Fairway's steak: with tomatoes, Asparagus: with fried egg
May 11, 2013
A few weeks ago, I posted a throw-away Facebook post about some steaks at Fairway which, to my novice eye, looked pretty good at $18/lb. As often happens when I open my mouth, a long, convoluted debate emerged, primarily with my nemesis from the north, who I will call "Ant-nee." As if Ant-nee and his strong opinions weren't enough, the discussion took some additional turns with input from some other nice folks, visiting topics like editing Facebook posts, the source of Peter Luger's beef, and if these steaks were actually expensive. Adding to the mix was the recent Facebook change which causes comments to appear out of order for some reason. Nobody knew what the hell anyone was saying. Which was probably just as well.
Ant-nee, who no doubt has a lot of experience with eating and drinking and drinking and even husbandry, proclaimed that he would "pass" on these "ghetto ass steaks." There was only one thing to do, after arguing. I mean two things to do:
1) not invite Ant-nee to dinner
2) cook these steaks to prove him wrong
If I understood the rantings correctly, the thrust of Ant-nee's argument was that this steer was injured at some point in its life, and that injury manifested itself in the muscle/silverskin/fat development of the rib primal, which apparently was not up to Ant-nee's snuff.
While I can understand that some muscle damage could cause slight variations in quality, I didn't buy that silverskin would form, nor did the bands of fat in these steaks look like silver skin.
Oh who cares. Long story short, I grilled the things, and they were perfectly good steaks, injury be damned.
I can't find the link to the recipe that inspired the tomato side dish, but it was basically grape tomatoes, sauteed in some EVOO with garlic and shallots, with basil and thyme. Hold on, it was probably something very similar to this recipe from Ina Garten, who seems like a very nice lady, and who I should note has never argued with me.
We also had grilled asparagus topped with a fried egg (because an egg on top makes anything taste better). The inspiration from this dish came from The Chew, which is probably our favorite daytime cooking show. Good, clean fun, that Chew.
So there you have it. These ghetto ass steaks were good after all.