Sunday On the Road

     Sunday this week and last have been busy for us.  Last week our cousins were in town, and this week Mom, Cy and I were driving back from Vancouver, B.C. most of the day.  We'll be back next week, however, to celebrate my 16th birthday.

Salad. Meat Salad.

     A little over a month ago, at the swim team potluck before our the State Championships, my friend Zach brought a dish which could only have emerged from the thickets that are the brain of a teenage boy: meat salad.
     It was a version of what some of my other friends would call a "barnyard massacre," beef, chicken, and pork in one dish.  Zach's version was steak, grilled and sliced into strips, bacon, cut into pieces, and chicken, pan-fried in the bacon grease.  Mine was the same concoction, with spaghetti sauce on the side for dipping.

     Meat salad is, to say the least, a little bit revolting.  It's something about mixing the flesh of different animals.  At the same time, what's better than bacon, or steak, or fried chicken?  What's better than all three together?

     Mom called the meat salad "disgusting," and I agree it is not a great mix of flavors.  But as a novelty, meat salad is something well worth eating, not unlike a stick of deep-fried butter.  Just don't expect the flavor to blow your mind.

Twenty Three

     Today we had to pay for that wonderful day in November where we got a twenty-fifth hour in our day.  Somehow, even though it is only a single hour and we actually sleep through the change, daylight savings always has an outsize effect on an otherwise normal Sunday.   Today we rose "late," ate a late brunch, and struggled through the day -- late.
     Sometime, late in the afternoon, Cy picked out a simple spaghetti and meatballs recipe.  Cyrus assures me there was no Czech horse meat in the meatballs (but Ikea told me the same thing).  The sauce on the meatballs (and spaghetti) was strangely simple and simply strange.  Onions and a can of tomato paste where not so strange, but two cups of milk are not often found in a recipe for spaghetti sauce.

     The sauce, rich, creamy and flavored with the tomatoes, was excellent.   It was an exceedingly simple meal, and an excellent one at that.

Birthday Boy Calls the Shots

     Today was Dad's birthday, so when he came to me with a meal plan for dinner, I was happy to oblige.  The recipe was a sort of banh mi sandwich, with the meat being grilled on shish kebabs.
     The grill heated up quickly, leaving me scrambling to skewer the meat and get it out on the hot coals.  As with any meat on the grill, especially sirloin steak cut into bite-size pieces, we were back inside, slicing open baguettes and filling them to make surprisingly large sandwiches.
     Chewing through the thick bread and steak combination left us little room for conversation, but we still managed to sing happy birthday before digging into the chocolate-peanut butter cake Mimi made.