Recipe #23: Rib-eye Steak with Whiskey Cream Sauce

Recipe: Rib-Eye Steak with Whiskey Cream Sauce
Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 30 minutes
Ease: 2
Taste: 10
Leftover Value: No leftovers!
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep it in the Strainer!

Confession time.  It has been ten days since my last post.  No, I have not given up on my recipe challenge.  Yes, my new job has occupied some of my time and energy.

Have no fear, I have still been keeping up with cooking, but the blogging piece has had to sit on the back burner in order to keep myself from spiraling out of control into a stress tornado.

When I mentioned to Hubby that I hadn't posted recently this was his response, "What? You had better. I'm not eating all these strange recipes for you to not be blogging about them."

Ah, I love my husband.

I think it might have been the cheese grits, or the recent Sherried Tomato Soup* from which this response was derived.

*Coming soon!

I'm almost half way through and I have learned so much during this challenge.  I've learned that though I love reading what Pioneer Woman has to say about each step in a recipe, when I'm in the midst of cooking a recipe the lengthiness of her descriptions can aggravate me.

I'm also learning a lot about meat.

If ever I were to write a recipe book, I would make sure that the only meats I used were ones that all supermarkets carry, and ones that the at-home-chef would never need to awkwardly search through the meat section for only in the end to convince herself that such a meat does not exist.

Also, meats that don't break the bank.

At my local Shop Rite, the only option I had for rib-eye steaks was a package of three steaks priced at $65 that looked as though they had been portioned for giants.  I couldn't reason making such a purchase, even in the name of a most important recipe challenge, so I bought these:

They were boneless so, as I stood in the meat aisle confused and wanting desperately to be back home, I assumed since the description included the word "rib" that these would count.

*Note: I learned afterwards that though we typically connect bone-in steaks with rib-eye, originally the term rib eye meant the center best portion of the rib steak, without the bone.

Steak alone is perfect.  Steak with cream sauce is like turkey with gravy.  It just makes things better.

The cream sauce is super simple.  Onions, butter, whiskey, broth, seasoning,and light cream.

See, this recipe is slightly health conscious.  She could have used heavy cream.  But instead, she used light cream.  Still delicious, and slightly calorie conserving.

My favorite part of this recipe is that it can be made in under thirty minutes--that is always a plus.  The only thing that could make it better is if somehow the meat and the sauce could be made in the same pan.  

I suppose if the steaks were made before the cream sauce, the sauce could then be made in the same pan the steaks were fried in.

But of course, then you would have to deal with where to keep the steaks while the sauce was being made.

It's a lot to think about for the sake of using one less pan.

The steak was perfect.  I needed to cook it a lot longer than she said to, and this is not because I am against medium rare.  Hubby always orders medium rare, while I lean more towards medium.  However, following PW's suggestion of 3 to 4 minutes on each side (for a medium rare thick steak, she says) resulted in steaks that were rare rather than medium rare. 

The only thing I would change about this recipe is that I would double the cream sauce.  This is always the case for me regarding sauces.  There can never be too much.  I want the sauce to be an ocean covering my plate, unifying my side dishes with my meat.

Yum.