Not here to totally guide you on that choice. But... you can make an awesome filet by searing them on the stovetop in the skillet first. This will get them a nice crust and then finish them off in the oven. This is what I do now and they taste better then any I have attempted to make before. Got this tip from Cooks Illustrated. I am working on a remodel so I have done mine off of a old GE no frills gas range. From what I read, the bluestars have very high heat output on the rangetop so you should get an excellent sear that way and the oven then does not matter.

Add me to the list of people who just doesn't order steak out. Of course, I'm a bit spoiled with my own organic and grass fed beef that jkom is so dismissive of, finding it far superior to any of the fatty/greasy pieces of nondescript beef I get at steakhouses. To each their own, I know some don't like grassfed beef, finding it too "beefy". I'd give up beef completely if I had to eat the commercial stuff, so it's just another case of taste being subjective, not objective. I do agree that beef just isn't the quality it used to be, the cattle are grown in such quantity and in such deplorable conditions that it compromises the final product. Plus, there is now a rush to market, so meat is seldom aged properly, it takes too long. Breeds are selected not for quality of carcass but because they grow quickly and the beef can be produced more efficiently. That's why we feed them all that grain, they get fat quickly, but the quality suffers along with the health of the animal. In addition, I've yet to find a restaurant who really believes me when I say "rare". Outside a nice crunchy layer, inside just warm. Waiters nod when I describe it for them, but it just never happens. Even if it was on someone else's tab, I think I'd have mentioned the steak. And in the case of FOAS, I'd definitely have mentioned it, as it's somewhat local for him, even though not something done with any regularity. As for me, I ate my grassfed rib eye recently with a butter knife and a fork, in spite of it being grassfed. It was nicely marbled, perfectly rare and with just a tiny bit of chew and big beefy flavor. I think I'd still complain to Morton's, it won't improve if management doesn't hear from dissatisfied customers and especially at that price point. Annie

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.

Every year I vow to read more. My problem is I don't have time to read during the day and if I try to read at night, I fall asleep. I only read non fiction. Tried to force myself to read fiction but it doesn't hold my interest. I have 2 books here that I want to read....American Sniper and Lone Survivor. However I will say that when Stacy describes a book she has read, they always sound so interesting. Reminds me of when I was taking care of Ken. He read all the time and would pick up a book and read it all the way through, hardly laying it down. I would get a book to read and not have time, so I would give it to him and say, " Read it and tell me about it."