“Do you eat red meat?” a doctor asked me in December. Yes, I told her. “Good, she said. “Eat more of it.”
If I could eat steak every day, I would, and mostly skirt steak, which is super-yummy and comparatively inexpensive and nearly foolproof to make. You do need the right cast iron pan, or griddle; a link to the griddle I use in the episode notes. Or you might be one of those fancy people who have an over-the-range broiler, which I just now learned is called a salamander broiler. If so, I envy you! (Range is pretty sweet too.)
I neglected to mention in the audio some family steak lore. My dad was working at the Blue Mill Tavern, the Portuguese steakhouse across the street from where he grew up in New York’s West Village. He brought my mom there on one of their first dates, whereupon she ordered a steak… well done. He was crestfallen but married her anyway, and wound up having two extremely carnivorous kids, to whom he’d dole out hunks of raw chop meat as he made himself solo portions of steak tartare. I recently gave Matt Welch’s eight year-old, who super-appreciates food and is an adventurous eater, a bit of raw burger meat as I was making patties. She approved!
A few corrections: Around the 12-minute mark, I say “flank steak” when I mean skirt steak. And those motorcycle rides Marlon Brando gave my dad? Not the 1950’s but the mid/late 1940s. Management regrets the errors.
Episode notes:
I do pretty much exactly as she does in the video, except that I use a griddle, as I tend to make long strips of meat that I don’t cut into pieces before cooking.
Super basic, no complaints Lodge reversible cast iron griddle, $34.90 on Amazon
The Real Real World, by Hillary Johnson and Nancy Rommelmann
“I’m 74. I’m not gonna stop eating here because some guy at the Times doesn’t like it,” says a longtime customer, when Peter Luger got panned.
The last time I was at Peter Luger Steakhouse (bring cash!) it was not as good as I remembered, but hey, still good. As for “some guy at the Times,” that would be Pete Wells, who, if you have not read his 2012 review of celeb chef Guy Fieri’s restaurant in Times Square, man oh man, all I can say is, you’re welcome!
My and Hillary’s suite in the Four Seasons Hotel in New York looked something like this. I recall writing at the time, “Please do not let us waste these beautiful rooms on sleep…”
Just before we left on the Real World trip, Hillary and I took some of the money we’d made on the book (a princely $7000 each, no royalties) and spent about $200 on dresses at the Betsey Johnson Outlet Store south of LA. The dresses didn’t exactly look exactly like this; they were shorter and tighter and made out of some sort of stretchy polyester…
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