Beef eaters unite! The Flat Iron is for you!

I like steak. No, I love steak. The problem is that my wallet is highly allergic to the cost of steak. A good ribeye can easily cost upwards of $8 to $9 per pound. Go for a New York Strip, T-Bone, or Porterhouse, and you just about have to take out a mortgage. At prices like that, the closest our family usually comes to steak  is tube steak. For those of you not versed in the various cuts of steak, "tube steak" is a more refined name for hotdog.

One day, we received a giftcard for Longhorn's Steakhouse. I forget the occasion, but that really doesn't matter for this story. On the particular day we decided to use this giftcard, Sissy was otherwise occupied, so it was just Neva, Joseph, and me. We had $50 dollars on this card and Joseph was determined we are going to have steak. I made it clear to everyone that we could each spend $13 dollars, leaving just enough on the card for tips. Needless to say, we didn't walk into the restaurant with very high hopes. We walked in, and, before being seated, asked for a menu. It was starting to look like chicken that night when I spotted one steak within our price range. We were staying.

The steak we decided to try was a flat iron steak. I had never heard of it before. It came out in an 8oz portion, about one inch thick. It is supposedly called a flat iron steak because it resembles the old fashioned flat irons of old. Much to my surprise and delight, it came out absolutely delicious. It was tender, like a filet, but still had the taste of a ribeye. This steak was definitely a winner.

Unfortunately, I could not find the flat iron in any stores. It turns out that this cut of meat is more popular, therefore, easier to find, out west. Just as I was about to give up hope, I was looking through the meat department at my local Kroger, and saw this long strip of vacuum sealed beef. Upon closer inspection, it was labeled as a flat iron steak. Even more importantly, it was about $9.50 for a two pound strip. That was just $4.75/lb. I convinced Neva that it was a necessary item for the grocery cart, and started salivating over the thoughts of grilling it. A few days later, that steak was sectioned into four 8oz pieces, and slapped on the grill. Below are the results.

Isn't that one tasty looking slab of beef!?! Trust me when I tell you that it tasted just as good as it looks. Now, don't go jumping down my throat, complaining about me putting way too much sour cream on my potato. My family does try to occasionally eat right. We stopped eating sour cream quite a while ago. What you see on that potato is plain Greek yogurt. It's taste is very close to that of sour cream, but without all of the fat. The steak is genuine though ... fat and all.

Update: A good friend of mine (we'll call her Melinda...because that's her name) told her that her butcher recommended the chuck eye steak as an inexpensive alternative to those pricier cuts of beef. I decided to check it out. It turns out that the chuck eye steak is cut from the part of the beef chuck that enters the rib cage and connects to the part of the cow where ribeyes come from. In fact, they are often called the "Poor Man's Ribeye" because they resemble ribeyes in taste and tenderness, without the cost. The main thing that distinguishes chuckeyes from ribeyes is that the chuckeye steak definitely has more connective tissue running through it. At $5.99/lb, I was certainly willing to try. I found a pack of six. I marinated them for half an hour in a mixture of butter and a thirty minute steak marinade.

After grilling these things, I can see why the butcher is so reluctant to let his customers know about them. He can only get 3-5 chuckeye steaks per cow, and he wants to keep them all to himself.

There, you have it. Two excellent alternatives to the more expensive cuts of meat; flatiron and chuckeye steaks. Enjoy your steaks, and stay fiscally sound.

So, What goes well with pork loin...that I actually have?

Apples!

Let me start off by apologizing for the lame title for this post. I was so proud of the meal I cooked Saturday, that I knew I wanted to blog about it. Unfortunately, in the ensuing days, I was not able to come up with a title for this blogpost that I really fancied. So! Since you got this far, you obviously got past the title. Thanks for not holding it against me, and refusing to read my ramblings.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I got up Saturday morning. (I know. that in itself is pretty amazing.) I was facing another four hour shift of grilling hot dogs, hamburgers, and smoked sausages for the Boy Scouts. (I think I now qualify as an expert on those items.) I also knew that there was only a minutely slim possibility that someone else in my family was going to start supper that evening. Therefore, I had to do one of those scary things, and plan ahead. I looked in the freezer, to see what could be put in the slow cooker. Behold! I still had a 2.5lb pork loin just waiting to be cooked. I nuked it in the microwave (on defrost). After all, any good chef would take all possible opportunities to add gamma rays, nuclear radiation, and all that other stuff to their food. That's what gives our dishes that special "glow". Remember that smoked salt I wrote about in another blog. Well, I sprinkled that and some black pepper on the loin and seared it in a skillet until all sides were nicely crisped.

