A Wow-Worthy Meal

            “Meg, would you go make your bed, please?” my dad yelled at my sister, the line of his poorly hidden smile punctuated by two big dimples.  Megan climbed up the stairs as my dad and I hovered in anticipation; he had let me in on his plan.  Suddenly, a loud shriek came bouncing off the happy pink walls of my sister’s bedroom as she realized what my dad had done.  Plopped right in the center of her bed was the early stages of tonight’s dinner: an uncooked slab of ribs.  My dad and I laughed so hard it was soundless as my sister feigned horror.

            I live in a household with one and a half vegetarian sisters (one of them caves when cheeseburgers are thrown into the mix) and it absolutely kills my dad.  He loves meat, to the point where we would have steak about two times every week, despite my vegetarian sisters.  The only way he can justify this is that I am just as much of a meat lover as he is.  I wish I could be a vegetarian, but the idea of giving up filet mignon is terrifying.  So it was something my dad and I had always bonded over.  Now that I am away at school, neither of us gets the opportunity to indulge in this mutual love of meat very often.  Which is why when I was presented with an unexpected opportunity to spend a night at home, creating the perfect meal with someone I love so much seemed like the ideal thing to do.

            The company for my perfect meal was set: just my big teddy bear of a dad and me.  Filet mignon was the obvious choice for the entrée.  But I didn’t want this to be just another weeknight steak dinner that happens so frequently in my house.  My dad always cooked our meals on his own and would anxiously await our inevitable praise.  This time, we were going to cook it together.  I also wanted to add my own spin on our standard favorite by making the side asparagus with a poached egg, an appetizer I had just recently discovered by dining at a fancy restaurant with some friends.  On the menu would also be a Caesar salad, baked potatoes and strawberry lemonade.

            After the menu and guest list came the preparation for the meal.  Organic versus industrial is a structure I only recently began to pay much attention to after reading Michael Pollan’s fantastic book The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  Because of the newly found internal struggle within me discovered by this book, in an ideal world everything on our plates would have been organic and local.  But finding all of this in a time crunch in the suburban area of metro-Detroit in which I live was a nearly impossible feat, so I decided I would do what I could.  At our neighborhood Kroger my dad and I picked up some organic strawberry lemonade that was on sale, Michigan asparagus, filets from the deli, romaine lettuce and Idaho potatoes.  Not ideal, but not awful.  It was a compromise I felt comfortable with.

             As much as I deeply love grills for what they produce, I hadn’t the faintest clue how to use one.  My dad takes great pride in his cooking concoctions and the cutting edge tools he uses to prepare them and so there was never any need for me to learn: he would do it himself.  He may look and seem like a big manly man with his tall and wide frame and fancy gadgets but to me, they were just silly toys.  My dad’s latest cooking contraption was something I was even less familiar with: the Big Green Egg.  It is a grill/oven/smoker ceramic cooker that creates a rich, smoky flavor in the meat.  My dad is obsessed with it, and was more than happy to show me step by step how to work it, from how to heat up the coals to how to maintain the perfect ventilation.  There were moments I just could not help but laugh at how seriously he took the Big Green Egg.  I mean, it is literally a big, green egg.  What’s not to laugh at?  He would have probably thrown me on the egg if he knew that was how I really felt.  But knowing that fact for some strange reason is one of the things I love about him.

            After heating up the Big Green Egg, the first step was to bake the potatoes.  After washing them and wrapping them in tin foil we popped them on the Egg and let them cook for much longer than I would have expected. As those were cooking, we prepared the meat.  My dad said we would be doing a reverse sear, (something I, and most people who aren’t steak/grill fanatics, had never heard of) which is a method in which you heat the steaks up at a lower temperature and then heat up the egg and sear both sides.  The filets were too thick to do a standard sear.  We oiled and seasoned the meat while singing along to The Beatles music playing in the background.  After getting the meat ready, we made my favorite steak sauce: zip sauce.  Our recipe was composed of clarified butter, oregano, kosher salt, cracked pepper, garlic and Maggie’s Seasoning.  We then prepared the asparagus to be grilled, coating them with olive oil, cracked pepper and sea salt and sealing them in tin foil.  We popped them on the egg and pulled them out fifteen minutes later without opening the foil case, letting them continue to cook.  I quickly tossed the salad and seasoned and poached the eggs in the microwave as my dad told me a story about his best friend/gadget rival whom he is always at war with to prove who has the coolest stuff.  As silly as it was, I loved hearing it.  I love that my dad is still a kid at heart.

            We had started making the meal at around 8:00 and we didn’t start eating it until 10:00.  But it hadn’t seemed that long.  As luck had it, it was a beautiful evening.  Our outdoor radio reported the Tigers Game as we sat on our back deck, waiting while the food cooked, my dad telling stories with a beer in hand.  “See, now when I make dinner you will know how much time it takes,” my dad said jokingly, but he was right.  He always cooked such extravagant meals for us thanklessly.  I had no idea how much time and effort he put into our steak dinners.  I was clueless that being able to eat steak so frequently was rare and something we should be very thankful for.  And that was because my dad never complained.  It made him happy to give his family the best, or at least what he thought was best; I’m sure my veg-head sisters would have a different opinion.  It made me appreciate my dad more, and it made it the perfect meal before we even sat down to eat it.

            The table was set and it was time to dig in.  It was the best steak I had ever eaten.  The zip sauce was the key.  Though I had had it before, this had a homemade taste to it: the kind of taste you can’t necessarily pinpoint but you know it is there.  The meat was so tender it tasted like the cows had just come from a day of massages at the spa.  The zip sauce lived up to its name, bringing out the flavors already present in the steak, just giving it that extra zip.  The mild Caesar salad and baked potato provided an excellent contrast to the rich meat.  And the strawberry lemonade was the perfect thing to wash it all down.  My family likes to rate meals by deeming them “wow-worthy” or not, and after our first bite my dad and I both awarded ourselves a big WOW.  By the time we were eating, our spirits were so high the conversation flowed and my heart was as full as my stomach.

            It was the moment I had been most anxious for: my dad taking his first bite of the poached egg asparagus.  I was not only nervous because it was the only out-of-the-ordinary thing that I had brought to the table (literally).  I was nervous because my dad had given me so much crap about making it!  “Emma, quit making that, we do not need eggs when we are about to eat steak!” he kept protesting.  But this was my perfect meal and I wanted to impress him.  The reason for his resistance was that my dad and I are people of tradition.  We don’t always love change.  And a nice and simple side of asparagus in prime asparagus season and country is tradition alongside a juicy steak in my house.  The egg threw things totally into whack, although all other parts of the meal were the same.  But I needed to add the egg.  It was an appetizer I had learned about while away at school; it represented the change between this now rare steak meal compared to weekly ones we used to have.  But I felt confident that this change was for the good.  And that could mean that other changes are good too, like me going away,  Because no matter how old we get and no matter where I end up in the world, I’m going to love my dad’s steak.  And he’s going to leave eating it with me.

            He took a bite and my fingers dug into my legs.  He chewed for a couple moments until he let out a reluctant “not bad.”  I smiled, that was good enough for me.  We rotated between eating our food and nearly dying of laughter.  I was literally in tears when a mosquito bit him and he said with no intentions of being comedic, “that bastard bit me in my own damn house!”  It never ceases to amaze me how my dad can go from acting like a teenage boy to a crotchety old man within a matter of minutes.  Its what I love about him, and it is what makes him a really great dad.  And this incredible meal was the ideal thing to bring those qualities out of him.  The food, the experience, my dad, it was all perfect.  No, wow-worthy.