Enter the Beef Checkoff program, which in collaboration with the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, mobilized teams of meat scientists from the University of Florida and the University of Nebraska to come up with affordable alternatives to New York strip steaks, tenderloin, T-bones, and porterhouses.
The new Web sources allow home cooks to buy skirt steaks, tenderloins, shoulder steaks and end-loin steaks called pluma, mostly in one-pound portions.
RECOMMENDED DISHES -- All salads, crab cakes, potato soup, pizza, smoked chicken risotto, duck breast and risotto, beef short ribs, grilled chicken, hanger steak, pork tenderloin, creme brulee.
So it was a letdown when I arrived and found the menu consisted mostly of the typical upscale Italian/New American offerings: mussels, salmon, tuna, shrimp and crab, veal and steak, pork tenderloin and chops and one chicken dish.
After you have visited the huge salad bar and are ready for meat, turn the green side up, and the waiters begin to descend bearing succulent pork sausages, thick rounds of rib-eye steak, pork tenderloin, chicken hearts and maybe a dozen other varieties.
And for those who prefer to have someone else do the cooking, Chris DeLuna, the chef at La Fonda del Sol in Midtown Manhattan, last week started serving Ibérico skirt steaks, sliced tenderloins and rib-eye chops, some garnished with green sauces.
Protein often came in the form of high-quality seafood like orange roughy and scallops as well as lean steaks and tenderloins.
A grilled tenderloin steak had its requisite buttery taste increased by béarnaise and bone marrow.
