High Steaks: An Accomplishment of Adulthood
Teagan Takahashi
Over the summer my friend Kaden and I moved off campus for the first time. With this new step, we began venturing into the adult world of cooking for ourselves. After repeated jokes about how terribly ‘college student’ some of our meal were turning out, we started discussing what would be the truest mark of becoming a certified Adult™. Over a meal of individual cold blocks of tofu doused in soy sauce, we decided that true adults can cook all kinds of meats and vegetables from any cuisine of their choosing. We agreed that ground meat with spinach and rice (what one of our roommates affectionately coined “Boy Kibble”) wasn't adult enough. True adults could cook even the most classy meal we could think of. True adults could cook steaks.
To break the ice of cooking a daunting meat like steak, Kaden and I decided that we needed to have a “Garbage Steak Night” where we bought a trash cut of beef and did our best damage to it. No significant financial investment, no significant financial loss when we inevitably burnt our beef to a tough and chewy mass.
Naturally, the sauce to pick was chimichurry; We agreed that we could eat anything if it was slathered in chimichurry.
In this planning, I failed to remember that Kaden’s father is a steak snob… This means that despite my vision, when leaving Kaden to buy our steaks —thus leaving him to confusedly call his father in the meat aisle— I was leaving a steak connoisseur to aspirationally pick out a slab of meat for his eldest son cook up and make him proud.
After returning home with ribeyes in hand (and an extra friends for moral support), we got to work. We pulled out our meat thermometer, cast iron skillet, and trusty Google. With four friends (yes, another one of our roommates also came downstairs to give us cooking pointers) standing around the oiled and smoking cast iron, we debated if it was the right temperature to put the steak on and how long we would leave it for.
“This recipe says three minutes." “This one says five.” “I think we should put the steak on now since it’s smoking” “Are you sure it looks too hot.” We settled on a sensible four minutes with periodic pokes with the thermometer, and placed the steak on the pan. The crackling and sizzling was thrilling.
After several minutes of us cautiously peering over the pan, two bouts with the fire alarm, and one text form our neighbor making sure everything was okay, the steaks were removed, rested, and ready to cut.
To our surprise, the steaks were a perfectly warm pink-red.
After picking our jaws up off the floor and calming our overjoyed bouncing, we plated the steaks with chimichurry and took one hundred million photos. We had made our fantasy of adulthood come to life, and the proof was sitting in a juicy cut of ribeye in front of us. Each of us took a moment to text each of our parents a photo, and we sat together in proud, hungry, and smiling silence.
Dinner concluded with us each sharing the proud texts we received from our parents. Notably, Kaden’s mom had posted us on her Facebook before we could even finish dinner with the hashtag #ProudParent.