martha's salisbury steak recipe

I make some killer mashed potatoes. And dynamite sauces and dressings for various salads, vegetables, and the occasional unprocessed meat mass (aka, steak, chicken breast, pork tenderloin -- all those high-end meat pieces). Low-budget animal mass, however, generally throws me for a loop. I don't normally look to Martha Stewart for recipes because I have a Recipe Arsenal that usually fills our nutritional and salivator-y carnivorous needs, but I was at a loss for dinner fixings this evening and remembered seeing a pin on the almighty Pinterest that peaked my interest a few days ago.

Salisbury Steak With Onion Gravy. (So I figured mashed potatoes and corn-on-the-cob were dutiful accompaniments.)

My mashed potatoes exceeded all tastebud expectations. The corn was buttery, salty, hot, and well, what more do you expect from corn. However, Martha's salisbury steak recipe, was quoted as followed by my dear husband (honestly, he said A LOT of salisbury steak/Martha Stewart comments, and I didn't write them down, and then I couldn't remember them, and then I asked him to repeat them again, so these might or might not be in their regurgitated format):

"Martha Stewart knows some shit, but she doesn't know salisbury steak."

"Martha Stewart might know Chow Chows, but she doesn't know salisbury steak."

"I might make salisbury steak out of Martha Stewart's Chow Chows."

Oh yeah, and:

"Fuck Martha Stewart."

So, I realized after making Martha's labor-intensive recipe for salisbury steak that I never really liked salisbury steak to begin with. See, Jay has been buying Banquet Salisbury Steak TV dinners for as long as I've known him, and it's something that he gets genuine culinary joy out of but something that I've tried maybe twice in my lifetime. Because they're pretty fucking gross. But he likes salisbury steak, and like I said, I was at a loss for what to concoct for dinner, so I figured what the hay.

In my defense, I absolutely followed the directions to a T and the only change I made was to halve the recipe. The onion gravy was a greasy, sloppy mess. The final product was basically hamburgers with no bun or condiments. I doused it in barbeque sauce (due to the lack of an inedible onion gravy) and managed to only finish half a patty (while finishing off my mashed potaters, corn, and then a little more potaters).

Jay polished off two Salisbury Steak patties. I asked him for his honest opinion (because I needed to know whether this was something to add to my dinner repertoire, even though I didn't particularly care for it), and he said that it was decent. This won't be appearing on the dinner menu again.

The moral of this story is, if it looks like a hamburger patty, it might be made of Martha's chow chows. And it doesn't taste good.