Gremlin Grill

So, a couple weeks ago, Big Dan the meatguy-in-training at HyVee picked me out a couple nice rib eyes. The boy’s a genius. What he has yet to learn about meat, he more than makes up for in useless sports statistics and an uncanny ability to pick when Kansas will lose in the NCAA tourney. Which is actually not difficult of late.

I got the steaks home and discovered my own uncanny ability to be overconfident in the charcoal aisle. I pride myself on never running out of charcoal. I was out of charcoal. Two beautiful steaks, no charcoal. No justice in the world, either.

Being the eternal ray of positive energy that I am, I decided to take the opportunity to try something I’d seen on Alton Brown’s Good Eats. The cast iron skillet steak. Sounds yum, duddn’t it? I inherited a few of Granny McSparin’s masterfully seasoned old skillets, and used them for the last five years for bacon, mostly. Lots of bacon. They’d be perfect.

I also decided I’d follow Brown’s recipe to the letter. Again, I don’t usually do that, and the smell of the hotter than…well, really hot skillet made the urge to toss in some bacon and maybe some onion slices was painful. But I beat the urge and followed the recipe.

Nah. Didn’t like it. I mean, the recipe did what it said it’d do. Sara’s steak was burned the way she likes it, mine was medium rare, both were good, but something was missing. Fire. Fire was missing, dammit. Whatsisface on Survivor is right: fire is life. Or death, if you’re the cow. Either way, a great steak was made a good steak due to lack of fire, or technically, due to the mess in the garage, because I found a brand new bag of charcoal in there yesterday. I grilled chicken breasts with chipotle raspberry sauce. Very nice.