Why is Steak Cheaper Than Hamburger Meat?

On most Fridays, our local Safeway store features either Rib Eye or New York Strip steaks for $5. a pound.  Good ground beef is usually more than that, so we eat a lot of steak!

The New York Strips are completely boneless and without a lot of excess fat.  The Rib Eye steaks (above) have a bone, but that is not all bad.

We are not big meat eaters, so part of what you see above sufficed for each of us for a dinner, and then I used what was left in a stir fry.

This left the bones, so they went into my 6-cup Nesco slow cooker filled with water, and that sat on the back of the stove, bubbling away for most of two days.  Cooks in the olden days had such a pot of stock going on the back of their wood-fired stoves all of the time, and just kept adding things to it.

I didn’t do that, but I DID add water from time to time, as I was scooping out a ladle of it here and a ladle of it there to enrich whatever was bubbling on the burners, or to make a quick lunch of “Soup du Jour”, i.e. whatever leftovers (meat bits, veggies, rice, pasta shells) were about, along with a modicum of this delicious, slow-simmered beef stock.

Last night, I was heating up some leftover pasta sauce that was mega thick with burger and Italian sausage meats.  There was a plethora of veggies in there, too, so the last of the very condensed stock evened out the consistency quite nicely.  The extra flavor of the broth brought quite a nice richness to the sauce.

And, yes, there is still about a cup of sauce left, which will likely be turned into a couple of meat/bean burritos, or a bowl or two of chili – maybe for lunch today!  ;->

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