Have I mentioned just how glad I am we were able to get that quarter beef this winter?

Thanks to paying the same price per pound for the whole thing, regardless of cut, last night we got to enjoy a rare indulgence.

T-bone steak!

In our younger days, when it was just my husband and I, and we had fewer expenses, we would *gasp* go to restaurants and order things like steak. My husband would order a T-bone, but he didn’t like the bone, so he’d give it to me. That’s the best part! I would happily gnaw every last bit off the bone, much to his amusement.

I’m sure the other patrons were not to impressed. 😉

That was a long time ago. When the BSE, or “mad cow disease”, crisis hit our cattle industry, restaurants stopped selling bone-in beef. Even grocery stores stopped selling any bone-in beef, though for a while, getting any beef at all was difficult. Today, restaurants, with few exceptions, still don’t sell bone in beef, and even grocery stores never returned to pre-BSE levels of inventory, and that happened back in… 2003? Quite a long time ago. What is available in grocery stores is so insanely expensive, we could never afford it.

Which means, we haven’t had a T-bone steak in decades, and I’ve never cooked one before in my life!

So there I was, with 4 beautiful steaks and not sure what to do with them!

Ideally, I would have grilled them, but it’s freezing out, and the BBQ is buried in snow. I decided to go with pan searing them (after seasoning them with only coarse salt and freshly ground pepper), then transferring them to a baking sheet to finish them in the oven, at 450F, to finish. What that was happening, I used the pan drippings to make a gravy.

They came out looking amazing!

They tasted amazing, too. Even though I ended up over cooking them. I probably could have skipped the oven part completely and just pan seared them.

Best of all, I got to gnaw on some delicious, delicious bones!

I’m thinking we really need to find a way to fit a half beef next year, instead of a quarter beef, because having cuts like this is just amazing. 😀

The Re-Farmer