When it comes to cooking cheap steaks, it’s a fine art. Anyone can buy a $15 rib-eye at the market and it’s hard to make it into a bad steak. But when you buy the $5 pack of 6-8 thinly sliced steaks, it is very east to end up making beef jerky. Here are a few tips I have for cheap beef steaks.

• Let them get to room temperature before cooking. This sounds like a bad thing, but when the meat travels from 45 to 160 degrees, that can cause it to change shapes and tighten up. You’ll notice this when the meat curls while it’s cooking. That is a sign that it will be chewy. By letting it warm to room temperature we are now only taking it from 70 – 160 and there by reducing the drastic reaction to the meat.
• Salt it before cooking and give that time to absorb the moisture out of the meat. If you want it to be a low sodium steak, then simply wipe off the salt with a paper towel before cooking. The salt pulls out the moisture, which when left in the meat can contribute to it being chewy.
• Cook at HOT temperatures fast. When you have a big thick slab of meat, your instincts are to slow cook it at a low temp. The opposite is true for thin slices of beef as well as game meats like venison. Cook it fast flip it and once both sides of the meat have a nice color, pull it out of the heat and wrap it in some foil.
• Let it rest in foil for about 5 minutes after cooking. This allows it to not only finish cooking throughout, but by leaving it in the foil wrapped tight, the steam and flavors keep it warm and moist. Thin sliced meats can dry out quickly when left on the table.

Fish is a touchy subject in our house. I love it, and all the kids love it, but mom is not a fan. So I usually just give her a heads up on fish night so she can find her own dinner on the way home. The things I love about fish is that it comes frozen, but since I live inland, I don’t know the difference between frozen and fresh fish because everything I eat comes from frozen fish. Also, although it’s frozen, it thaws and cooks fast. Where as chicken would take to long to thaw and cook in the same night, fish can be thawed and cooked in under an hour. Especially the thin fillets of fish that I find cheap at Walmart. This particular fish is Swai and cooks and tastes alot like tilapia only typically larger.

I usually just bake fish with a little lemon and salt, but I had the hankering to do something more adventurous this time. I breaded the fish by first thawing and then pad drying it on paper towels. Then I took my seasoned flower mix and powdered it, pressed it and then flipped it using the paper towel and repeated 4-5 times until the breading was an even coat stuck well to the fish. I also fried it in olive oil, which goes against frying rules, but worked beautifully. The olive oil added a lot of flavor. That said, frying food is such a mess and I always regret it during clean up.

This is what I call an extreme low budget meal. Minus the humus, the entire meal is around $10. The chicken fried steak is from the frozen section at Walmart. Carrots were frozen and a bag of potatoes is pretty cheap. When I’m in a rush for dinner, I like to have golden potatoes on hand, because you can wash and slice them without peeling them and no one complains about the little fragments of potato skins in the mash. It helps to slice it in such a way that you don’t have large chunks of potato skin. The beauty of a meal like this is you can turn on all the burners and oven, toss in water in some pans and frozen patties in the oven and you can almost ignore the food for 20+ minutes while you help kids with homework and stuff.  Of course it’s not a super healthy meal, but the kids love it and it takes stress off mom and dad which has been proven (by me) to prevent mental illness in parents.

Pork is a great cheap meat and it’s almost impossible to ruin a pork-chop.  Chops are also a great way to get creative with flavor. Pork is a great platform to add flavor and experiment with seasonings and glazes. Pork is traditionally high in fat, so it’s important to pick lean cuts, but I try to avoid super thin sliced chops as it can dry out to quickly when broiling. Although the thing stuff is great for twice cooked pork stir-fry.

Beans require soaking overnight and I cook them all day in the crock pot, so although it’s a simple side dish, it takes a lot of planning ahead. I know you can buy canned beans, and we have done those before, but our allergic child had some strange reactions to bean dishes, so we have stuck with cooking dry beans only.

Baked chicken has become a specialty of mine. I don’t want to claim to have perfected it, but I haven’t baked a bad chicken in a long while. I usually go with my instincts based on the size of the chicken breasts. If they are large, and I need to cook them fast, then I will split them like  a butterfly chop and bake them somewhere between 400 – 425 for about 45 minutes. For my cooking method the important thing is to just stay near the food and keep an eye on it.

I have a previous blog post about the zucchini log that you should check out if your interested in that. The asparagus was new to me. I’ve cooked it before, but never correctly. I usually overcook it. This time I quickly at a high boil par-boiled it and then drained the water and continued to simmer it in the pain with olive oil, lemon zest and a salt. AWESOME. I will have to do it again. Although, none of the kids are big fans of the stuff no matter how perfectly prepared.

Beef Pot Roast is sort-of a no brain’r. If you own a crock-pot, you’ve cooked this before. Here are the big secrets to a successful crock pot beef brisket.

• Set out the crock-pot the night before, so that you remember to start it in the morning. Sounds silly, but the hardest part of a crock-pot brisket is remembering to make it 10 hours before you are even interested in eating it.
• For super quick and easy preparation you can buy a frozen bag of onion/pepper seasoning that you can simply toss in with the meat. The onions are important because they add flavor and create a barrier between the meat and the pot.
• The whole meal can fit in with the crock pot. Potatoes, carrots, and celery make good brisket buddies.
• After removing the meat and veggies from the pot, pour the remaining juices into a sauce pan with some butter and flour to make a nice gravy.