If You Don't Eat Yer Meat, You Can't Have Any Pudding

 

 Who am I to argue with Pink Floyd? 

 
My love affair with meat began pretty much as soon as I was able to chew it. It has always been my favourite part of any meal, and the centerpiece to which the rest of the meal should be suited, so when people see me eat a plate of food and eat all the side dishes before I start my meat, they usually assume that I save my favourite part for last. 




Those people would be wrong. 

So strong is my love of meat, that I would, as a very young child, eat the meat off my plate and then claim to be full and refuse to eat any vegetables or other sides. After multiple battles with her strong-willed first born, my clever mother decided to change things up. She would serve me my plate of supper, but would leave off the meat. She then told me that I had to eat all my vegetables before I could have my meat. The woman was ahead of her time. Funny how I use the exact same technique everyday at work now, as an adult.
 

Thanks to my mother's trickery, the habit of eating all my vegetables and then my meat seems to have become part of my DNA. To this day, I eat in the same order. It's so ingrained in me that I even set the meat aside in soups, stews and casseroles. I CAN eat meat with other foods, and I don't have a meltdown when I eat spaghetti sauce and can't save the meat for last, but it feels unnatural, kind of like eating with my left hand. I also don't like it when my food touches each other. I'm a bit inflexible, I know. Weird.

So, you would think someone who loves meat as much as I do would be awesome at cooking it, right? WRONG. Horrendously wrong. By the time I moved out on my own I had pretty much mastered properly cooking bacon, but that was about it. Pork chops were always under or over cooked, chicken was always dry, and steak...well, steak was an unparalleled disaster. I either cooked the crap out of it and turned it into shoe leather, or I undercooked it and my plate would end up sopping in juice. As you know, I don't like my food touching, so steak-juicy potatoes are just about one of the worst things I can think of. When my then-boyfriend moved in with me he took over most of the cooking. He wasn't big on vegetables, so I usually made them, but I left most of the meat cooking to him. And he was really good...apart from the fact that he felt the need to drench everything in barbecue sauce. I am so sick of barbecue sauce. I have literally not eaten barbecue sauce since we broke up. I even requested my father leave the barbecue sauce off my food when he barbecued this summer. I am barbecue sauced OUT! Sadly, when my ex and I broke up, I lost my meat chef. My mother prefers her meat well done, and I prefer it medium, so I haven't had a steak cooked to my liking in over a year. And I love steak. I have since perfected my pork chop and chicken cooking skills (tip from my ex's mom; cook boneless, skinless chicken breasts for 6 minutes a side and they'll be perfect), but steak was my Waterloo.

Hence this list item. Number 17, Learn to Cook a Steak is complete.

I found this recipe on Pinterest and thought it looked like something I could do. It turned out better than I could have imagined and I highly recommend everyone try it. This lady is my saviour.

How to Cook Restaurant Style Steak at Home 

I made a few tiny changes and would make a couple more next time (and there will DEFINITELY be a next time), but here is a basic run down of what I did.

1. I bought a steak. Which was harder than I expected. The recipe called for a ribeye, but I couldn't find one so the helpful (if slightly younger than expected) chap at Sobeys suggested I try the strip loin, which was a lovely choice. It was a bit pricy, and in the future I'll probably buy a cheaper cut, but I wanted to try it out on a better quality meat.

2. Salt the hell out of it. Seriously, you put an obscene amount of salt on this beast. It has to be coarse grain salt, both sides, like a crust. And then you let it sit for an hour. About half way through I added a bit more salt, which I probably didn't need to do.

3. Crank the heat on your frying pan and rinse the salt off the steak. Dry it really well and then the recipe said to salt and pepper it with a normal amount of s&p. This is a step I'd skip. The extra salt wasn't really needed.

4. Using tongs, hold the side of the steak with the fat on the hot pan until it browns nicely and releases some grease. I also did this on all the sides, which the recipe didn't call for, but the gooey looking insides were skeeving me out.








5. Put the flat side down and cook for a few minutes. When it's nice and brown flip it over. I did this a few times until it was cooked to my liking, although the recipe just says to do it once on each side. There wasn't much grease in the pan at this point and my frying pan SUCKS so it's a bit raised on the bottom. As such, all the grease was puddling around the edge of the frying pan, so I put some butter in the pan and swirled it around.







6. Using the poke test to check doneness (see the link in the recipe posted above), I took the pan off the heat when it was cooked just under what I wanted. I wanted medium so I took it off when it was medium rare, as it keeps cooking for a few minutes after the heat is off.

7. Put some butter in the pan (I put too much), swirl it around and let it sit for 5-10 minutes.

8. Enjoy your yumminess!

 

 Happy camper right there, boys and girls.

The steak was cooked exactly the way I like it. There was no bloody goo on the plate and it cut like a dream. I did find it quite rich, but like I said, I don't think I needed to re-salt or add extra salt and I definitely over-buttered the poor bastard. Plus, it was quite a big piece of meat. Size does matter when it comes to my stomach. But now I have some yummy leftovers!!