I cooked steak for the first time ever

... And it turned out great!

Spoiler: Awful phone pictures

Ever eat something that tastes so good that you feel kind of irrationally happy and maybe even tear up a little? I was just so glad it turned out well that I wanted to share it. I intentionally cooked it medium-well because that's how my mom likes it and I don't eat a ton of red meat, so I was slightly worried it might upset my stomach if it was too red. I was slightly disappointed at first when I cut into it because I thought it was well-done, but it was more pink near the middle.

A while back we bought some pork chops from Generic Local Grocery Store. I noticed when putting them into a freezer bag that they felt slightly... slimy, and I didn't think that was normal. Sure enough when I tried to cook them, they smelled AWFUL. They were also sticking together and just falling apart when I tried to pull them apart. My mom complained the next time she went shopping and apparently they had been getting a lot of complaints about that, so this wasn't an isolated incident. We never bought meat from Generic Local Grocery Store again. Anything else is fine, I just don't trust the meat there.

So we started going to a different store that only sells organic meat. I made some pork chops from there and they were the best I had ever made, a huge step up from the previous disappointment. My mom was in the mood for steak, so last weekend she bought a couple (pretty sure they're ribeyes, but I'm not 100% sure since this is my first time ever making it.) I was pretty nervous about actually cooking it because I had never made steak before and they were kind of expensive so I didn't want to ruin it. But it turned out pretty well!

My mom is kind of particular when it comes to steaks, so she had made it pretty clear that she didn't expect me to do too well on my first attempt. While I was eating in my room with the door closed (to keep the dogs from bugging me, poor pups had been smelling it for a while) my mom opened the door a crack to stick her hand in and give me a thumbs up. After I had finished eating, she told me that it was better than any she had ever made and was probably on par with the best she had ever eaten.

Poor dogs are very upset now because they never got any.

 

I looked up a bunch of cooking methods last night and one that I found was to salt it for half an hour before cooking to add more flavor and dry out the outside so it would sear better and not use any other seasoning until the very end (it would just burn off otherwise). I decided to just go with salt and not add anything else and I think that was a good call. The salt was more than good enough on its own. (Oh, and butter too.)