Thank you all for your replies ... and a great link, party music, for sous vide info. Islay, without having any brown stock handy, I can't imagine making a nice Steak Diane sauce WITHOUT using the drippings in pan after cooking or searing steaks! It's so lacking flavor without it and is the basis of so many meat sauces. A NY steak is also called a strip steak and is the "long half" (along the bone) of a porterhouse steak (not the filet side) if that helps you. In Calif., it's usually served boneless. I think what we'll do is sous vide to a RARE temp, sear in very hot pan, put in oven for a few min. while I'm quickly making the sauce. Apparently there will also be liquid to pour out of the cooking bag to add to pan, also. Hopefully, meat will increase to no more than medium rare.

Made chicken breasts yesterday, after some research. It's the reason I bought the sous vide. I will be raising chickens this year, but I've never ever eaten chicken breast that I truly enjoyed. It's dry and it's stringy, no matter how it is prepared or by whom. 149 F, 2 hours, skin on. Cooked with salt, pepper, fresh thyme. Wrapped one with a slice of bacon, added avocado oil to the other. Sliced and served under a sauce/topping of butter, onion, lime, many mushrooms, spinach, tarragon, melted cheese, wine. I'm a fan!!! I even enjoyed the test slice I topped with nothing.

I did the reverse sear method...set oven temp to 275 degrees & preheat, steaks at room temp with an internal temp of 57 degrees. Pat dry, season, put on rack (on baking sheet) and into the oven for about 13 minutes, until the internal temp reaches 95 degrees. Sear in a CI pan, 1 minute and 15 seconds on each side...put steak back on wire rack, cover with foil for 8 minutes. Here are three photos!

Thanks, bbstx, I'm going to give FOAS' method a try next. There are several reasons that I thought I'd use the pork chops for my sous vide experiments. I have quite a few of them, and since pork is not my favorite meat and it was pretty cheap, I'm not as leery about "wasting" them. They were languishing in the freezer, and I'm trying to get some freezer room for those 23 meat chickens that'll be ready to process in about 2 weeks. And, of course, the dog likes everything I mess up, LOL. So, I figure I'll keep trying different methods/temperatures/times/seasonings until I hit that "sweet spot" where Elery likes them and I think they are edible. (shrug) I am disappointed that I can't just chuck them into the sous vide in the morning, work at the farm all day and come home to a perfectly cooked chop that just needs a quick sear to be supper. It was the reason Elery wanted one, so he could do a bunch of chops/steaks/whatever and then just toss them on a grill to finish when the family was ready to eat. Unfortunately, that results in a mushy and sub-par finished product, which I did not expect after hearing others say they could "hold" a steak for 12 hours or whatever and still have it be perfect. I remember Grandma telling me that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, so I should have been suspicious. However, Elery wanted one and it made a good gift, so it accomplished something already, and I bought it on line, didn't have to go to a store! Mother, wants everything to be soft, so maybe she'd like it that way! Annie