My "Own-Cooked" Meal

Being a bachelor, I have, up until this point, succumbed to the typical bachelor "eat-what-and-when-you-can" mentality. This involves some rather poor choices in cuisine sometimes, but hey, it works.

Well, today I broke that cycle and made my very own homecooked meal. Now I've cooked up eggs before and made grilled cheese sandwiches, but I've never made an actual meal for myself. I decided that the KISS principle was probably a good rule of thumb (Keep It Simple Stupid!) so I chose to go with steak, salad and bread.

I won't drag you through the fun experiences of finding things at the grocery store...in places I'd never been before... (Hey, they have a meat section??!!) or (Wow...spinach comes like that??!!)...though I could have easily told you where the cold cereal and the milk were located.

Anyway, I arrived home, groceries in hand, to start my adventure. First of all, I decided to cut up part of the steak into small strips, because I wasn't sure how my "frying pan method" would (sorry...pun intended)...pan out. This was a great starting experience, because the fan over my stovetop doesn't have an outside vent...it merely re-circulates the grease and smoke. I didn't mind it so much, but my smoke alarm did. (Thankfully it was within arms' reach, so a quick removal of the cover and a 9V batteryectomy later, the little bugger remained quiet).

Now that my first meat samples were completed, I placed them on a separate plate and blessed them with a little salt and pepper. These were to be the snack cache while I assembled the rest of my meal.

My plan was to make a spinach salad (and no...I don't mean just chewing on spinach leaves!!!) with some diced strawberries and crushed dry ramen noodles. Here I ran into my first problem. I don't have a salad bowl...or anything large enough to mix a salad in. (Well, that is not entirely true, I do have a couple of cooking pots, compliments of my folks, but they didn't seem like the kind of thing to make salad in.)

Now I resorted to typical unashamed bachelor "brain-stuff". My old coffee maker has been sitting unused since I acquired my newer one, and the empty carafe was about the right size...so...

After crushing some ramen noodles to sprinkle on the salad, tearing up some spinach leaves, and dicing up a couple of strawberries, my salad was basically complete. I now turned my attention to cooking up the main portion of the steak. I cut the steak into two smaller pieces, and, after warming up the pan...and putting in a dab of butter as a lubricant (sorry, I'm using my aircraft mechanic terminology) I slapped those two wonderful pieces of meat on the hot pan.

I will admit to being a bit unsure as to how long to cook the steak. I also acknowledge that frying a steak is hardly the preferred method. However, with no grill and no knowledge of broiling, I decided that frying was better than the alternative. To make a long story short, I was pleased with the end result. I suppose they were a bit over-cooked than I normally like, but they didn't dry out and actually had a nice flavor...but I am skipping ahead in the story.

After arranging some salad on a plate, I pulled out the Wishbone raspberry vinaigrette (yes, I had to go over to the fridge just now to see how to spell that!) and drizzled some on my salad. After garnishing it with a couple of "decorative" strawberry slices, the salad was finished. I pulled the sizzling (and they were...I'm not just using cooking jargon) steaks out of the pan and placed them next to my salad. A couple of pieces of English toasting bread and a glass of milk rounded out my very first meal.

So that's the story...how did I do?