It was a wedding-plan weekend, dear reader, interspersed with some other entertainments. On Saturday, the official VM fiancee visited a Nicole Miller boutique and fell in love with a gown. At the same time, her parents were testing out the food at the venue where we’re planning to get hitched, down in New Orleans (they’re locals). Today, we bought a stone for The Ring, at a little jeweler in the East Village. (No hyperlinks for any of these places till they’ve done their jobs and I can guarantee their link-worthiness.)
In-between? We risked our very lives. And I’m not talking about today’s return-trip to New York during the Puerto Rico Day Parade.
Very rarely, I’ll find myself struck with a peculiar notion that supersedes every other priority. Saturday afternoon, for example, I noticed a remaindered-book warehouse-store, and it instantly became imperative to stop in. Why? I can’t really explain it. My library is over a thousand volumes at this point, and I’m still immersed in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which keeps me from opening any other book.
Still, we do as needs must, when the devil drives. Forty-five minutes later, I left with an armload of books, accompanied by a fiancee who has smaller arms and hence a smaller load of books.
Perhaps it’s a mood that makes me susceptible to these uncompromisable whims. I like to think I’ve been much more compromising and flexible in recent years, but how then to explain the mania that grabbed me later that evening? What possessed me, as we were doing our food-shopping Saturday evening, to grab this grotesquerie? To be fair, at the moment I picked up the Jack Daniel’s Mesquite EZ Marinader bag, I turned to my One True Love and said, “I’ll try this during the week, while you’re back in the city.”
But she’d have nothing of it. If I was going to brave a steak immersed in “EZ Marinade,” she’d be by my side. She’s a heck of a girl, that way.
So we bought a pair of unsuspecting steaks, got home, and placed them in the gelatinous muck of the marinading bag. I can’t believe I just wrote that. Anyway, the marinade needed a minimum of 30 minutes to dissolve the steak down to its constituent atoms and restore itself to life soak into the meat, so we gave it an hour while we took care of other stuff (I baked some pre-made/-cut cookies, while my girl stewed bananas in coconut milk). Then it was time for the show.
We put the steaks in the broiler. Because we’re the sort of people who bought Jack Daniel’s Mesquite EZ Marinader, the packaging comes with explicit instructions: namely, take the food OUT of the bag before cooking it. Yes, dear reader, it’s apparently necessary to warn consumers not to put A PLASTIC BAG into a broiler or onto a grill. We took the bag’s advice.
Ten or so minutes later, we got our brown-jelly-covered steaks out of the broiler. Most of the brown jelly seemed to have burned away, but we were afraid it was hiding somewhere in the broiler.
This is the last known picture of me, just a moment before my first bite. Fortunately, my digital camera has a bemusement-filter.
As it turned out, the marinade wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good, either. It was phenomenally generic. Two weeks earlier, Amy & I tried out a rib place here in NJ, but it turned out to be bar food, and the sauce on the ribs was “utterly adequate,” as she put it. These steaks came out the same way; we basically cooked up bar food at home, with better quality meat. Fortunately, we blew off Spirited Away for some Family Guy reruns, and offset the over-sweet marinade with a broccoli rabe and garlic side, but I think I learned my lesson: Never do anything on a whim in a supermarket.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to see how these frozen, microwave-able White Castles came out.