Woohoo! Now I had a partially cooked lump of meat. That's really going to bowl the family over. What to do? What to do? Then my little eye spied a bag with some apples in it. It just so happened that this bag had one of those proverbial rotten apples getting ready to spoil the whole bushel (well...the other five). I took out Mr. Rotten and gave him the heave ho. Then I used the apple corer/slicer on the others. I did not peel the apple. People in my family quickly learn to enjoy fruit and vegetable skins. I hate peeling, unless the skin is just inedible. I then found some baby carrots, and craisins. Craisins are the neatest things. They're just like raisins, but made out of cranberries. The neat thing is they don't go bad...ever....never! That's right, folks, we actually have a food product that could potentially outlast the cockroach population of the world...without the use of preservatives. I mixed all that together with some granulated sugar, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and just a little ground sage. I then put all that stuff on top of the pork loin. Heck! Even raw, this dish was starting to look good.

Fast forward about eight hours. Now we have a slow cooker full of pure heaven.

Oooo, Doggie! supper was gonna be good tonight. There was a problem though. With all that sugar, I still didn't have enough starch! (Calm down! I'm just kidding!) I had some potatoes that were starting to sprout some little vinelets (baby vines, for those of you who don't like me making words up). I decided we needed to have some Potatoes Anna to go with our pork roast.

Potatoes Anna is a fancy sounding name for a classic French peasant dish. It is quite literally just sliced potatoes, salt, pepper, and butter. Don't let that whole peasant dish thing disappoint you. That just means it is the food of the people. Go back to the Middle Ages and you basically had only two classes, aristocracy and peasants. Trust me, you and I would have been in the peasant class, and quite proud of it. They had better food. The peasants were the workers, and those cooking, knew they had to make the food hearty and tasty to provide the nutrition to keep the workers healthy. The other good thing about peasant food was that it was much less likely to contain hemlock or arsenic. Those aristocrats had a nasty habit of trying to kill each other off.

Anyway, Potatoes Anna is just good plain peasant food...and one of the tastiest ways to cook potatoes. It really is quite simple to fix. You basically slice six to eight potatoes as thinly as you can. Once again, they are supposed to be peeled. Once again, I didn't peel them. I find the best cooking dish for these is a good cast iron skillet. Melt a stick of butter. Brush the inside of the skillet with some of the butter, then cover the bottom with a layer of potato slices. Brush that layer with butter, then sprinkle with salt (Use kosher, if you have it. It provides little bursts of flavor you can't get with table salt.) and pepper. Lay down another layer of potatoes and repeat with the butter, salt and pepper. Continue to do this with the rest of the potatoes. If you have any butter left over, drizzle it over the top of everything. You will end up with something like the dish pictured below.

Place some foil over the pan, and put it on a med/hi burner. Cook until you hear sizzling. Continue cooking for about five minutes. You will then transfer the dish to a 425 degree oven and bake for 20 - 25 minutes. Pull the foil off and press the potatoes down with a spatula. Bake uncovered for an additional 25 minutes. You should end up with something like this.

Crispy on the outside. Soft and buttery on the inside. You are supposed to then place a plate over the top and flip, so you can see the nice golden brown bottom. I had just spent four hours flipping burgers, and another two hours cooking supper. (I know! So much for saving time by planning ahead. I also baked a loaf of bread) I was not about to expend my last bit of energy, trying to flip a frickin' twelve inch cast iron skillet. The family would just have to imagine how golden brown it was on the bottom.

Needless to say. We ate very well that night. There wasn't a shred of pork left, and every belly was full. It was worth the effort, but the next day, I let the funny lady at China Royal cook for me.

That's Christina. I am NOT wearing a frilly pink sweater!