// meats

Way to be ahead of the game! I love a fruit-rum-pork combo. The sauce sounds perfect.

This isn't your everyday pot roast! The sauce includes an entire bottle of bold red Zinfandel wine. The vegetables in the sauce are cooked until every ounce of flavor is extracted from them, and then the sauce is pressed through a sieve and reduced even further. The beef, braised for hours is fork tender. Enjoy.

I love plum sauce, it goes really well with pork too and often just roast a few plums along with, say, a pork belly to make a crude plum sauce. Delicious! But...

I love this photo. It makes me want to eat this steak all over again. Don't you love it when you make something that you know is good, and you feed it to someone who has their doubts (because that's just how they are, they doubt everything), and their eyes light up and they get a big smile on their face right after the first bite? That was my mother and father after biting into this steak teriyaki. Flank or skirt steak is naturally tough, but the combination of marinating it in a homemade teriyaki marinade of mirin, sake, and soy sauce, along with a fast sear on high heat, and cutting thin slices against the grain, makes for a juicy, tender presentation.

Looking for a quick, easy, yet special meal? One of the best things about having a butcher close by who knows a thing or two about meat is that we are often inspired to try cuts that would otherwise be unfamiliar to us. Hanger steak is one of those cuts. Also known as a "butcher's steak", the hanger steak "hangs" down from a steer's diaphragm, attached to the last rib and spine near the kidneys (according to the Wikipedia). It is highly flavorful, but isn't perfectly tender, so it responds well to quick cooking with searing heat, and a thin slicing against the grain to serve.

Pot roast  requires slow cooking over low heat to ensure tender, flavorful meat. Pot roasts typically use the tougher cuts of beef - a chuck roast or shoulder roast - which have the most flavor. The slow cooking at low heat is what melts the tough connective tissue between the muscle fibers, leaving you with tender meat that flakes apart with your fork.

Have you ever come up with your own, never-before-seen recipe (at least not seen by you) and it turns out so well you just want to stand up and take a bow? Well, some of my friends do this all the time, but for me it's a rarity. My mini-triumph today is a green bell pepper salsa, the ingredients for which you probably have, which perfectly accents steak, or in this case, a grilled tri-tip steak.

Recently I got a call from my friend Olga who said, "You've got to try my mother's flank steak; it's soooo good!" I begged the recipe from Olga (Elizabeth's mother) and tried it out last night. It was terrific. Very tasty, everyone ate it right up. Best thing about it? It's fast and easy. Olg adapted her recipe from.