off until someone from the fire department stops by, checks things out, and shuts it off. Which was longer than usual, presumably because they had some actual important things to tend to.

So anyway, the short ribs rested for a very long time while all that got sorted out, but finally it was time to slice, serve, and taste. They didn't taste a damn thing like the beef from Rice Paper. But they were really good, with a lot of tasty, salty char on the outside and that extra beefiness short ribs have on the inside. I'm going to have to experiment with ratios and marinade times to see if I can get that strong lemongrass hit I got at Rice Paper, though. That was amazing.