steak

Steak. Manly food. But, let's get real, it is great for women. I have a lot of associations with steak all of them good. In a hypocritical way, if I had had a personal name basis relationship with the steers outside my classroom window, that would not be true. I wouldn't want to eat Tom, Dick, or Harry. However, I have no problem with a piece of Texas prime, slabbed across my plate. Especially in the morning when I need to regain my strength. None of this frou-frou lightweight breakfast stuff. I am not, and never have been, one to swoon over a cinnamon bun, brioche, or puffy thing for breakfast. Nix the sticky jam, the butter which has to be disrobed of the aluminum wrapper, and for sure the eggs. I really do not like eggs and have had to make them all week. As a child, I was reduced to tears watching my 'Humpty Dumpty eggs" congeal on the plate, I could not leave until I ate them. ruined eggs for life. This week I have been cooking breakfast at an inn, and it is a cultural take on breakfast foods. Yeah, yeah, I know that it is a combination of English beef-busting nutrition to fuel the workers plus a sense of home economics that convinced Americans to eat eggs, sausage, and pastry for breakfast in the last century. I have made scones, passed out jams and several fluffy omlettes, frittatas, and other multi syllable breakfast items that are like their names, fluffy, not stuffy. Steak, now there is a one syllable event. However, I often feel in many events that I am a changling, not only not of this country, an ex-pat in my own world, but also switched at birth with someone from the Middle East. For me, a plate of tomatoes and olives would do much better than limpid soggy cornflakes, an egg that looks back at me, and sappy waffles. But I still lie. I want meat. I want a plate of bacon but would drop dead with a coronary. I love corn beef hash and usually get it when out at a Sunday breakfast. I used to order grilled chicken livers with green onions, ginger, and lots of soy sauce in Ashland when traveling. But steak does it all. It is exactly what I need, flavor, protein, and sexy. Yes, sexy. Steak is a morning pick me up after the pick up. It is a reminder of flesh, of strength and muscle, of Texas cowboys with rippling pecs, of American know-how. Get on little dogies, ride them cowboy. Slap them on the grill, slap them on the bed, same thing. Truly, I could by extension, gague the degree of a relationship by the breakfast food. In the same inn where I am cooking those waffles, sunny side up eyes, and flaccid bacon, the chef was bemoning that one of his past girlfriends didn't like steak. I made my observation that they probably hadn't , you know, had, you know....either. He looked at me with a bemused expression and said, "you got it. " So vegetarians...think they get off on a slab of tofu? Or, tempeh...yeah, tempeh is sexy indeed, and not. Or, portobellos, surely a large irradiated fungus that takes over Chicago is the equivalent of a t-bone. I think not. So steak it is, run through the range, rode hard, put down wet, and waiting on the plate to replenish corpuscles and muscle, salt and sinew, a direct transfusion of energy. Woman food. Tabasco, lots of coffee, and starched white tablecloth underneath the sheets of this breakfast....sooooo much better than a cinnabon.