A truly memorable meal for all the wrong reasons
23 August 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I had a tragic dinner with a well meaning friend the other day (great athlete, horrendous cook) and while the food he served would have caused a prisoner riot in a forced labor camp, his foray into food prep provided me with sudden insight that served to amplify and clarify why proper food preparation is critically important for those serious about triggering true transformation. My friends culinary offering was a total disaster on a multitude of levels. It was what happens when laziness is combined with ignorance and compounded with a total lack of taste. (A riddle wrapped in an enigma tucked inside a paradox) The first course was salad-in-a-bag. I use the stuff myself but it has to be eaten quickly and for that reason I buy small bags; he had bought a monster bag from Sams Club and kept it in the moisture retaining plastic bag for the best part of a week before we got around to using it for our meal. It was one vast, tasteless mound of fiber the lettuce tasted the same as the shredded carrot which tasted the same as the onion and peppers. Time and moisture had reduced the salad components to an indecipherable mass of blandness. My wife grows yellow and red peppers and when she plucks a ripe one off the vine, the vibrancy of flavor is astounding. It is an object lesson on why top chefs insist on farm fresh produce; a just-picked pepper has an intense flavor that shines though whatever dish you use it in; assuming you dont cook it to death. Our soggy salad was topped with croutons that tasted like square cubes of those salty BBQ potato chips my teen daughter loves. Our dressing choices came in 3-for-$2.00 plastic bottles. We could have French dressing that tasted like liquid candy, blue cheese that contained no blue cheese or oil-and-vinegar that seemed as if it were mixed with crankcase oil.
Im not too big on salad. I lied as I slide my concoction to one side of my plate. Being a powerlifter, my pal poured the entire contents of a 12-ounce blue cheese bottle over half a box of crotons and then asked if he could eat mine. Salad is good for you. He mumbled between bites. Done with the first course he bought out the vegetables, steamed broccoli, steamed green beans and steamed asparagus. Plus he produced a pile of baked potatoes. The star of the show was grilled flank steak. Where to begin.a steamer is a dangerous tool left in the wrong hands and his foray into vegetable preparation showed his hands were dead wrong. He was quite proud of the fact that in order to save time and be efficient hed steamed all three green vegetables at the same time in the same basket. Hed purchased a monster streamer that likely could have held enough rice to supply a Vietnamese village for a month. The succulent tips on the asparagus had disintegrated, the tender broccoli crowns had been reduced to a blur and the green beans were still raw. All the nutrients from the asparagus and broccoli lay in the green water at the bottom of the steamer. The green beans were so stiff they could break a tooth yet my power-pal ate everything with relish and zest, Nothing like a home cooked meal here have some more. He ladled more solyant green onto my plate before I could mount a protest. He loaded his baked potato up with half a stick of butter and a half a container of sour cream. Flank steak is a brutal cut of meat and requires the deft skills of a celebrity chef to prepare properly. Tough and stringy, the optimal way to prepare it is slow and carefully. This poor cow cut was tossed onto a super hot propane grill, charred on each side and upon presentation appeared to be part of a hapless forest animal struck by lightning.
Carving it required he head back into the kitchen to obtain a sharper, sturdier blade. The knife hed first selected was not nearly up to the task and bowed like a hillbilly making music with a saw and fiddle bow. He attempted to cut me a slice but the downward pressure kept making the meat slide off the plate. He had to relocate to the kitchen where he could place the charred cinder on a wooden cutting board for better traction. Do you like yours well done? He asked rhetorically between grunts. After a few minutes he appeared tableside, beaming like Wolfgang Puck. He ate his meat with relish and gusto and consumed 24-ounces while I was chewing on my first and only bite. I understand Plains Indians in the 19th century would chew on buckskin to ward off hunger during times of starvation. I mulled this over as I chewed his grilling masterpiece. When he wasnt looking I slide my bite out of my mouth and into my napkin. Per usual he finished his and mine. So whats this culinary Chernobyl have to do with fitness? In order to really get your hands around the throat of nutrition and diet you have to come to grips with food preparation. You cannot depend on mom, the wife, the girlfriend, boyfriend or power pal to prepare your meals. Optimally we need to eat nutritious foods often in order to establish and maintain positive nitrogen balance, the optimal metabolic state wherein muscle growth is possible. In order to melt stored body fat the energy balance equation needs to be tipped into a negative status. If you ingest more calories than you consume fat loss becomes a physiological impossibility. We need strike to razor balance between consuming enough calories to stay anabolic yet not too many calories as the excess will be shuttled off into body fat storage compartments.
Ideally you should have an arsenal of healthy, nutritious dishes in your culinary repertoire. We all have our food preferences and the smart trainee identifies foods that push the fitness ball forward and jettisons foods that retard or derails our efforts. Once the good stuff is identified we need learn how to prepare it and prepare it with such a degree of competency that we look forward to eating it. Once youve come up with the beneficial foods and learn how to make them in such a way that they actually taste delicious, fast food, pizza, sweets and junk will lose much or their psychic control. Much of the attraction of sweets and junk food relate to the quickness and ease with which they can be prepared and eaten. On the other hand once youve discovered that a piece of haddock, a handful of asparagus and a serving of brown rice can be prepared and ready inside ten minutes (by you) the bad stuff loses a lot of its attraction. Check out the food network; the prep tips are invaluable and shows like How to Boil Water, Thirty Minute Meals and Good Eats can take the mystery right out of cooking. Once you enjoy foods that you can make the dietary war is all but won. Are you reading this Mongo? If so, dont get offended.
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