Tag Archives: steak

Where’s The Beef?

Posted on October 3, 2021 by | Leave a comment

Review of Cardenas Markets’ T-bone steaks

Cardenas Markets is a relatively small chain of mid size Mexican supermarkets in California. They have regular groceries, an expanded section of Mexican and Latino groceries, as well as a bakery and deli which offers a small variety of hot meals. I discovered it when it joined Instacart during the first year of the pandemic. I have since ordered from it occasionally, it’s the only market serviced by Instacart that carries empanada shells (albeit the Goya brand).

I don’t usually order beef at Cardenas – though I was very happy with the beef chuck I got from them over the summer -, but their T-bone steaks were on sale ($6/lb), so I decided to give them a try. I was grossly disappointed.

A T-bone steak gets its name from the T-shape form in which the vertebra is cut. It includes a strip steak on one side, and a filet mignon or tenderloin in the other. It’s supposed to let you indulge in the tenderness of the filet and the flavorfulness of the strip, without having to compromise for either. They are supposed to look like the photo below, which I took from the Cardenas page at Instacart. What I got, is what you can see in the photo above. It was basically a bone-in strip steak with little to no tenderloin. I felt ripped off – $6/lb is super cheap for a T-bone (but supermarkets often have loss leaders), but I still expect to get a T-bone when I order a T-bone. If you are going to put a photo of a T-bone and call it a T-bone, make it a T-bone

Cardenas Beef T-Bone Steak
The second problem was that the steak was cut very thin. As Cardenas does not indicate the grade of meat they sell, I’m going to guess they are “select,” the grade with the least marbling and therefore toughest meat. If these are particularly tough, it makes sense that they cut them thin. But be forewarned that that’s what you get.

Now, flavor-wise they weren’t bad. They were pretty generic, tasty steaks. The type I did grow up eating as everyday fair for lunch without giving it much thought. Nowadays I expect a little more from a steak, of course, though for $6/lb perhaps I shouldn’t.

In all, I wouldn’t buy them again.

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Note: the link to Instacart is a referral link, if you subscribed immediately after you click on it, I might get $10 credit and you would as well. You probably can get a better deal elsewhere, though.

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Review: Hello Fresh’ Sirloin in a Mushroom Sauce + Recipe

Posted on September 23, 2019 by | Leave a comment

Rating: 7/10

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Hello Fresh seldom offers steak as part of their regular offerings. Instead, dishes with steak are usually considered “gourmet” and require an additional supplement. These are usually a very poor value, so I never ordered them. I did this time because when I added to my cart, HelloFresh showed that the 65% off discount that I had applied to the supplement as well. Alas, when I checked my account I realized that I was charged the full supplement price, which makes me feel defrauded. Still, it’s a lesson learned and in the future I just won’t order any meals that require paying a supplement.

This meal kit for Sirloin in a Mushroom Sauce with Caramelized Onion Mashed Potatoes and Roasted Carrots was pretty good, if a little too much work. It basically had 5 components that had to be cooked separately: the steak, the mashed potatoes, the carrots, the onions and the mushroom sauce. I think one (the onions) could have been skipped without losing much beyond cooking time.

But all ingredients were very tasty and, in particular, the mushroom sauce was phenomenal, which helped elevate both the meat and the mashed potatoes. I’ve had similar mushroom sauces before, but I liked how simple and quick this one was (recipe below).

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All the ingredients were included and they were mostly fresh (the carrots were a little wobbly) and good quality. The steaks were very, very thick but at least they were around the same thickness.

I paid a little over $20 for this meal kit, including the supplement, or about $10 per person.

Mushroom sauce

I recommend you double the sauce

  • 3 Tbsp butter, divided
  • 4 oz white mushrooms, thinly sliced
  • 1 garlic clove, minced
  • 1 Tbsp. beef demi-glace
  • 1/4 cup water
  • 1 tsp Dijon mustard

Melt 2 Tbsp. butter over medium-high heat in a pan, preferably one you used to cook steak. Add the mushrooms and cook, stirring frequently, until softened – 2 to 4 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for 30 seconds. Add the demi-glace and the water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and stir in the mustard. Simmer until slightly thickened. Stir in the remaining Tbsp. butter.

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Review: Gobble’s Blackened Top Sirlon Steaks with Mashed Potatoes & Baby Carrots

Posted on May 25, 2019 by | Leave a comment

Rating 7/10

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This was a perfectly acceptable, but unexciting dish. Of course, I should know better than order any kit featuring top sirloin, a cut that is neither tender nor tasty. The blackening spice helped, but still, I wasn’t thrilled. A NY strip, tri-tip or ranch steak seasoned with just salt is better.

