I love steak because it tastes great and is packed with the nutrients you need to keep busy lifestyles on track. But there's more to it than that for me.
Steak is important because it makes ordering off a menu quick and easy. That's something I place a high premium on as much as I travel. And I guess the reason for that goes back to my roots.
When I was a kid, we rarely ate out. Our meals were eaten at home and cooked by my mother. We might go to a restaurant once a year, and when we did it was a big deal. My brother, sisters and I knew that we had to be on our best behavior in public. We didn't dare act up.
I remember the first year I left Texas at 18 after signing to play baseball out of high school. All the sudden I was in Marion, VA, playing minor league ball and having to eat lunch every day at a restaurant. It was a small town and none of the players had a car, so we always walked together down the street to a restaurant. It was your typical small town café with a counter and booths, and all of us gathered there at the same time every day.
I can remember the challenges of deciding what I wanted to eat so I could order. I just never had those kinds of food choices before. At home, when Mom cooked, you ate whatever was put on the table. Now, all of the sudden, I had to select. My solution was usually just to order whatever the daily special was.
It wasn't until I made it into the big leagues in New York in the late 1960s that I began to eat steak regularly when I dined out. In those days, steak restaurants in New York all were named after someone famous, and it was a big deal to go to one of them. But eating steak completed my desire to simplify the process of eating out. I could choose steak time after time without spending a lot of time looking over the menu. It didn't hurt that I also loved steak.
That preference for simplifying the process passed to my children as they grew up and started making their own food choices in restaurants. I really didn't realize that had happened until my young son Reese went on a vacation with some neighbors from Alvin.
They stopped for lunch the first day, and he surprised our friends by ordering steak off the menu! He thought everyone ate steak at a restaurant during lunch because that's the way he'd been raised.
I apologized for not telling him differently, but I couldn't fault Reese. He knew as a kid what I didn't learn until I was an adult: Steak is the best daily special in the world.
Steak is important because it makes ordering off a menu quick and easy. That's something I place a high premium on as much as I travel. And I guess the reason for that goes back to my roots.
When I was a kid, we rarely ate out. Our meals were eaten at home and cooked by my mother. We might go to a restaurant once a year, and when we did it was a big deal. My brother, sisters and I knew that we had to be on our best behavior in public. We didn't dare act up.
I remember the first year I left Texas at 18 after signing to play baseball out of high school. All the sudden I was in Marion, VA, playing minor league ball and having to eat lunch every day at a restaurant. It was a small town and none of the players had a car, so we always walked together down the street to a restaurant. It was your typical small town café with a counter and booths, and all of us gathered there at the same time every day.
I can remember the challenges of deciding what I wanted to eat so I could order. I just never had those kinds of food choices before. At home, when Mom cooked, you ate whatever was put on the table. Now, all of the sudden, I had to select. My solution was usually just to order whatever the daily special was.
It wasn't until I made it into the big leagues in New York in the late 1960s that I began to eat steak regularly when I dined out. In those days, steak restaurants in New York all were named after someone famous, and it was a big deal to go to one of them. But eating steak completed my desire to simplify the process of eating out. I could choose steak time after time without spending a lot of time looking over the menu. It didn't hurt that I also loved steak.
That preference for simplifying the process passed to my children as they grew up and started making their own food choices in restaurants. I really didn't realize that had happened until my young son Reese went on a vacation with some neighbors from Alvin.
They stopped for lunch the first day, and he surprised our friends by ordering steak off the menu! He thought everyone ate steak at a restaurant during lunch because that's the way he'd been raised.
I apologized for not telling him differently, but I couldn't fault Reese. He knew as a kid what I didn't learn until I was an adult: Steak is the best daily special in the world.