Butch, First find a place in your refrigerator, with a thermometer, that maintains a 34 to 88 degrees temperature and can accomodate the strip. If you buy your strips vacuum packed remove the plastic and thoroughly dry the strip with paper towels. Lay down several layers of paper towels where you plan to age the strip. Put a rack over the paper towels and place the NY strip on the rack. You want air to circulate around the meat so don't clutter the area around the meat. Turn the strip over twice a day for 10 days. At this point the meat is about as tender as it will get, even with further aging. I think 28 days is the point where, if you have any left, you might want to freeze it. Aging past 10 days does tenderize a little more and it will concentrate the flavor through evaporation but the gain is small and you will lose more meat because you will have to trim more.

We used to make calamari steaks at the restaurant. I can take them or leave them, myself. I'm not crazy about the texture, and they don't seem to have much flavor, so you will need a sauce of some sort. An easy, and very popular preparation was Dore style. You dredge the steak in flour, shake it so the coating is thin, dip it in an egg wash and saute it at a medium high heat until the egg coating browns just a little. The egg wash is simply an egg beaten with a little water (appx. 1 T per extra large egg.) Then you top it with a sauce. A simple lemon caper butter was very popular. Just dice the flesh of a lemon, and mix it and some zest in with soft butter and mix in some capers. Top the calamari with a pat of this just before serving. A fresh tomato sauce, a little spicy if you like spice is very good with it as well. Or, an herb cream sauce. We sometimes made a cilantro cream sauce w/ or w/o jalapenos. Or a tarragon cream sauce was very nice also. I would suggest cutting a small slice off the steak to practice on before cooking the whole thing. Calamari steak goes from relatively tender to rubber in a very short time. It really only takes 3 or 4 minutes total to cook a calamari steak that is between 1/4 and 1/2" thick. It's almost as though you're just heating it through rather than actually cooking it.

Ann_t, I've considered it but it isn't worth it for us. The Costcos are not close to us and driving to areas I don't normally visit aren't worth my time/energy/gas. I enjoy cooking but not every day. Our budget is generous for going out and that's what I most enjoy. I LOVE chicken fried steak! But it is possibly the worst thing in the world for you, LOL. Restaurant versions are okay, but The Real Thing is dynamite. I wrote up my mother's method one day, when I was doing a restaurant review of a cafe that did a decent chicken-fried steak we liked. My younger friends and family have never had this recipe, so I included it in my email as a humorous touch. BTW, I do not claim this is an authentic Southern Recipe. This is just how my JapAm mother made it when we were growing up in Chicago, after she learned it from the Mississippi AfrAms in our neighborhood: *The Traditional (e.g., home-cooked) Chicken Fried Steak Yes, this is another thing my Japanese-American mother learned to make from Southerners (Mississippians transplanted to Chicago, hence our familys love of sweet cornbread and really good fried chicken from the legendary Harolds in Chicago [you can look up Harolds Chicken in Wiki]). It can be eaten for dinner or breakfast. Or lunch. Or....well, you get the idea. Like most Southern food, it goes best with biscuits. Real biscuits, the kind made with white lard and even whiter soft wheat flour, rolled and cut with a biscuit cutter (what do you mean, youve never seen a biscuit cutter?!?) and served hot out of the oven with lots of butterc. Definitely not the fake Pillsbury-in-a-can stuff. To the day she died (at age 84), my mothers idea of heaven would have included a hot biscuit dripping with butter. Start with decent-sized pieces of beef, well trimmed of fat. Bottom round is ideal. The mechanically tenderized "cube steak" is sheer laziness and has the wrong texture. Traditionally the pieces of bottom round meat are pounded thin with the edge of a heavy china plate (okay, my mother did use a traditional meat mallet instead). Never, under any circumstances, do you use a wet batter. Never, ever! The egg and the flour do not mix together promiscuously in a bowl; this is a worse heresy than a mechanically tenderized steak. As you are pounding the steak pieces thin, you sprinkle them generously with seasoned flour. The flour, up to a cup or more, is pounded into each steak. "Seasoned", BTW, means salt and pepper. Thats it, no garlic (powder) or onion (same). Just lots of the evil white Mortons. Heres where you get a split between the thin batter-fried and the thick batter-fired recipes. My mother was a thin batter advocate, so she fried the steak after pounding it with the flour. The opposing camp sets out a beaten egg and a pan of more seasoned flour. The steak is dipped in egg and then in flour again, making a thicker batter coating. Either way you do it, next you fry the bacon remember I said there was another whole level to this dish? The bacon doesnt actually appear anywhere else in the recipe, so you probably just nosh on the crispy strips which youve fished out of all that bacon-y, salty, greasy artery-clogging saturated rendered fat. If you happen to have rendered bacon fat on hand, why are you reading this recipe? You already know how to make this. While youre chewing and swallowing bacon, you fry the steaks really crisp in the bacon grease. This is where most restaurants fail. Its bad enough they use some kind of healthy polyunsaturated oil but to make things worse, they dont cook it long enough to really get it dark brown. Drain them on newspaper in a warm oven, while you toss leftover flour into the pan to soak up the bacon grease of course you dont drain any of the fat out, why would you do something so silly when thats where all the flavor is stirring and scraping for a few minutes to cook the flour. Then in goes the evaporated milk whole milk, not that ridiculous reduced fat stuff just enough to make a thick gravy that holds in nice clumps on the spoon. Not glue-y, just very thick. Some people make a thin gravy, but not in our house. Oh, and more pepper, too. Serve with two fried eggs. Or maybe three. Or better yet, eggs and biscuits so you can chase all that yummy gravy around the plate to sop up every bit. Real biscuits, the kind made with white lard and even whiter soft wheat flour, rolled and cut with a biscuit cutter (what do you mean, youve never seen a biscuit cutter?!?) and served hot out of the oven with lots of butter handy. After that, you go clear out an entire field of cotton, or chop down every tree in the forest, for the next eight hours straight (as youve already worked five hours before lunch). The discovery of statins to lower cholesterol is obviously Gods way of saying that every American has a right to copious quantities of salt, fat, and cream, three times a day. Also sugar, but that goes into the coffee, tea, and peach cobbler.

Hope you'll let us know how it turns out!