Thursday, August 04, 2016

la chair coûte cher

On occasion, if it's raining during work hours, my coworker and I will do our ten-minute walks inside our office building. The indoor path that I laid out leads us into the basement level, where most of the usable space has been taken up by small restaurants, tailors, hair salons, veggie stands, foreign-food marts, fruit stands, and even a coffee shop or two. In the basement are two butcher shops, and I occasionally speak to the proprietor of one of them. That guy has had, on display in his freezer, a hunk of beef tenderloin that's almost the size of my meaty forearm, and I've been wanting and wanting to buy that thing for days.

Tonight, I finally bought it. It was expensive at W5,800 per 100 grams, but I can make several filets mignons out of it. I should have asked the guy to shear away the last vestiges of silver skin that run along the bottom of the loin, but I guess I'll just take a few minutes to do that myself when the time comes.

Filet mignon is easy to fuck up when you don't know what you're doing. Years ago, I tried the oven approach with some filet, and the results were leathery and horrible. Never again. From that point forward, I've preferred the pan-frying approach because it gives me more positive control over the cooking process, and the results have been much better ever since. It's been a while since I tried cooking a filet, so we'll see how it goes. I may cook one or two this weekend. If I do, I'll be sure to post some pictures of beefy glory.



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