Grilling Food Then Eating It

I was at my parents house and they barbecued for the first time this season. When they grill we have to handcuff my sister to the stairs cause the last few times she burned her mouth trying to lick beef grease off the grill slats.

Check out all these different kinds of roasted potatoes. My mom thinks that if she mixes a variety of potatoes on a tray that she can afford to be racist in real life, but it doesn't work like that.

It's usually tough to concentrate on stuff when I know in the back of my mind that this is somewhere.

Pleased to Meat You

My waiter at Uncle Jack's was like a combination of Christopher Walken, Jack Nicholson after he goes insane in The Shining and a human bag of cocaine. His wide-eyed, ravenous gaze and persona of an impending bloodbath made for a terrifying experience as he recited the list of specials like someone that just drank the mercury out of a thermometer. He made everyone at the table amused and uncomfortable, but the service was quite good.

I ordered the gorgeous hunk of carnage pictured above – a 35 day dry aged ribeye. Dry aging is when God sits down at a table and blows on a piece of meat until it's time to be served. It tasted exactly like it looks. It's spotlit because the flash setting on my camera is set to "blindness".

Already filled to the brim with chewed meat, I felt like it would be a smart idea to order a slice of pecan pie. I ate it while drinking a Maker's Mark manhattan, and upon completion went brain dead and lost the ability to see and hear. For the rest of the night the extent of my communicating was limited to slow, circular movements of my bottom jaw – like a cow with a mouthful of grass. Totally worth it.

TEN-DAH!!!!!!!!!

My weekend - in the midst of wrongfully fearing the impending wrath of Hurricane Irene - was spent watching countless hours of television & films, drawing pictures of sad Italian girls and having staring competitions with my dog (I win every time). Also, as I'm sure was true with most of you, there was a lot of eating. A LOT of eating.

Here's the start of a gigantic pot of Steak Pizzaiola, which for Italian American purposes I will shorten to Pizzaiol. As all of you know, "pizzaiol" is Italian for "something you put in your mouth that causes you to ejaculate". I experienced the reality of this definition on Saturday. Meat, often a cheaper cut of meat, is left to cook over a long period of time amidst a savory gangbang of tomato sauce, peppers and onions. The result, as you can imagine, is unfathomably tender and flavor infused - giving true meaning to the term "melt in your mouth", which is also how my great grandmother described the prank dentures I casted her out of nutella.

Post-Op Steak Dream

I return to you from the wretched confines of the Operating Room - my pelvis freshly incised and romantically packed with large rectangles of mesh to repair the unfortunate ruptures that transpired upon my abdominal wall. Bi-lateral hernia surgery! Gross! I tried to write a bit sooner after the operation, but I was under the influence of a notable amount of percocet, and what I thought was me sitting at my desktop diligently typing on my keyboard actually turned out to be me lying face-down on the floor with my eyes closed, tapping my fingers on the carpet.

The surgeon gave me photographs of my insides - pre and post op. "Put them on your food blog!", some of my sicker, more deranged friends suggested. What the fuck is wrong with you people? Have you no tact? Actually in all honesty it was quite difficult for me to resist doing just that. But I managed, and instead I present you with photos of what I ate upon going out to dinner after the sensations of stabbing and fire in my stomach subsided.

When scallops are good, they are so fucking good. Especially when they're in a swimming pool of corn, scallions, watercress and celery puree.

A T-bone steak. Covered in fried onions. The next surgery will be upon my heart.

There Is A Lot At Steak

You can marinate a steak if you want. Stab holes in it and put it in a Ziploc bag with a bunch of bullshit and leave it in the fridge overnight. But I've always found that to be a bit extraneous. Mainly because I want my steak to taste like steak. If you purchase a halfway respectable cut of meat from the butcher or grocery store, all you need to do is molest it with sea salt and crushed black pepper, ground with the pepper grinder you felt gay buying at Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Fangs

Angelo and Maxies. Delicious Manhattans and things that look like this.