I love the name of this recipe. It’s about as imaginative a name as my family would come up with.

But you know what? It’s perfect. That’s exactly what it is — mushroom steak stuff.

Check this out from AllRecipes.com: 

The Mushroom Steak Stuff

SUBMITTED BY: Fetish Cook

“The Mushroom Steak Stuff is what my family has come to call it. In all actuality, it’s sirloin strips and an awesome feta-mushroom cream sauce with pasta. A wonderful Italian meal!”

RECIPE RATING:

---

PREP TIME	25 Min
COOK TIME	35 Min
READY IN	1 Hr

INGREDIENTS

• 4 slices bacon
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 (16 ounce) package rigatoni pasta
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1 pound beef top sirloin, thinly sliced
• 1 (6 ounce) package sliced fresh mushrooms
• 1 teaspoon prepared yellow mustard
• 1/4 teaspoon minced fresh ginger root
• 1 pinch salt and pepper to taste
• 2 tablespoons red wine
• 1 tablespoon Marsala wine
• 1 cup crumbled feta cheese
• 2/3 cup heavy cream

 

DIRECTIONS

• Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C).
• Place bacon in a large, deep skillet. Cook over medium-high heat until evenly brown. Drain on a paper towel-lined plate and set aside. Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to a boil over high heat with 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Add the rigatoni pasta, and cook until al dente, 8 to 10 minutes; drain.
• Bake in the preheated oven for 10 minutes until hot and bubbly. Crumble the bacon overtop, and serve over the rigatoni pasta.
• Meanwhile, melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the sirloin strips, and cook until no longer pink, about 6 minutes. Remove the sirloin to a casserole dish, then stir the mushrooms into the hot skillet. Cook and stir for 2 minutes, then season with the mustard, ginger, salt, and pepper, and cook 3 minutes more. Pour in the red wine and Marsala wine, and bring to a simmer over medium-high heat. Add the cream and half of the crumbled feta cheese, reduce heat to medium-low, and simmer 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. The feta helps thicken the cream. The cream sauce is not a gravy, so it will not thicken like gravy. Once ready, pour the mushroom mixture over the sirloin strips, and sprinkle with the remaining feta cheese.

You can read the entire article along with readers’ comments here. And try it yourself!

My husband and I just got back from a long weekend in New York City. We saw the Yankees play before they tear down their old stadium and we met a group of our college friends there.

Since NYC is the unofficial steakhouse capital of the world, one night we went to Sparks Steak House. The ambience is amazing and if you know your mob history you know that mafia boss Paul Castellano was murdered out front in the mid-’80s.

We tried not to think about the murder part but we figured if it was good enough for mob bosses who could go anywhere they wanted it was good enough for us.

The meal was, indeed, great, but it’s the little things that make or break the experience for me. And I gotta tell you, no matter where I go I always end up wishing I had cooked my own steak meal at home.

First of all, they do not have bacon for your baked potato. I’m sorry, that’s a must for me. Where I come from, EVERYONE puts bacon on their baked potato.  And, considering that and butter is all I like on my potato, mine was pretty boring.

Then we get to the steak. The quality of the meat is wonderful. This is NYC for Pete’s sake! But I like mine done medium well. And that apparently means different things to different people.

To me, that means very little pink.

On a really thick steak that’s hard to do. And, frankly, they just don’t wanna.

I’m not big on sending stuff back to the kitchen because I’m always afraid it will come back with invisible spit on it. So, I just eat it as is. Even if it’s not exactly the way I want it.

That’s disappointing.

Then, if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time you know I prefer Teriyaki sauce on my steak. Gee, do ya think they’re going to have that? They’d laugh in my face.

So I suffer through.

I figure they can at least fix the bacon thing before I go there next. But, wow, do you think they have a Suggestion Box at the front?

Heck no.

And if they did here’s what they would do to my little suggestion . . .

So, as we were eating, a little phrase I tell my kids all the time kept running through my head, “You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.”

My husband wouldn’t mind putting my steak back on the grill until it was perfectly done. And I’m sure he would buy me bacon for my potato (that is, if he EVER went grocery shopping).

But my husband doesn’t work at Sparks. So since he works for me, I think I’ll put him to work on our own grill pretty soon . . .

I was reading an article called “Picking Perfect Steaks:  How to Make the Most of the Beef You Cook at Home” and I stopped in my tracks when I came to one particular part. 

It wasn’t so much the advice that gave me pause as the way it was worded. Here it is . . .

· Pick out your steak like you pick out your clothes. Would you grab just any old pair of pants off the rack? Of course not. Same with a steak. Look at each one carefully. If you want it to be juicy and tender for cooking on the grill, you want lots of little white flecks of fat in the meaty part (it’s called marbling). The flecks melt away during cooking, adding to the meat’s flavor. You also want it to be an even thickness (if it’s thinner in some parts, it will cook unevenly). If you’re buying more than one steak, try to find cuts that are all close in size so they finish cooking at about the same time.

Now that’s good advice as far as I’m concerned, but I can’t get past picking out my steak like I pick out my clothes.

I imagine myself in a dressing room with a three-way mirror and when I look up I see a T-bone hanging on the hook behind me. There’s a bacon-wrapped filet sitting on the bench waiting to be tried on. A KC strip peers at me on a shelf next to a flouncy skirt I’m about to slip on.

I take my things up to the register and the woman says, “Did you find everything you needed today?”

“Yes,” I say. “I’ll take the skirt, the beaded belt and the ribeye.”