Steak Recipe - How To Make Steak Tender You invest a lot of time and money into the steaks for a special occasion and when dinner time comes, they are tough. What happened? How can you cook steaks as tender as your favorite restaurant? The first step to cooking a good steak is to choose the right grade of steak. The top quality beef is graded USDA Prime and commands top prices. USDA Prime grade meats are sold to the restaurant industry and specialty markets and are not as likely to be found at your local grocery chain. The next grade of beef is USDA Choice. USDA Choice is tender, flavorful and only slightly lower in quality than USDA Prime. The meat is well marbled with fat and will be tender and juicy when properly prepared. USDA Choice makes up about 70% of all graded beef and is readily available in your supermarket. USDA Good graded beef is an acceptable grade of beef that has only minimal marbling of fat. It is leaner, but may not be as tender as USDA Prime or Choice. Next, ...
Icing or Frosting Home cooks most generally use the term frosting and icing interchangeably. This can cause confusion. In order to reduce that confusion I like to make a distinction between the two on my website. Frosting Frosting is a fluffy, thick concoction that will hold its shape. You can pipe decorations with it like you see on cakes. Even though it holds a shape it stays soft and keeps its creamy texture. There are as many variations of frosting recipes, as there are cookie recipes. One of the most popular is butter cream. Even within the butter cream category there is no one definitive recipe. It seems that every country that can get its hands on butter has its opinion of what butter cream frosting should be. Some are made with eggs and butter. Some varieties you have to cook sugar to a softball stage. There are others that use shortening or a combination of shortening and butter. Still others don’t use butter or shortening at all but another substance such as peanut butt...