This kit, as too many of Gobble’s, required that you start cooking the steak and carrots on the stove and then transfer them to the oven. This, to me, is an unnecessary step and a waste of gas. So after slicing the carrots and seasoning the beef, I cooked both on my iron skillet on the stove. Once the beef was done, I removed it and added a couple of tablespoons of water to the carrots, covered it and cooked for a few more minutes, until the carrots were softish.

The mashed potatoes only required mixing with a pre-mix of poblano peppers & corn and then warming up. As my daughter doesn’t like poblano peppers and I don’t like corns and the two were mixed together, I just skipped that. I did add the cheddar cheese afterwards. I found the cheesy potatoes pretty tasty, but my daughter didn’t like them.

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All in all, I wouldn’t order this kit again.

I got this kit for free due to credits and a welcome back promo code. Use this referral link to get a free kit for 2 with your first box.

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Note: if you use my referral link I *may* get some credits in return, if I happen to be subscribed to the meal kit service at the exact moment you use the code – which is unlikely.

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Review: Plated’s Steak au Poivre with Crispy Fingerling Potatoes

Posted on March 30, 2019 by | Leave a comment

Rating 8/10

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Sometimes, often times, it’s in the sauce. Indeed, in this recipe of Steak au Poivre with Crispy Fingerling Potatoes, it was all the sauce.

The steak, sirloin, was fine but unexciting. The potatoes were blah – I mean, good, but just potatoes. But the sauce was very good and therefore, so was everything else.

The dish also included creamed kale. I wasn’t going to eat it, so I didn’t bother making it.

But this kit was another winner.

I paid around $16/$8 for this kit/per serving. Again, I thought it was worth it.

Sauce au Poivre

This sauce is to be served with steaks. I’ve doubled the quantities but it will probably still serve 2.

  • 2 tsp olive oil
  • 1 tsp cracked black peppercorns
  • 1 shallot, chopped
  • 1/2 cup white wine
  • 1/2 cup heavy cream
  • 4 tsp Dijon mustard

Add olive oil to pan where steaks were cooked and heat over medium heat. Add peppercorns and shallot and cook, stirring, for 2-3 minutes, until the shallot starts to soften. Add wine and cook for 1-2 minutes, scrapping up the brown bits from the bottom of the pan. Add the cream and mustard, stir and cook for an additional 30 seconds.

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Review: Plated’s Sherry-Marinated Steak with Potatoes and Creamy Tomato Sauce

Posted on March 30, 2019 by | Leave a comment

Rating 8/10

I was pretty lucky with my Plated kits last week – flavor wise, at least. Indeed, this kit for Sherry-Marinated Steak with Potatoes and Creamy Tomato Sauce was much better than I had expected.

I’m not generally a fan of sirloin, as it’s a pretty tasteless and tougher-than-it-has-a-right-to-be cut, but the tomato sauce was good enough to make up for the meat’s deficiencies. It was one of those sauces that was weird at the beginning, but then really grew on you. And while the potatoes were sort of blah on their own, they were great with the onion mixture.

All in all, I really enjoyed this dish. I liked making it too.

All the ingredients were fresh and stayed fresh until I cook the meal. However, while the potatoes pictured in the recipe were baby potatoes that had to be halved, the ones actually provided in the kit were four regular red potatoes – the oven time obviously worked differently for them.

I paid around $16 for the kit, or $8 a portion, for this kit – using a “come back” promo I got in e-mail. That was definitely a fair price given that I got basically a restaurant quality meal out of it.

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Meal Kit Review: HelloFresh’ Sirloin and Horseradish Cream Sauce with Garlic Bread and Roasted Carrots

Posted on February 28, 2019 by | Leave a comment

Rating 5/10

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This meal kit for Sirloin and Horseradish Cream Sauce with Garlic Bread and Roasted Carrots may be the first HelloFresh kit that really failed to impress me. It was acceptable dinner fare, but very pedestrian. There were no new flavors here, no tricks, no recipes I’d care to copy and repeat. It was ultimately what it looks like: meat with carrots and garlic bread, with some onions and sour cream. I’ve had it all before (indeed, I had pretty much the same dish concept from EveryPlate – HelloFresh’ cheaper meal kit brand). Moreover, it seems to me that HelloFresh is trying to cut corners and send out cheaper ingredients and ask cooks to include more and more staples of their own to the meals.

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The main ingredient of this meal was the sirloin and I was unimpressed with the quality. The meat was tough and wasn’t particularly flavorful. The two steaks sent had very different shapes from each other and, as you can see above, they were partly discolored, which took from their visual appeal (at least before cooking).

