Heresy

Sometimes the best gifts cost nothing.

Before we proceed: if you have strongly held beliefs about the correct preparation of steaks, you may want to come back tomorrow when we'll have cheesecake instead of blasphemy.

In what I can best describe as beautiful solidarity among the financially pinched, a special promotional code has been getting passed around my friends. You know those meal kit services that send you once-a-week boxes of ingredients and recipes? Well, there's a meat company that does the same thing. As one might expect when having meat shipped on dry ice to one's house, they ain't cheap.

However! If you get a refer-a-friend code, your first order is only $10. But that nearly-free order of meat comes with a dangerous trap: if you forget to cancel your membership, your auto-renewing order will viciously attack your bank account the next month. (I did not forget to cancel.) I don't know who first got this magical meat code, nor who they got it from, and I don't know how many people had it passed to them before it reached me. But since the meat people apparently don't get suspicious when multiple accounts go to the same shipping address, everyone in the house got a $10 meat order before passing the code on to someone else who could use a bit of a meaty windfall. For all I know, by the time I write this, somebody who lives a thousand miles away is getting their ten-dollar happy box after the code made its way to them.

When the box of meat arrived, I carried it to the kitchen. Everyone stared it, backing away slowly as if it was a trap. Eventually, one of us dared to cut the box open. With no small amount of reverence, we beheld the insane amount of vacuum-packed dead cow that had reached our doorstep. I had ordered a lot of ground beef because it's been a long time since I made a good meatloaf. After seeing that this magical meat offer was everything we hoped for, the others in the house ordered steaks which arrived in another box a short week later.

As much as I appreciated that they ordered a steak just for me, I honestly don't like steaks. And so, when it was time to put them on the grill, I politely asked them to put mine in the freezer and I would cook it later.

Before going any further, I'd like to pause and make assurances that everyone else's steaks were cooked to that still-red-in-the-middle state, complete with big puddles of coagulate all over the plates. This would be the last time anyone at this house cooked a steak in accordance with all the dictums of meat purists, but it would not be the last time anyone in this house cooked a steak.

Two weeks later, with no witnesses present, I got my steak out of the freezer. The bovine besmirchment could begin.

If you have religious views about steaks, this is your last chance to look away.

You know what I haven't had in a long time? Something I have not found competently made in the entire state of Texas? A good cheesesteak. Everyone here puts some miserable gooey sauce on them, or they make it with these leathery rags of meat, or they find some other way to make people wonder "Why does anybody like these?"

Unfortunately, we didn't have the right kind of bread. (Amoroso's Bakery is a bit too far away.) Sandwich bread seemed too... unworthy. But the rye bread that we had inexplicably purchased seemed good enough. It wouldn't be the same as anything purchased in the greater Philadelphia area. But cow and cheese on rye seemed impossible to argue with.

After putting the meat onto the cast iron griddle and subjecting it to a vicious spatula-chopping that made the kitchen sound like I had taken up blacksmithing, it was time to put this together, complete with provolone on top. It would have looked prettier had I been able to resist eating half of the cheese before draping it onto this... thing.

Our finished creation may look worse than some of the recipes I have coming up, but the steaming-hot meat got the provolone to that perfect temperature where it's almost but not quite melted.

Yes, it looks absolutely terrible. But I did not care. 

Beef sacrilege aside, I was very glad no one else was in the house. This felt like one of those moments when you really need to be alone. I'm not going to recommend using ribeye (or whatever this was) for your chopped sandwich needs. But if some of it randomly lands in your freezer at a cost of nearly nothing, I don't discourage it either.

After so much scrimping and saving, it was downright therapeutic to be so carelessly extravagant. After all, I purchased the pre-sliced provolone for this! I may have desecrated what should have been a high-dollar cut of beef, it felt so damn good. Now I need someone to randomly give me an unsolicited $700 bottle of wine so I can make sangrias.