A Steak Fit For a Housewife

I have never been a steak eater.

It was always a sore subject in my family, one that made my meat and potatoes father all the more agitated with me at the dinner table. I would pull the broccoli and the baked potato to one side of the plate and push the pieces of steak to the other, at which point my father would roll his eyes and slide his plate over to collect them.

But now I realize that my problem was never with steak. It was with the way it was made. And after testing out one of The Skinny Italian’s steak recipes, I have found a way to keep my boyfriend and my father happy and well fed without cooking something I don’t want to eat.

Giudice’s Papa’s Steak Pizzaiola is a great, simple blend of Italian sauce on something other than pasta. Grab two shell or strip steaks (and clearly, higher end is better), some fresh parsley and a few ingredients that you probably already have in your kitchen at home, and you’re ready to begin.

I always use more oil than Giudice’s recipes call for, but she sets up healthy steps to counteract my unhealthy additions. After the onions, garlic and tomatoes have time to simmer, into something of a sauce, you set the sauce aside and sear the steaks. Then you pull out the steaks and drain the fat, but all the nice browning that is left on the sides gets scraped back into the sauce when it’s returned to simmer. Then the steak gets cut into strips and the sauced poured over top. And let me tell you, that’s a wonderful smell.

Though my steak doesn’t quite look like the photo in the cookbook, it tasted pretty great. I should have let it simmer longer – as you can see, it looks more like an Italian vegetable medley on top of the steak than a sauce.

As I was trying to pull the Steak Pizzaiola together, I also attempted to dive back into the world of incredible and interesting pasta sauces with Giudice’s Milania’s Marinara. According to the book, not only is her particular recipe for this sauce named after one of her daughters (as are all her sauces, except for Danielle’s Puttenesca, which is a dig at her Real Housewives nemesis), but it is also known as the “Sauce of the Sailors” because sailors coming and going from Naples needed a reliable sauce that would last over the course of a long journey.

Easy to make? Lasts a long time? That’s right up my alley, and this sauce was wildly successful. I quickly whipped up a batch of “The Quickie” sauce base and threw the mushrooms and onions in a pan. This is one of the handful of recipes that requires some booze in the mix, and the hearty red wine that got added to the mix gave this marinara a flair all its own.

As usual, I added an extra garlic clove or two to the mix, and dug out some of the last authentic Italian pasta from the pantry, straight from Rome from a summer excursion. Though I didn’t have time to let the sauce simmer to full capacity, some four hours or so, after 30 minutes it was saucy enough to serve.

And so another delicious meal was cooked and served with the help of "Skinny Italian." The world of steak is an appealing one to me once more.