Well, sometimes life just goes our way. Yes, I know it doesn’t happen often, but hey, it does happen. Tonight I had a delightful meal that went far beyond my expectations. Here is the story…

I want a steak for dinner. It is very cold outside (January) so I don’t want to charcoal grill anything! Thus, I have two weak choices … skillet fried or broiled. I search the depths of the deep freeze hoping to find something respectable. I come up with a hunk of vacuum sealed frozen rib steak 2 inches thick. Where did that too thick steak come from?!!!

Hmmm … what to do? It is too thick to grill as a steak and it is too thin to roast as a prime rib.

Enter one kitchen guardian angel … she blesses me with a nutty idea. I accept as I have no alternative. Here we go …

Suppose I treat this hunk of meat as a skinny rib roast … if I use a small enough vertical side skillet and some small salad forks to keep it upright then I can roast it as a prime rib. Delightful if it works.

So, I turned on the Dacor® oven to a convection/sear setting at 550ºF. Holy smokes! Well, no, that comes later.

Okay, I thawed the beef and coated it with peanut oil. Then I rubbed freshly ground peppercorns and kosher salt into each side. About that time the oven beeped as the extra high temperature oven exhaust fan came on.

I stuck the two salad forks into the meat at a 45º angle down on each side and then opened the very hot oven and slid out the rack holding a steel skillet … a very hot steel skillet I might add. The forks and meat settled in flawlessly and the meat was sizzling immediately even with the oven door open. I mean to tell you the skillet was really hot. So I closed the oven and set one timer for 10 minutes and a second timer for 30 minutes.

Ten minutes later I reduced the oven heat setting to 375ºF. I kind of felt I had to do that as the oven was rather smoky inside. Understatement!!!

My kitchen guardian angel prevailed … I did not have to call the fire company.

20 minutes later I extracted the beef and I sat down to dinner, which besides the beef consisted of home grown butternut squash and a tossed salad with my recently created Hotel DuPont sesame salad dressing. Okay, a fine red wine too.

One cut to divide the beef in half was all I needed to see. Heaven on Earth! The outside was crisp and I had everything from well done to medium to medium rare to rare in the middle. What a delight! I ate a pound of this stuff like a hungry pig … forget the rest of the meal! I finally got around to the squash and the salad after many grunts and moans about dying and going to beef heaven.

So, I suppose you get the impression I felt very fortunate as the house did not burn down and the meal was to die for … that doesn’t make any sense at all, does it?

I was thrilled and I decided to bore you with my story in the hope that you too can experience this kind of delight. All it takes is a silly ass problem that shouldn’t have happened in the first place combined with a wild idea and a bit of luck, not to mention a kitchen guardian angel to keep a holocaust from happening.

So, now you have it. You just read a narrative recipe.

The End