An Evening in the Kitchen

I like to cook. I don't know if I've ever mentioned that here before, but I know I've talked about food. Food is important to me. I'll admit: I live to eat.

So last night, I decided to cook up one of my favorites: fajitas. I don't pretend that what I cook is anything genuinely Mexican (I spent a weekend in New Mexico once, and once went to a house party in Detroit's Mexicantown neighborhood, but that's as close as I've ever gotten to Mexico), but let's play Let's Pretend.

So, I bought some shoulder steak, and asked the butcher to cut it up into thin slices. I also picked up half a dozen mild Cubanelle peppers, a few red bell peppers, a couple of big Vidalia onions, three large tomatoes, two dozen soft corn tortillas, and a great big honking jar of hot salsa.

The actual cooking didn't take so long. I chopped the veggies: the peppers into strips, the onions and tomatoes into little cubes, and then sauted them all in a big frying pan. I sauted the steak strips in a separate pan, and mixed the meat and veggies when they were all done. All of this took about 45 minutes. Total. And then dinner was served.

My kids liked the meat, and poked at the veggies. They didn't like the tortillas. My wife liked everything. So I guess this meal was a success.

The key here, though, is that the actual cooking was easy to do. You see, while I like cooking, I like eating even more. You wouldn't know it to look at me, though: I eat healthy, and stay fit. Which is also fun, but that's for another post.