The steak was stopped with sliced onions cooked with beef stock which were fine, but unremarkable. I wondered if HelloFresh was cutting corners by not including demi-glace instead of the stock concentrate.

The accompanying horseradish sauce was also disappointing. It was basically sour cream with a few green onions and horseradish powder. I think it might have been better with some prepared horseradish.

The carrots were just carrots – not my thing but my husband happily ate them just like he has every other time a kit has included carrots.

Finally, the garlic bread included the same “semi-baguette” buns that were included in the EveryPlate meal I referenced above. Once again, I really liked the consistency of the buns. I didn’t like that I had to provide my own butter – I understand that from EveryPlate, but I expect more from HelloFresh -, and I specially didn’t like that the kit included garlic powder instead of fresh garlic.

At the end of the day, however, I am likely to blame for choosing this kit. But I’ve noticed that I’m not particularly excited by many of HelloFresh’ kits – I’ll be suspending for several weeks now as I can’t find much in their upcoming menu I actually want to eat.

Update: I have 3 referrals for 1-week free of HelloFresh. E-mail me if you’d like one.

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Meal Kit Review: Plated’s Seared Steak with Blue Cheese Butter and Spinach-Beet Salad

Posted on February 10, 2019 by | Leave a comment

Rating 9/10

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After writing a whole post reviewing this Plated meal kit for Seared Steak with Blue Cheese Butter and Spinach-Beet Salad, I realized that I had started a review the very night I made it. So I’m incorporating what I wrote then here:

I am impossibly backed up with all the meal kit reviews I need to review, but I can’t help but start with the one I made tonight: Plated‘s Seared Steak with Blue Cheese Butter and Spinach-Beet Salad. It was absolutely delicious – and a very quick recipe to make to boot.

I’m amazed at the simplicity of it:  fresh baby spinach tossed with olive oil and salt and topped with beef sirloin slices, toasted pecans, blue cheese butter (a mixture of just blue cheese and butter) and a packet of balsamic glaze.  There were also supposed to be seared sliced beets, but no one in my family likes beets so I skipped them (I’m thinking of using them to make an amuse bouche for my Christmas Eve dinner).

But all the flavors together – including the juice from the beef – were just magical.  They worked to contrast and compliment each other.  I definitely have to make this myself, though that means making my own balsamic glaze, which is easy, but time consuming.  If I find commercial balsamic glaze, I may even make this very simple salad for Xmas Even dinner.

The meal wasn’t perfect, however.  While most of the spinach was nice and crispy, some of the leaves had started to wilt.  Given that I only received my box yesterday, I’m not sure the spinach would have survived if I’d taken longer to make this kit.

Another problem was that the two steaks were terribly different in thickness – one was twice as think as the other, which made cooking them at the same time difficult.  This is not the first time I’ve encountered this problem and I wish meal kit companies would be better at this.  The beef, however, was very good quality and very tasty.

Finally, I don’t think the portion was large enough for an adult.  Perhaps it would have been if I had included the beets, but I’ve found that many of the meal kits that don’t include a carb leave me hungry.

I paid $8 for this kit for 2 people, using a $40-off Black Friday promo.

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Meal Kit Review: Home Chef’s Texas-Style Steak on Toast with smashed red potatoes and red onion gravy + recipes

Posted on December 20, 2018 by | Leave a comment

Ratings: 8/10

Last week, it was my time to sample Home Chef meals, and all in all, they did pretty well.   This kit for Texas-Style Steak on Toast with smashed red potatoes and red onion gravy not only produced a very tasty meal, but it taught me recipes/techniques that I didn’t know and would use in the future.

First of all, who would have guessed that white bread brushed with olive oil and sprinkled with a tiny bit of salt before baking in the oven would be so tasty?  Of course, I’ve made crostini plenty of times, but the white bread seems to incorporate the flavor of the oil and remain soft inside in a way that crostini doesn’t.

The steak itself was better than I would have thought, and I enjoyed the onion sauce very much.  Once again, demi-glace showed its power.

I usually make mashed potatoes with large russet potatoes that I peel before boiling.  I really enjoyed the convenience of making it out of small red potatoes that I only needed to half before cooking.  It was a much faster approach (plus I hate peeling!) and the resulting mashed potatoes were very good.  The peel actually included some festive color to them.  I’m considering using this recipe to make mashed potatoes for my Christmas Eve dinner, but I’m not sure they’ll keep as well as my regular mashed potatoes.

The meal was simple to cook and the portion was adequate – in particular because mashed potatoes are filling.

