the lover and the fighter.

I love shopping for meat.

And I especially love shopping for meat with my husband.

We plan entire Saturdays around breweries and butcher shops. The ideal scenario fills him with enough beer to be happy and agreeable, blinding swiping the credit card for mildly unreasonable meat purchases.

It is mid-afternoon and he is warm and fuzzy. We walk up to a butcher counter— perhaps tucked into the back of an unassuming neighborhood shop, multi-stall market, or gourmet chain. He looks over to me. “Let’s get a nice steak for dinner-- a really nice steak.”

My face scrunches critically. I become nervous. Why do we deserve a really nice steak anyway? Did we work that hard to drink those beers? Are we pretentious urbanites who have justthatmuch disposable income? Or perhaps we are just ignorant. Then, a wave of insecurity floods, showing the unflattering slump in my shoulders. Anyone can ask for a really nice steak. It’s the eater who knows better that asks for specialties and deals, for the expert’s advice. “Let’s see what they recommend.”

What I need is complexity; something with a challenge. If given an option too straight-forward, I’ll be bored after a few bites, a few moments. Give me something with bite and good flavor; I’ll come back for more. So for better or worse, if we’re buying a steak, our decision frequently lands on the most expensive, a Porterhouse. He can let the tender filet melt in his mouth while I nibble on the New York Strip, slicing it thin, eating half for dinner and carefully saving the rest to top a salad the next day. (Did I mention he hates leftovers?)

See, balance is key. I feel confident that if we purchased a whole cow, not one bit would go to waste. I’d present him with pristine plates of succulent steaks while braising tougher bits in my red ceramic soup pot for me to eat for days, weeks. If we both craved the same cuts, everyone loses, especially the poor cow. This way, we’re not conflicting, but complimentary.

I’m willing to go out of my way to be frugal and resourceful; he’s more about quality and time management. But you’d better believe that if I grind bits of scraps, carefully season them, and stuff them into plump sausages, he’ll sure as hell eat them. And enjoy them too. (Dammit.) But you know what? Sometimes, there’s nothing better than a foolproof, finely marbled filet.

a meat journey and the beer trek.

Coercion and manipulation are the surest signs of love, as long as they are thinly veiled as "encouragement." After nudging the man to write about his affinity for expensive, esoteric craft beers, I've realized that no matter how I spin it, my motives for trying to get him to write an incomplete sentence and snap a quick bottle picture "to share his genius with the world" are not pure. Instead, they are not at all unlike buying him a book for his birthday with the hope that he will suddenly devour stacks of novels and spout philosophical quotes in casual conversations.

But beer is his passion, his escape; his vehicle by which to explore the country and the world while relaxing after a long day's work. The experiences of going to out of the way pubs and hole in the wall liquor stores have not escaped me even though I am deprived of the actual tasting of the beers, as an unfortunate wheat-and-nut allergy has left me to be a stout-sniffer and branding criticizer. I will, however, take a bit of credit for pressing him to peek into every bar we pass and make late-night runs to party stores even though his obsession is slowly creeping out of his beer fridge and into my sewing area; soon it will encroach upon my art corner and meat storage unit.

What's a beer teetotaler to do whilst supporting an expanding hobby with a high alcohol content? Make small talk with the over-eager college boy gulping happy hour hefeweizen ("It's OK honey, I'm sure he was gay...") while her man waxes on about last year's bourbon barrel-aged bottles with bartenders? Or perhaps make note of the details in the markets we've entered? I have eyed the extra-long counter piled exclusively with red plastic cups next to the imposing touch-screen virtual bartender on the UCSB campus uneasily, thinking of 19-year old sorority girls with poor judgment; daydreamed of the visionary Highland Park 7/11 employee who makes his mark selling $25 bottles of last year's Christmas ales next to the ubiquitous rotating hot dog stand to the sound of mariachi music; and chatted and shuffled to distract cashiers at gourmet stores from questioning sales of unlabeled 12-ounces while quickly shoving them into brown paper bags. All in the name of encouragement. And meat.

See, we have a whole schtick going-- and neither of us can bear to deprive the other of our respective passions for brews and burgers. Supportive we are of weekend trips to breweries and butcher shops, of gifting each other with beer- and bacon-of-the-month club memberships, and of running like hell to burn off the calories. But where will the line be drawn? Will we keep playing this coy game until one of us decides to really pursue our sidetracks as something gainful? Can I turn a blind eye if he decides our refrigerator would live a better life as a mega-sized kegorator because I'll jump on the opportunity to turn his gadget nook into a pen for plump pink pig?

more about dad than meat.

It didn't come as too much of a surprise to hear, after inquiring about some clanking background noise, that my dad was eating alone at an all-you-can-eat buffet in Mississippi while on his business trip to the chicken farm. "Really, I find it isn't a bad option," he said cheerfully, "when you just want to eat some meat." He proceeded to tell me about the alligator gumbo he had for lunch at a joint in New Orleans that he ducked into that afternoon to avoid a sudden downpour.

Many of the running jokes my family revolve around my dad and I's culinary adventures. When he ran the sound system for ethnic festivals at Hart Plaza in Downtown Detroit, he brought home rescued crates of leftover foods that us lower-middle class Midwestern folk would never have been exposed to otherwise in the early 1980s-- spicy curries, pierogi with thick Polish sausages, Styrofoam containers bulging with hummus and baba ghanoush. Along with his job downtown came trips to Detroit's Eastern Market (the largest public historic market in the country) for piles of cheap produce, leading to an infamous vat of green, lumpy brussels sprouts soup, which was mildly traumatizing for 4-year old me.

A later Eastern Market expedition resulted in a 5-pound box of quickly wilting basil. Two days (and two industrial blenders) later, our cupboards and freezer were filled with dozens of jars of pesto and the house reeked of garlic. During school that year, I faced much ridicule for my green pizzas, but by that time, I knew that my potato chip and bologna sandwich-eating lunch buddies didn't know what they were missing.

When I was a little older, I took up more of an interest in his kitchen experiments. Together, we came up with amazing concoctions. Some of them were simple, like our orzo salad for which tasting the most expensive aged balsamic vinegar was a must or the lavash wraps that always warranted piles of meat and cheese samplings at the deli counter. We will surely be remembered for our more esoteric inventions-- salami and peanut butter roll-ups or our ultimate classic, corn dog bread. Here's the recipe:

1 box of Jiffy cornbread mix
1 package of hot dogs

Follow directions on box for cornbread. Pour batter into casserole dish and drop in hot dogs lengthwise. Bake at temperature indicated on box.

Serve with a knife, fork, and your choice of mustard.

Cheers to my ingenious dad. (Just make sure you brush your teeth when you get home,you know how mom hates it when you have alligator breath.)