The Perfect Meal Rough Draft

            Coming up with and preparing the perfect meal is an incredibly daunting task.  With the endless possibilities of food choices and innumerable ways I could go about preparing the meal, it seemed almost impossible to complete.  I had to truly reflect on what it is I love about cooking and eating before I could begin to prepare the meal.

            After serious reflection and contemplation, I realized my most memorable meals generally had to do more with the company and the events surrounding the occasion than the food.  I wanted to create the perfect recipe with all the right ingredients of company, timing and the cooking process to make my perfect meal.  I quickly realized the only person I could truly have this experience with was my dad.

            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 obsession very much anymore.

            The company was set: just my 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.  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.  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 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 organic strawberry lemonade, 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.  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 how it worked.

            After heating up the Big Green Egg, the first step was to bake the potatoes.  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, 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.  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 placed 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, seasoned and poached the eggs in the microwave and our meal was prepared.

            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, talking about our lives.  “See, now when I make dinner you will know how much time it takes,” my dad said, and 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.  It made me appreciate my dad more, and preparing the meal created space for us to talk and catch up.  It was the perfect meal before we even sat down to eat it.

            The table was set and it was time to dig in.  This was the best steak I had ever eaten.  The meat was tender, the zip sauce brought out the flavors already present in the steak.  The mild Caesar salad, baked potatoes and asparagus 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.

            I think of meals as opportunities to bond.  It is a time when people we care about join together to fulfill this basic human requirement: eating.  Being in college makes opportunities to do so with my family few and far between.  So maybe the steak wasn’t as good as I thought it was.  Thinking back, the lettuce in the Caesar salad was slightly wilted.  But it had been several months since I had seen my dad, and steak was something that always brought us together.  The meal wasn’t perfect, it was wow-worthy.

The Big Green Egg

 

Tada!