I got my first week of Home Chef at a discount, so I paid only about $10 for this meal.  Regular price would be $20 – which is a better deal than other home meal kits.

Smashed Red Potatoes

serves 2

  • 12 oz small red potatoes
  • 2 oz sour cream
  • 1 oz butter
  • salt & pepper to taste
  • 2 green onions, sliced

Wash potatoes and then cut in half.  Place potatoes in a cooking pot and cover with about 1″ of water.  Add salt.  Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 15-20 minutes, or until the potatoes are tender.

Drain the potatoes and return them to the pot.  Mashed them with a potato masher, then add sour cream, butter and salt to taste and mix well.  Serve, garnished with the sliced green onions.

I got my first week of Home Chef at a discount, so I paid only about $8 for this meal.  Regular price would be $20 – which is a better deal than other home meal kits.

Red Onion Sauce

serves 2

  • 2 tsp olive oil
  • 1 red onion, thinly sliced
  • 1/2 tsp smoked paprila
  • 2 oz red wine
  • 2 tsp beef demi-glace

Heat olive oil over medium-high heat.  Add onion and saute, stirring occasionally, until it starts to caramelize, 6-8 minutes.  Add paprika and red wine and continue cooking until the red wine has almost evaporated, 2-3 minutes.  Mix together the demi-glace and 1/4 cup of water and add to the pan.  Lower heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, until it thickens, 2-3 minute. Serve over steak.

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Meal Kit Review: HelloFresh Saucy Thyme Steak with Sweet Potatoes and Green Beans Amandine + Recipes

Posted on October 21, 2018 by | Leave a comment

Rating: 9/10

I, obviously, need a new camera – or something better than my I-pad, which always takes blurry pictures.  But I think even my out-of-focus picture of my thrown together Saucy Thyme Steak with Sweet Potatoes and Green Beans Amandine is more appealing than HelloFresh‘s:

Saucy Thyme Steak

This, indeed, is one of the problem with HelloFresh: their photos don’t make the food appear particularly enticing. To be honest, neither does the description of the dishes.  Most of them sound totally boring – and yet everything I’ve had from them (albeit, it was just four meal kits) has tasted good, if not great.

And this recipe has probably been the best of the bunch.  The “ranch” steak was good in itself, but the pan sauce was amazing – it made me a convert to demi-glace.  I’m not the biggest fan of sweet potatoes, but I liked them served in this manner and they were perfectly cooked (per the instructions), and not at all chalky, as they can get.  The combination with abundant thyme was also great.

And the green beans weren’t too shabby either. All in all, this meal was of the quality you’d expect at a nice restaurant (one in which they serve boring side dishes, as they do in my town).  Most amazingly, it wasn’t even part of HelloFresh’ “gourmet” offerings, so it was regular price ($22 to $24, depending on your plan).

All the ingredients in the kit arrived in good condition. I was a little surprised at just how much thyme there was, but it was all used.The recipe didn’t call for peeling the sweet potatoes, but I did anyway.  The only real issue is that one of the steaks was significantly thinner than the other, so it required less cooking.

The portions were good and we actually had leftover sweet potatoes/beans.

Making the meal was pretty straightforward, and the only thing I had to watch for was cooking each steak for a different amount of time given their relative thickness.

In all, if you have HelloFresh, I’d recommend this meal.  And if not, I’d recommend making it with your own ingredients.  You can sign up for HelloFresh using my referral link and get $40 off your first week, which is a very good deal.

Au Jus

Make this recipe on the pan where you’ve pan-grilled or broiled steak,with the pan juices are your base.

  • 1 Tbsp demi-glace
  • 1/4 cup to 1/2 cup water
  • 2 tsp fresh thyme leaves, chopped
  • 1 Tbsp butter
  • salt & pepper

Place pan with pan juices over medium-high heat and add the demi-glace and water, crapping the bits of browned meat from the pan.  Simmer until slight thickened, 1 to 2 minutes.  Turn heat off and mix in the butter.  Taste and season as needed.

Roasted Thyme  Sweet Potatoes

  • 2 small or 1 large sweet potatoes
  • 2 tsp fresh thyme leaves, chopped
  • salt & pepper to taste
  • olive oil
  • 1 Tbsp sliced almonds

Preheat oven to 400°F.  Cover a baking sheet with aluminum foil.

Peel and cube the sweet potatoes into 1/2″ cubes.  place on one layer on the baking sheet.  Sprinkle with thyme and salt and pepper.  Drizzle with olive oil.  Bake for 25 minutes.  Remove to serving plate, sprinkle almonds on top and serve.

