steak

So good!

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

It occurred to me that I have yet to post a picture of what the Black Nebula carrots look like, cooked! So I thought I’d share this photo with you, while we still have some left.

My daughters did the mashed potatoes and ginger carrots. At the last minute, I cooked up four HUGE t-bones from our quarter beef order, and made a pan gravy. The steaks were so big, I could barely fit them in our largest pans. I was able to cook all of them at one time, though, and made the pan gravy while they rested.

I am so full right now!

As for the Black Nebula carrots, they are so dramatically dark! A very beautiful dish. As for flavour… they’re really not any different from any other carrot. They were sweet and tasty, but not outstanding in any way. I am glad we grew them. We had the most seeds for the Black Nebula, and they shared a bed with the Uzbek Golden carrots, in the main garden area. The Napoli and Kyoto Red carrots we grew along the chain link fence did not do well with how much flooding that area got, even being in a slightly raised bed. If we had not had carrots growing in two completely different areas, we would not have had enough to last us beyond a couple of meals. Something to keep in mind, when we grow carrots next year! I’d be willing to grow them again some day, but I want to try a few other types before we settle into one or two varieties.

As for the steak…

Oh, my, that was so good!!!

The Re-Farmer

A rare indulgence!

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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. :-D

The Re-Farmer