I love food like I love music -- there is no forbidden. Just as I love country and 80's love songs, I also love baloney on white bread and Jack-in-the-Box's 99-cent chicken sandwiches. And just as I like exploring the edgy music of friends with far more eclectic tastes, I also love to find new tastes even if they're considered haute cuisine. (I have a prejudice against haute-anything.)
I thought of this because my wife and I just had an amazing meal. We were out shopping until 9:30 pm, so it was too late to cook anything extremely extensive but I was determined to use our new gas grill. She bought me a gas grill for my birthday because we wanted to be able to grill on a moment's notice, and isn't 9:30 pm on weeknight the perfect time to prove a gas grill's advantage over the trusty charcoal one I'd been using all these years?
So we took an extra steak we had left over from the weekend, rubbed salt and pepper into it and threw it on the grill. Then we took a brandywine tomato from our garden, sliced it, dusted it with sea salt (a surprise gift from a friend over the weekend) and fresh cracked pepper, and drizzled olive oil (a tiny sample bottle that we got as advertising shwag at some fair) over it. A second brandywine got the same treatment with the additional of shredded basil, also from our garden, and some mozzarella. Both awesome.
Borrowing a funny combination my brother showed me while he lived on a farm, we also had fresh, raw radishes and buttered bread. A bite of buttered bread, followed by a bite of pungent, earthy radish. I hadn't had that since I had it with my brother more than 7 years ago, but it brought me back.
And the finishing touch? Orange salad! Non-dairy cool whip, orange Jell-O powder, cottage cheese, and mandarin oranges from a can.
It's times like this I wish I could just grow and cook food as my day job.
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