Marsha made a mistake this week. A horrible lapse of judgement. She asked me to make dinner. Now normally I’m good at dinner. I’m a good cook for things like fish and chicken and vegetables, the latter is a remnant of the 20 years I was a vegetarian. But meat is different. Meat is difficult. Oh I’ve made burgers but burgers are simple. Whether it’s chicken or beef, tuna or veggie you cook them until the inside is as hot as the outside. Simple. And I guess when I was a kid it was our job to “make dinner”, which usually consisted of taking the roast, in a pan with veggies, out of the fridge and putting it in the oven when we got home from school, hopefully after turning the oven on. So I guess that’s not hard either. But a steak is a different story. I’ve never been good with steaks. The last time I cooked a steak was back in Minnesota. We got some of those quarter inch thick breakfast steaks. You know the ones that even a complete idiot can cook in one minute? I managed to burn them AND leave the centres raw, which I think of that as quite the accomplishment. Marsha has made steaks before so when she bought them I figured she’d take care of it. Then on Thursday we had this exchange. 



When I got home I first made a nice potato, green pepper, and onion side dish as a warm up. While that was cooking I checked Google. Anything you want can be found with the right Google search. I even found instructions for making an atomic bomb, oddly enough while I was looking for how to cook a steak. Google is weird sometimes. After more searching though, there it was. How to Make the Perfect Steak. To my disappointment however, the recipe called for cooking it in the oven at 250 degrees F for an extended period of time. That just didn’t sound right to me. Then I found another recipe from BBC Food. You can always trust the BBC to do everything right. To include all the little hints and details and important bits of information that places like Gourmet.com or Fox News might miss. The recipe I found was exquisitely detailed. It covered pans and marinades, and how long to cook for thicknesses vs desired doneness and everything else you’d need to make the perfect steak. It looked like exactly what I needed, until I was ready to start. Then I found they did omit one little detail, how hot to make the pan. You’d have thought that would be the first thing to put, but no. So I winged it. At first the pan was too hot. Step one was to seer the meat. I assumed that searing consists of putting it in a pan that’s almost glowing red and letting it scorch a bit. Apparently, that’s not right. But after some adjustment the steaks came out passably good. 

But that wasn’t the only food related issue this week. We were at the store and in the frozen section I came across a brand of frozen pirogies. For those of you that don’t know, pirogies are pouches of dough  filled with a mixture of mashed potatoes, white cheese, onion and spices. They’re good. Not recommended for those needing a high fibre diet, but we like them. Anyway what caught my eye wasn’t what was in the box, rather the name on the box.

Cheemo Brand Pirogies.

Now, I’m not a business person so maybe it’s just me, but I have an aversion to anything called Cheemo. Somehow it doesn’t bring up memories of warm family get togethers or of loved ones gathering around the table to share a meal. Rather, it brings up something cold, clinical, medical. It just doesn’t strike me as a good connotation for food. Especially when one of the side effects of Chemo is not being able to eat. Unless of course they found a way to deliver actual Chemotherapy in pirogies. That I could support.

Anyway, we were at the store partially because I was looking for rolled oats. Not quick oats, not the flavoured, sugared, packaged, stuff either. No I wanted ordinary Quaker rolled oats. We could get them bulk but by an odd quirk, bulk is more expensive than packaged, at least that’s what we’d found up here in the past. This time though, we couldn’t find anything but quick oats. Finally after several weeks of searching, we found them and herein lies another weird name. Quaker Rolled Oats in the red bag, the name and package used for at least a century for regular oatmeal is gone. Now, at least in Canada, they are called Quaker Large Flake Oats. I don’t think of oats when I read Flakes. Of course on the French side of the package they’re called Gruau Gros Flocons. Mmmm doesn’t THAT sound delicious. And they now come in a bright yellow package. Even after we found the package we weren’t sure they were normal rolled oats until we opened it up and tried them. I really have to wonder though, at what point did someone decide that completely changing everything about the product was a good idea? Who came into the office one day and said “Let’s try and hide our product from the customer. That’ll help sales.” Was this by any chance the same guy that came up with KD for Macaroni and Cheese? Now I’m not a business person and I don’t mean to sound like an old guy shaking his cane at “the wold going to hell in a hand basket”. But I’d think there is a certain value in not confusing your customers. 

Or not insulting them. I don’t know if they’re running it in the states, there’s an ad up here for Best Buy. It shows a middle aged guy in a Best Buy and he can’t understand what everyone around him is saying. Finally one of the clerks turns to him and starts talking in English. The message being; at Best Buy we speak your language. OK fine, except the other “language” they are speaking is the beeps and squawks of a modem dial up handshake. To me that says “At Best Buy we’re fluent in obsolete technology”. Somehow I don’t think that’s the message they wanted to convey. But then I’m not a business person.

And that’s something I’m proud of.

Doug & Marsha.

PIX: A special sneak preview this week. These are a couple of shots from a prototype of Inuktun’s new infrared camera. I had to test it and to be honest I found myself playing with the thing as it was so bloody cool. OK, it does make me look like a zombie, but it was fun to play with.