A VERY important, and also unpredictable discovery was made last night.
Steak? Is AWESOME.
I spent yesterday alternately cleaning and crashing. Usually I’m one of those weird people who really kind of enjoys the housework. Am a big freak, yes. But lately more and more of it has been falling either to Joey or to the wayside. Although he has stepped up wonderfully. But yesterday I decided to Clean The Apartment, and even though this would ordinarily take me about three hours, I spent eight. But it is done, except for the mammoth pile of clean laundry on the couch which I am studiously ignoring.
So needless to say, I was exhausted. And more than willing to have my husband fed at his parent’s house when they invited us over because they were grilling steaks. “I’ll have a bite, too.” I said optimistically. “Good!” Encouraged my love. “You could use some protein.”
Now for a little bit of back story, I have been a notorious meat-hater since the dawn of time. There is an infamous family legend of how I, an innocent and trusting four year old, was watching my mother make meat loaf and asked, “Mamma, what is meat loaf made out of?” And my mother, who cannot pass up a joke, responded, “Well, honey, it’s made out of little cows with big brown eyes just like yours.” My mother insists that most of this phrasing is my own dramatic embellishment, but I REMEMBER and I was REALLY TRAUMATIZED. Also, ewww, meat loaf.
But I also remember being very young and watching a Shirley Temple movie where she sang, “You gotta eat your spinnach, baby.” and thinking spinnach must be some form of sausage if it was so disgusting that there needed to be songs to cajole children into eating it. It never occured to me that spinnach was a vegetable, because I have always LOVED vegetables.
And lets not forget the Sloppy Joey Incident of 93. Because, you can’t MAKE me eat this awful disgusting-ness, not even if you TORTURED me, not even if you CHAINED me to the table ALL NIGHT. I would rather DIE sitting here!!
And maybe I then chewed some of it up a little and spit it back on my plate with dramatic vomiting noises, because NO ONE could be expected to eat food with BARF on it.
Traumatize ME with developmentally-innapropriate anthropomorphism, will you, mamma?
And while I am much more mature and less dramatic about it now, I have never really learned to like meat much. I like bacon, if it is very crispy, and fish is usually safe (does that count as a meat?) and chicken can be somewhat tolerated if I can politely ignore any bits with unpleasant textures. But hamburgers? Are the devil’s food (don’t get me started on meat loaf) and really anything with ground beef is out. When Joey orders a steak at a restaurant, I will have one small bite because I like the flavor, but no more because it is too chewy. Really, I think texture is my biggest problem.
And that leads us right up to now. Last night we got to his parent’s house, and after I frightened my poor little sister by interrupting her mid-sentence to go throw up, Joey kindly fixed me a plate. Heavy on the mashed potatoes, and a few little pieces of steak for his delicate bride.
And I discovered that steak is the best food in the whole world. I was in some strange, steak-induced delirium where I asked for more, more, MORE steak repeatedly. I may even have gone so far as to call my husband on his cell phone when I ran out of steak and he wasn’t in the room. I ate more than anyone else last night, something like two WHOLE pieces of steak. And then I Had Energy! And Wasn’t Nauseous At All!
In spite of being exhausted from a hard day of actually moving around, I stayed up until 12:30, talking. I felt GREAT! And Joey and my mamma, who both know how I ordinarily feel about beef in general, gaped in amazement and asked each other, “who is this T-Rex and what has it done with our Lucy?”
We took some leftover steak home in a bag. And I ate some of it for breakfast? And lets just say that Joey hasn’t had such a nice morning since, oh, May 17?
It is agreed now that I must have steak. Every. Single. Day.
