In The Matrix (1999), Cypher jacks into the Matrix to meet with Agent Smith to arrange a trade. He wants to live in the Matrix as someone famous and important in exchange for giving up his shipmates. In that scene, he is in a restaurant eating a particularly bloody piece of steak. That’s me; I like my steak medium rare.
Unlike actual chefs who judge the degree of a steak’s doneness by touching it to assess its firmness, I use time and temperature. I set the grill to a specific setting, and I give the steak five minutes before turning it. I turn it every five minutes a total of four times, and it is perfectly medium rare. I so love science.
This afternoon, I set out to cook two large ears of yellow corn and a thick juicy piece of USDA Choice boneless ribeye. The ambient temperature was 106F. I closed the grill and cooked my victuals. When I returned to pull my corn and meat from the grill after the last five-minute interval, I found the entire grill contents aflame. Merde!
The result was charred corn and well-done steak. It would have been to the taste of his most Orange MAGATness, but not to mine. Double Merde! Susan did her best to rescue the culinary disaster – A1 steak sauce can cover a multitude of culinary errors. I added a pickled serrano pepper for good measure. The complete fiasco looked like this:
We had a good chuckle and ate a hearty meal. I think that the ambient temperature contributed to this culinary misadventure – if not by over-cooking the ingredients then by overcooking the cook’s brain. 🙂