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.

I like lean meat so round is a favorite. Makes good bbq sandwich meat. Boil it in tomato juice until it falls apart. After boiling the excess tomato juice makes excellent soup. The meat I work down with a potato masher then add bbq sauce. Just about as easy as it gets. I like mixing catsup, open pit, a-1, a dash of cayenne pepper, and a shot of jim beam for my bbq sauce. I had some people on the forum here that figured I'd get a rubber ball if I boiled a round roast. I got one and took pictures! Sorry about the huge size of the pics... my photo editor was not on my computer at the time... hmmm still ain't. As you can see it falls apart with a fork. This was a bottom round so I had a bit of tough fat to pick out... dog treat. I don't buy it as a steak but as 5lb roasts. To me it makes a decent roast... in a pan with veggies and a spoon of crushed garlic on top. Bake under tinfoil until the veggies are done. Alternate is to put the meat in a baking pan with tight tinfoil and bake overnight @180... which leaves it fully cooked but still pink in color!. Wrap a chunk in loose tinfoil with seasonings and grill it on a Weber with indirect heat. Lots of hickory chips on the coals! If you are brave a small handful of cracked pepper on the coals then get the lid back down quick... don't let that smoke get in your eye. A couple slices as roast, a couple sandwiches, and the rest drops in the chili pot. One of my cook on Sunday and eat 'till Thursday plans. I love a fresh slice buttered with a dab of a-1. Careful getting off the grill as the tinfoil often has a cup of hot juice. I have good arm strenth so I stab it with a big bbq fork and get into a baking pan for transport back to the kitchen. About the same dilema as beer can chicken. I was supposed to buy a short loin this week but now you have me thinking round. : ) lyra

I think there's an art to cooking steak at home. It really requires a very hot grill, and although I found some good instructions on the Web a while ago, and the steak came out good, it just never tastes as good as when a good steakhouse does it. (At home, I don't have an outside grill--I have just a tabletop grill designed for inside use, and it can't reach the optimum temp.) I like a good filet mignon, myself. At a good steakhouse, I have never seen "well done" listed as a cooking preference on the menu. Basically there are 3 levels of "medium"--the photos at one place look like they are either bloody, light pink or a slightly darker pink. I always got grossed out by pink--I wanted something "gray" looking. But when I started to go "pink," I was amazed and quite pleased. In the D.C. area, there is actually one steak place whose owner/chef refuses to cook certain cuts anything more than "medium"! I haven't been there yet, but I gotta think he knows what he's talking about! And you really ought to have sent the steak back. The chefs need to know how to respect both the meat and the customer. Them really blowing your steak--it's not like they can put it back on the grill--and having to put it in the financial loss column is the only way they will learn.

Get a couple of 3/4" thick Flat Irons and generously rub both sides with your favorite seasoning, using 1/4 tsp. of salt per steak if your seasoning has no salt in it. Let them stand at room temp for 10 to 15 minutes. Heat a skillet (I use a heavy, high-quality nonstick) over medium to medium-high heat. Add a little oil, fry the steaks for 5 minutes on each side, flipping only once (tongs - no fork.) Take pan off heat and let rest for 5 minutes. They'll be tender, juicy, bursting with flavor . . . guaranteed.