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, ...
Regional Cuisine Down Home Southern Cooking I grew up in New England, the home of plain cooking, where corn on the cob is served as is with a slab of butter and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. We boil salted meats with vegetables and call it well, a boiled dinner. Our clam chowder is white, our baked beans have bacon and molasses in them, and no one in the world has ever invented a food that was improved by the addition of curry. By the time I was eighteen, I could boil a lobster, steam clams and grill a pork chop to perfection. Then I moved to Virginia, picked up a roommate from North Carolina and discovered a whole new world of down home country cooking goodness. To an All-American Italian girl from Boston, the menus in restaurants were in a foreign language. Chicken-fried steak, grits, corn pone pudding, strawberry rhubarb pie sweet potato pie?? In my mind, chicken and steak were two different meats, grits is whats on sandpaper, corn is a vegetable and what in the world is swee...