Adventures with Steak

I'm still relatively (~2009) new to eating red meat, and because I try to only buy decently-sourced stuff, most of the meat I've eaten since then has been in the form of hamburgers. (Ground beef is the only grass-fed my budget allows, generally.) I've been trying to branch out a bit, though, and for me that will probably mean some inexpensive cuts of  "level 4" beef from Whole Foods.

Today I bought two relatively thin (1cm?) pieces of "outside bottom round steak" which I understand can be kind of tough. I trimmed some of the (fat? gristle? can't quite tell), stabbed both sides of it with a fork many many times, and dumped it into a mixture of balsamic vinegar, canola oil, chopped garlic, ground pepper, and some fancy whole-grain mustard that was in our fridge. It wasn't that much liquid--I didn't want to waste a bunch of balsamic vinegar. Honestly, I'm never sure what to use to make up volume in marinades. Oil? Water? Neither of these really makes sense, and I don't want to use gallons of balsamic vinegar or whatnot. Anyway. I am going to let it sit in that perhaps overnight, turning it at least once, and then cook it on top of the stove in a cast iron skillet.

In other meat news, ground turkey is gross, chili made from ground turkey is gross, and it is especially so when your source of ground turkey is a defrosted Trader Joe's turkey burger.  I rarely make something I can't bear to eat, but this fit into that category - and it was definitely the turkey, not the rest of the chili. I wish I hadn't wasted the onions, beans, and tomatoes on it, because those alone could have actually been tasty.

VERDICT: it wasn't actually that great--it felt a little tough and the balsamic flavor was too strong--it's a nice flavor but I want to taste meat.. For the second piece, I pierced it more times with a fork, seasoned only with salt and pepper, didn't marinate at all, and didn't cook for as long. It was better.