Steak, finally...

Like many during this COVID-time, we’ve burrowed deep into domestic routine and thrown ourselves into cooking. We’ve allowed ourselves to indulge a little. You have to, right? I mean, we can’t really justify the two weeks where hot dogs featured absurdly high for the first time ever on the grocery list, then there was the run on crab, and our recurring cycle of curries peppered with the occasional (and ever-improving) home-made pastas. If everything else has been bad, this has been good.

I’ve even been reading food. Midway through Bill Bufford’s “Dirt” and just now dipping into, and enjoying much more, “Always Home,” Fanny Singer’s memoir of life and cooking with her mother, Alice Waters.

Lately, though, I’ve had steak in mind and no distraction is working. And not just any steak, steak with A.1. sauce. The memory of pungent vinegary umami flavor was reaching a gastronomical status I don’t think it ever really enjoyed with me before. Yet I do love a thing that hardly changes and I feel like I could spot this bottle on the door of my grandparents’ fridge in my sleep (right next to the selection of Kraft salad dressings). We ordered a bottle of the sauce off Amazon and waited.

This steak urge has been building with every week there’s news of incremental re-openings. Our pool opened under new rules. Stores and restaurants are pretty much opened and facing this new reality. And yet our grilling area is still off limits. So while the sauce had arrived, I felt like steak nirvana could not yet be achieved. And so we waited.

But yesterday was the day I broke. I didn’t care. I was done with waiting. I would brave the broiler and cook my steak in the oven.

A simple meal, the New York strip loin marinated a A.1. sauce for an hour, patted down and doused in steak spice just prior to entered the heated oven. On the side, broccolini dredged through the A.1. dripping from the steak marinade, drizzled with olive and roasted in the oven alongside potato wedges and slabs of zucchini.

Move over, Fanny Singer and your perfect daughter-of-Alice-Waters domestic bliss, this was home.

Chris