So Saturday evening rolls around, and I have no plans. I’m 43, and a lot of my friends are married with children now. The rest are probably on dates. I date too, but I have no date tonight.
So I try to think of something fun to do, and I come up with the idea of cooking. I love to cook, and I’ve been cooking for about a year now. I cooked when I was a child too, but then I took a 30 year break.
I’m back in the cooking game now, and tonight I hit the local Key Food in my neighborhood, Astoria, Queens, around 7pm. I do a bunch of regular shopping, and then I have to decide what I want to make for dinner. I settle on steak, because I’ve been eating a lot of soy and tofu products lately, which I love, but I want to treat myself to some red meat.
London Broil is on sale. I know I’ve eaten it, but I can’t remember if I’ve cooked it before.
I buy a bunch of green beans to go with it, which I plan to saute in butter, salt, pepper and garlic powder.
I google a recipe for how to cook London Broil, and it says to let it rest at room temperature for 30 minutes. Then you make slits in the steak on both sides with the pointed tip of a knife.
Next you spread dijon mustard on both sides, and then you sprinkle with salt and pepper.
I have a grill pan with a dollop of butter heating on the burner, and when the steak is ready to go, I place it on the grill. I grill it for two minutes, flip, then grill for two more minutes.
I turn off the burner, remove the grill pan from the heat, and let the steak sit for about ten minutes in the pan.
We’re shooting for either rare or medium rare here, according to the recipe, and my preference is for medium-rare. I used to order everything medium-well, and I’ve only recently converted to medium, and then on occasion medium rare. So rare seems like another universe.
When the ten minutes is up, I place the steak on a cooking board and cover it with tin foil. It’s supposed to sit for another ten minutes like that.
Then I work on the marinade. I add water to the grill pan, scrape the burnt ends of the steak, and add another pat of butter. All this ooey gooey goodness starts to cook down, and it smells incredible. I finally turn the burner off the grill pan after about three minutes, and the marinade is ready to go.
I let the steak continue to sit as I cut the tips off the green beans. Then I saute the green beans in some butter, salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Five minutes and they’re popping.
I check the steak, and it looks somewhere between rare and medium rare. So we’re good to go.
Now I set about the business of slicing up this mofo, which is one of the most important parts of the whole London Broil cooking experience.
The recipe says to slice the steak thin, at an angle, and against the grain of the meat. So that’s exactly what I do. I turn the steak on a diagonal and I use my large knife to slice it. My cutting yields about ten slices of various sizes.
I line up about ⅔ of the steak slices on a plate, I add the butter beans, I pour some barbecue sauce on the side, and I dig in.
Bang! Boom! It’s an explosion of flavor. What I realize quickly though is that this sucker is rare, not medium-rare. It’s slightly bloody on the inside, and it’s chewy too. It’s like you’re tearing through still-intact muscle tissue with each bite.
But no matter, because despite the rareness, it tastes pretty freaking good. I dip a few slices in barbeque sauce, and before I know it I’ve finished the steak. I polish off the rest of the butter beans, and I’m done.
So this is rare, huh? That’s what I contemplate. Because in the span of about six months, I’ve gone from being someone who orders their burger well-done, to medium, to medium-rare, to now eating a semi-bloody rare steak. And I like it. A lot.
So that’s cool. Am I getting in touch with the true carnivore that lurks within us all? Who knows? I’m still trying to mostly eat soy-based products, for moral reasons, for the health of the planet, and for my own health.
But everyone once in a while, I do like a steak.
Does that make me a criminal? No, I don’t think so.
It makes me human.
