A Personal Truth: I Can't Cook

I categorize myself as a beef enthusiast.  The food is an obsession of mine: I raise it, read about it, study it (both on the hoof and on the plate), and eat it as many times per week and per day that I can.  Needless to say, my life is an endless conquest for the ultimate steak.

You’ll understand, then, why my eyes lit up when a couple of friends showed me a video of a thick, beautiful steak searing on top of a very hot rock.  The rock was heated over a wood fire, and their subsequent pictures of the finished beef nearly made my eyes pop out.  They told me it was one of the best steaks they’ve ever had.  I thought I needed to eat one.

As it turns out, the video was taken on the other side of the Atlantic in a small European restaurant, so I won’t be popping in for a bite any time soon.  The predicament sparked a long argument between the front part of my brain – the logical, discerning part – and the more lizard-like back part of my brain that operates free from the confines of doubt.

The lizard brain said, “Do it yourself at home.”

The front part of my brain said, “You can’t cook.”

A conundrum.

My lizard brain won the argument, largely due to the fact that my beautiful wife, Gina, departed the farm for a few days to visit friends.  Her absence left me in charge of meal planning alongside our two year old son, and we both agreed that a bonfire was a great idea.

I had the steaks (I always have steaks).  I did not have a big cooking rock, so I dug through the cupboards and discovered Gina’s pizza stone.  Certainly this was a tool designed specifically for high temperature cooking over open wood fires.  The front part of my brain warned me of a phenomenon known as ‘thermal shock’, a process by which superheated ceramics explode when they come in contact with cooler substances.  The back part of my brain assured me that simply knowing about thermal shock would prevent any such occurrence.  I mean, I’d take some precautions, right?  So we started the fire.

Everything was going swimmingly: I had a tall beer, a sunset lit up the sky, the wood was nice and dry and burning, my Denver steaks were looking gorgeous on the plate in the kitchen, I had fresh picked broccoli from the garden, and the pizza stone, perched over the coals, looked darn hot.

A dab of oil was deemed necessary because I’ve observed a lot of other people dab oil on cooking surfaces before actually cooking.  The liquid pooled and started shimmering immediately; shimmering is good, I read, because that means the oil is hot.  A thin trickle ran from one side of the pizza stone to the other.  I figured that was important, as I wanted it smeared evenly across the surface.  Before I could get to smearing, though, the stone split in half with a disproportionately loud bang!

Newly liberated from a nonporous surface, hot oil dropped into the fire and created an inferno likening to the industrial incinerators that consume New York City’s trash stream.  The poor stone, forced well beyond the limits of its intended capabilities, turned black and exploded into more fragments.  Consumed with the logistical nuances of accommodating an entirely new course of action, my mind managed to interpret an audible “WOW!” from Henry, who was watching from the porch steps.

Now the front part of my brain was turned up loud: “You placed the fire awfully close to the house (for more convenient beer sips).  The fire, which has grown considerably, is perched two and a half feet in the air, supported only by the unstable, rusted, rickety grill that you dug out from underneath the shed only minutes ago.  Your son is two, curious about everything, and he seems really enthralled by the fireball; he could be drawn in like a moth.  And your dog is running back and forth through it all, worried only about her Frisbee, and totally unaware of anything she might crash in to.  What are you going to do now??”

The back part of my brain said, “Put the steaks on the two biggest fragments.  Duh.”

So I added the steaks.  I was hungry, after all.

Believe it or not, the fragments did a great job.  The beef seared nicely, though I didn’t achieve the blackened-outside-red-inside perfection I was shooting for.  My broccoli was cooked on the stovetop, so it turned out fine and the preparation didn’t cause my adrenaline to surge, though I’m rather sure the hormone had already been completely expended anyway.  I was able to eat under a summer sunset, with one eye on the view and the other monitoring the wreck of a grill, now cooling and giving off a metallic, charred stink that hung in the air like an omnipresent reminder of my culinary shortcomings.

Best of all, dinner conversation was not lacking.  Little Henry, wide-eyed and giddy, retold the tale of a huge fire and massive explosion in the back yard at least a dozen times.  I wondered, as I fell asleep that night, if he’d remember to tell Gina when she gets home.  Probably.

I hope she didn’t like her pizza stone.