Flavoring Meat

Marinades or spice rubs would be great. Spice Rubs add a nice crust and incredible flavor, and marinades also add great flavor as well as making the meat extremely tender. Here's an example recipe of a marinade I just came up with on the spur of a moment. (best not to try it at home, just in case it turns out nasty!) Here it is.

Simple All-Purpose Marinade

Juice of 2 lemons
5 cloves of garlic, mashed and minced
3 tablespoons of Dijon mustard
1/2 small onion, diced
1/2 cup of soy sauce
1/3 cup of Worchester sauce
1/4 cup of balsamic vinegar
1/2 cup of olive oil
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1/4 teaspoon of black pepper

Whisk together all ingredients in a large bowl as olive oil is gradually poured. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

As you can see, marinades are a great way to add flavor to meats. Not sure if this is a really good one or an awful one, but you pretty much get the idea. Some people like to poke their meat with a fork to get all the marinade into the meat as well. Then, theres spice rubs, which is basically whisking together a random (or very precise) combination of spices in a small bowl, and then rubbing your steaks with it, drizzling it with olive oil to keep the spices in, rubbing a second time around. At least that's how I do it. There are a few rules however. Don't marinade things to long with acidity, or they can get mushy, or shrimps will turn into seviche (unless that's your plan.) And the second thing, have fun with it, and try to incorperate your favorite ingredients into a knock your socks of marinade. And some marinades work better on certain cuts of meat. I would rather have an orange marinaded chicken rather than that same marinade on something like brisket. And before you go dumping things in a bowl, have a clear vision of exactly what you want your food to taste like. And don't worry if you mess up, most likely people won't notice a difference. :) -Austin.

You should probably make it from scratch, just because it only takes a few minutes to make a marinade in the first place, and considering you're probably going to be marinating it for a couple of hours (or depending on how big the cut of meat is), a couple extra minutes probably won't be a big deal. Spice rubs on the other hand, can be delicious storebought, but in some cases it can get expensive and is pretty much your choice. For example, if you wanted to make a Cajun grilled shrimp with Fettichini Alfredo, the packaged Cajun seasoning is still going to taste delicious on the shrimp and is still going to add great flavor. A Cajun-spiced marinade on the other hand, would probably taste much better from scratch. There aren't really any specific marinades I reccomend, but you can always do a search on the foodnetwork website for "marinated" in the recipe search tool. I'm sure you'll get plenty of results and plenty of reviews telling you exactly how delicious those marinadese are. Once you get down the basics, you can pretty much make your own using whatever you have around the house.