Grandma's Steak Marinade

I feel so lucky that I grew up with a mom and a Grandma that are very good cooks.  Aside from the red label soup casseroles, almost everything I grew up eating was from scratch, which I now realize is very rare.  When my friends were eating their Lunchables and Twinkies and McDonalds every day, we were eating sandwiches on homemade bread and desserts of homemade oatmeal cookies. 

Little did I realize that my mom was saving us from all the chemicals and preservatives that were starting to emerge into the American Diet during my childhood. Whether she did it because she wanted to feed us right, or we were simply to poor to buy all the prepared and fast foods, or a combination of both, I am really grateful that we got started out on right foot.  I didn't have to learn how to like healthy food as an adult, because I wasn't raised on a strict diet of Hot Pockets, Stouffer's Lasagna, and Hamburger Helper.

As a full-time commuting employee and a wife, I really struggle to find a balance between cooking healthy meals or relying on prepared foods and take out.  Many of the convenience foods that we find today are easily made at home in less than a few minutes.

We had the privilege of being able to buy a locally raised grass fed and finished cow at the beginning of this year.  It has really helped our food budget, as well as help us have a freezer full of healthy beef at a fraction of the grocery store price. 

I love to take a cheaper cut of steak and marinate it for a day or two and grill it to a nice medium rare.  Since I've had to be so careful about what I eat now, I was appalled at the ingredients in most steak marinades that we had been blindly buying.  They were full of HFCS, MSG, and all sorts of other ingredients that I cannot pronounce.  How can I expect to benefit from the health values of a grass fed steak when I'm slathering it with the very ingredients that I know are harming my body???

Then I remembered the steak marinade that I carefully copied from my mom's handwritten cookbook from my Grandma.  A simple steak marinade. No yucky ingredients, no MSG, no HFCS.

Don't you just love stained cookbook pages???

Because of my restrictions, I've made a slight change to grandma's recipe and I now use coconut amionos in place of the soy sauce.  I always let my steaks marinate 24-48 hours and marinate in a Ziploc so that the marinade is always covering the steak and there is no need to constantly flip the meat. Let your steak rest at room temperature about 30 minutes prior to grilling.

Enjoy!!!

A nice London Broil ready to grill

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