Make the green beans amandine by following the recipe for the sweet potatoes above, don’t use thyme and cook for 15 minutes only. 

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Meal Kit Hack: HelloFresh Balsamic Rosemary Steak with Garlic Herb Toasts and a Roasted Pear Salad on the Cheap + Salad Recipe

Posted on October 17, 2018 by | Leave a comment

 

Rating: 8/10

Today I ended up with some extra top sirloin.  This meant I had to figure out what to do with it and I had so much fun making hacking the Plated recipe for French onion soup burgers, that I decided to hack something from Hello Fresh this time, as I’ve started trying their kits. I decided on this recipe for “Balsamic Rosemary Skirt Steak with Garlic Herb Toasts and a Roasted Pear Salad” because I had most of the ingredients at home and it was one of their “premium” recipes, which cost an additional $12 per 2-person meal.  There is no way that I’m going to spend $36 on a meal for two without leftovers that I have to cook myself, unless a rack of lamb or some prime beef is involved, so I can only try these recipes by making them with my own ingredients.

Once again, I shopped at my neighborhood grocery store so I had to make some drastic substitutions:

Hello Fresh Recipe My Version My cost
1 pear 1 bag Bosc pears $3
1 demi-baguette 1 loaf sourdough bread $2
2 shallots 1 large shallot Pantry
1/4 oz rosemary 2 tsp chopped rosemary homegrown
2 Tbsp. garlic herbed butter 4 Tbsp. garlic herbed butter pantry/homemade
12 oz skirt steak 12 oz top sirloin $6.50
3 tsp balsamic vinegar 3 tsp red wine vinegar pantry
chicken demi glace 1 tsp. beef base pantry
2 oz arugula 2 oz mixed greens leftover
2 oz Ricotta salata  4 oz blueberry goat cheese  $3

 

In all, I spent $15.50 on the meal, less than half of what I would have spent if I’d bought the kit.  I was lucky that all the substitutions worked great.  Bosc pears are actually preferable for baking as they keep their shape.  Sourdough bread (which I’d bought the day before and not used) is tastier than the plain baguettes and the croutons came out great.   While I, myself, prefer skirt take, the top sirloin worked just as well and it was more tender than skirt steak would have been.  And the blueberry goat cheese on the salad (for which I used the mixed greens I bought for my last hacked recipe) was a revelation.   I did have to make the herbed butter myself, but it wasn’t too hard.  I simply chopped a few fresh herbs I had around the house (rosemary from the side yard, basil and some of the living herbs thyme I bought for my last recipe) in addition to a couple garlic cloves and mixed it with softened butter.

The overall meal was very good, and I loved that it had three elements: steak with a sauce, a grown up salad and herbed garlic bread – but it was a pretty laborious meal to make for that reason.  Still, we both enjoyed the steak and the sauce certainly added flavor to a cut that I think usually needs it (as opposed to NY steak or rib eye which just need salt to be great).  The herbed garlic bread was quite good and I very much enjoyed the salad.  The blueberry goat cheese, in particular, was a revelation.  I’d never had thought of putting it on salad otherwise, but it worked perfectly well.

But hacking this meal also had me make a mistake: instead of using balsamic vinegar, which I did have in my pantry, I just used regular red wine vinegar for both the steak and the salad.  If I had been using Hello Fresh’s own ingredients I wouldn’t have been able to make the mistake.  I’m sure the balsamic vinegar would have improved the flavor of both.

Below is my recipe for the salad.  If you want to try this kit without having to make it yourself,  you can use this link to get $40 off your delivery of Hello Fresh (it’s a referral link that will also give me credit towards a future purchase).

Roasted Pear Salad with Blueberry Goat Cheese

  • 2 Bosc pears
  • 1/3 French or sourdough baguette or 1/4 bread loaf
  • 1 Tbsp olive oil + more for drizzling
  • salt & pepper to taste
  • 2 oz mixed greens, washed and dried
  • 2 tsp red or balsamic vinegar
  • 2 oz blueberry goat cheese

Preheat oven to 400F.  Line a baking pan with aluminum foil.

Cut off ends from the pears, cut them in half and core them; then cut the pairs into 1/2″ wedges.

Cube the bread into 1/2″ cubes.

Place pears on one side of the prepared baking sheet and bread cubes in the other.  Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper.  Bake until the bread is toasted, about 8 minutes.  Remove the bread cubes to a salad bowl.  Turn the pear slices and continue cooking until soft, about 10 more minutes.  Remove from the oven.

Add the mixed greens to the bowl with the croutons.  Add 1 Tbsp. olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  Toss.  Top with pears and crumble the goat cheese over the salad. Serve.

 

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