Falling in Love with Roast Beef

I remember when I first fell in love with meat. I was 12 and we were at Lake Tahoe at a church convention. We were not well off by any means, but we had kind friends who looked after us. One of these was a girl a little older than my sister, Kathy. Her name was Dorothy and she was in college. I think my mother became friends with her mother a couple of years prior when we went to the fall church convention in Penticton, British Columbia. Maybe Dorothy was acting on her mother’s instructions to be kind to us. Well she was very kind.

She invited us all out to dinner…a very rare occurrence in my childhood to eat at a restaurant. It seemed like it was a very nice restaurant, though looking back I probably have eaten in better places since. But at the time it was very grand, indeed. The only drawback in my mind was the menu. The main courses offered only 2 items: roast beef or trout. Since I hated fish, I was dismayed that the only thing I could choose was roast beef. My lovely grandmother, God rest her soul, was a terrible cook. And since we lived with my grandparents, I was very familiar with her cooking. She was a great pastry chef, but she just didn’t make good meat. The Sunday roast chicken was greasy, the hamburger concoctions questionable, but the roast beef was inevitably dry and tasteless. In order to eat it, I always had to put a lot of ketchup on it.

So when the waiter stood in front of me after getting everyone else’s orders, and me being last because I’m the youngest, I didn’t know what to do. “Try the trout” my brother Randy said. He loves fish and was really excited to order something as exotic as trout. “No, Tina doesn’t like fish. She’ll have the roast beef,” my mother said for me. Then I piped up “with a lot of ketchup, please.” Dorothy and my mother exchanged glances and laughed. My mother said, “Try it without ketchup. You’ll be surprised. If you don’t like it, you can then ask for ketchup.”

Now I was really worried. While we were waiting for our food to be prepared, I was fretting about how was I supposed to eat dried roast beef with nothing to help choke it down? Eventually our food arrived. Randy was thrilled that the head of the trout with its eyes still intact was staring at him. “I’m going to eat the eyes!” he said in excitement. I shuddered and thought him very strange. Then I smelt something wonderful as the waiter placed my plate in front of me. I did not see a dark brown lump of stringy beef…instead I saw something pink and glistening and smelling wonderfully strange. “Go on, try it” my mother coached me. Tentatively, I picked up my fork and knife and cut a very small sliver of the beef. I put it to my mouth and put my tongue out to taste it. I felt all the eyes at the table watching me. “Don’t play with your food. Put your fork in your mouth and eat it” my father barked at me from across the table. Gulping, I quickly did as he commanded and my eyes must have popped open because everyone started to laugh. I had never tasted anything so good, the texture and feel of it in my mouth was like nothing I ever had before. And from that moment on, I realized that it is not the beef, but it is what you do with it that counts.


HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!!!