Hey, Everybody,
So today I’m going to start the tale of one of our newest adventures. It involves steak. A very good steak. If you’re a vegetarian, I sincerely apologize. But...I eat meat. I love eating meat. Beef. Pork. Chicken. Fish...
Sigh. I know that it’s probably not right and in the end God will get me for it and future civilizations will look back upon me and my works with horror and disapproval. But, well, that’s the way it is. And if Veganism ever became the law of the land, I’d be out in the night, clubbing small furry animals and tossin’ them into the Crockpot when nobody was looking.
(Something about Ratatouille springs to mind. Although, that’s really a vegetable dish, so maybe... Hasenpfeffer? Rattenpfeffer? Whatever.)
Anyway, Martha and I love a bit of beef now and then. We try not to eat too much of it, for reasons both dietetic and environmental, but we do like it.
Now, a bit more background. Martha is a really good cook. David and Emily, our son and daughter-in-law, are really good cooks, too. In fact, for a long time, I thought David was headed for a career in the food services industry. I figured he’d be a chef. But, he surprised me by becoming an architect instead. Ah well. Filets and Townhouses. Six of one...
About the photo: for once, this actually has something to do with the story. This is us at the first cooking class we took, way back in 2020.
Anyway, knowing Martha’s skills and interests, David and Emily gave us a cooking class as a present back in 2020. Specifically, it was at Sur La Table, which is a chain of high-end cookware and cooking tools shops (check out their webpage here: https://www.surlatable.com/). The company is based in Seattle, but they have locations in Texas, and there is one in Austin at The Domain, which is a kind of shopping mall/residential area. Wikipedia describes it as “a high-density office, retail, and residential center.” (Again, they have a website. It is here: https://www.simon.com/mall/the-domain).
It can be kind of hard to describe the Domain. It is very trendy and sleek. Not everyone is young, but many of the customers are, and they all seem to work in one of the new high tech industries that are coming into the area. Frankly, it reminds me a bit of what the MIT area in Cambridge was like back in the ‘90s, when everything was so exciting and new, and every freshman was planning the next Microsoft.
But...we don’t go there often, partly because it is hard for us to get to, and partly because we weren’t going much anywhere during Covid, but mostly because we usually aren’t in the market for the stuff that’s for sale there. I mean, we’re probably not going to visit the Tesla Gallery (“The Gallery does not sell cars, but serves as a place to educate visitors about our electric vehicles.”) nor are we in the market for any Louis Vuitton bags.
That’s not to say anything against those products or the vendors that sell them, nor the people who buy from them. It’s simply that we’re not that crew. We are not the “target demographic,” as the marketers say.
But...kitchen supply stores? Those are a little different. There’s...you know...food there. Or, at least, tools to prepare food.
So it was that when we got the present of a cooking class...well, now...that was a very different matter, and, off we went to the Big Sur (La Table).
For Chicken.
And a brick.
More to come.
***
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~mjt
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