Marinated Chuck Steaks – A Fast, Marvelous Meal For 2 – Under 30 Bucks

When I was growing up, I was babysat by my aunt during summer break. She had kids that were a little older than me so most days, I got to hang out with my cousins in the summertime. This was the 1980s so we actually went outside – you know, for fun. We got in to plenty of mischief and most days were pretty cool adventures. Every day we would walk to a little mini mart called the “Shop-n-Cart” to get candy.

Start with a great local butcher shop

The candy store days have long gone but now as a 40 something, I have a better vice. Butcher shops. I am frequenting a local butcher shop called Porterhouse meat market in-between Havana and Tallahassee on the Florida Georgia highway. It has a bit of the mini mart nuance and the best part, fresh cut meats. Faith Johnson and I enjoy being foodies and now we try to make stuff better than a restaurant. This recent round at Porterhouse, I restocked on bacon and picked up some chuck steaks.

Chuck steaks have great flavor but can be a little tough. Let’s have some fun and beat the restaurants with a great meal for 2 at less than $30.

So let’s start with Italian dressing for marinade the day before we cook. If you’re not concerned about ingredients in the dressing, the cheapest Italian dressing will do the job. You need just enough to get the steaks completely covered and overnight in the fridge, it will mellow those steaks. I had some dressing in the fridge.

Keep it simple – cook it all on the griddle

I like to do most of my outdoor cooking on a griddle but this works on a grill or an iron skillet. Looks like my seasoning has gotten rubbed off since I last did a little “southern hibachi”. The humidity has not been too kind either so we’re requiring some re-seasoning. Bacon to the rescue. Cook some bacon for re-seasoning plus it doubles as an awesome side and meat snacks while cooking. I have yet to have a dinner guest complain about getting bacon as a side. Besides, if they did complain about bacon, they’d not be invited back!

Alright. Griddle seasoned. I have a bag of frozen broccoli to fry in the bacon grease. If you haven’t fried broccoli, it’s way better than microwaved or boiled. After a solid day of marinating, let’s drop those steaks on the griddle. I did about 4 minutes on each side of the steaks while moving the broccoli around.

Broccoli is done at the same time as the steaks. I transferred it to a bowl and stirred in a pat of butter and sprinkled Everything Bagel seasoning on it. Steaks were moved a cutting board and given a couple minutes to rest while I was wrapping up the broccoli. I sliced the steaks into strips against the grain.

It’s plated up. 2 pounds of marinated steaks and 1 pound of seasoned broccoli with a 12 oz. side of bacon. Add a little Himalayan salt to the steak.

Well… Faith would have had leftover steak – but I ate hers.