Steak Night

 I have an enduring memory of having steak for dinner as a child. My grandfather was a butcher and meat was always plentiful, but steak was something that happened on occasion. Normally t-bone steaks, normally done in the vertical griller, which seemed to cook everything. Maybe vertical grillers were the air fryer of the seventies. Having a look on the web it appears you can still get vertical grillers - made famous for the fact that all the fat drips to the bottom, making things healthier. Vertical grills also made great toasted cheese and gherkin sandwiches. 

Steak was always accompanied with mashed potatoes, peas and carrots. After all, this was the seventies, and that's what dinner was about. Like all good Generation X kids, I was preparing the vegetables by the age of eight. Most kids could cook a basic meal by this age. It's part of what makes our generation scary now. 

Also, I rarely order steak when I go out. Very occasionally I'll have one at the Cavenagh Hotel in Darwin on a Monday night. The steak is excellent, as is their chimichurri sauce. 

Tonight, at Chez Moi, it was steak night. Lots has changed in the years since I was a child. The steak comes from the supermarket or the local butcher at the shopping centre. It feels like it's larger steak than we had as a kid. 

I swap out the mashed potato for sweet potatoes. The small amount of grilled onion has grown, and I throw into the pan some sliced mushrooms, because I love mushrooms - who knew. As a child I thought they were poisonous - then again, we collected our own mushrooms from the paddocks and the swamp. Again, from a young age, we knew what we were picking, and Mum always checked them over before eating them. 

Then there is what you put on steak. Which in our family was always butter and Worcestershire Sauce. 

Always. 

Poor man's Steak Diane. Gone is the cream and cognac and stock and cornflower, instead there's that wonderful, umami filled goodness that is Worcestershire Sauce - nothing but Lee and Perrins or Holbrooks, no generic muck (I will make an exception for Maggie Beer's Worcestershire Sauce, which is used in the Qantas Lounge to make Bloody Mary's which are incredible). 

It's of my food memories that I enjoy - and probably why I'm one of the few people who goes through an annual bottle of the much-maligned brown wonder.

Today's song: