The Resting of a Steak

Written in summer 2020.

The urge to write often creeps across me in the night-time. Laying in bed I’ll try to turn off my mind, normally with the assistance of a Bon Iver album. Sometimes the strategy works, sometimes not. Tonight seems to be one of the latter. 

My brain is full of ideas. Ideas for the future, ideas of situations or scenarios that have long passed, ideas of the path I am travelling down and memories of the journey already taken. The past few weeks have felt like a merry-go-round of those feelings, interrupted by moments of clarity and inspiration. The inspiration to imagine the forks in that path ahead and how decisions to be made effect the ultimate destination. Alongside this period of reflection I have been quietly thinking about progression, predominantly career wise. A career for me anyway has larger implications than purely your job, title or income. Your career justly or unjustly defines an integral part of your character – at least from the perspective of another. They project their own historical experiences, prejudices and understandings of the world of your work in a way that creates a caricature of the person travelling down that particular career path. 

I like what I do – Cyber Security. When I have good conversation with a client I feel energised, confident, proud. I’m learning that I am not a person that can do something by halves. I’m an ‘in up to the knees’ type of person AND I like to do whatever I have decided to do, properly. 

I think the idea of doing things properly goes back to cooking when I was younger, maybe ten or so. I had an uncommon passion for creating tasty dishes from a young age. I think the wonder of food creation came about from two connected but opposite sources of inspiration – my dad and my mum. 

My parents divorced a year or so before I turned ten and it wasn’t a particularly pleasant time. It wasn’t one of those situations when the departed couple set out on each  a new path and decide to wave goodbye amicably at the fork in the road.  I stayed predominantly with my mum and used to visit my dad a day a week and often at weekends. They only stayed two or three miles apart so the physical distance was never much of an issue. 

The trips to and time spent at my dads house often involved cooking some sort of dish – medium rare sirloin or ribeye steaks with pepper sauce, North Indian Garlic Chilli Chicken (no jars, just spices), Flat Thai Noodles with smashed pork pieces and too much chilli, Baked Salmon with a slice of lemon. My dad often visited the alcohol cabinet of the kitchen whilst these cooking lessons took place. Despite the moderate levels of intoxication he was a good teacher; patient, undoubting, approachable, caring. More importantly the food tasted really really good.

My dad has always been a good chef. He often takes hours and hours to cook relatively simple dishes but the wait is always worth it. He’s the type of guy who insists that the steak will rest for ten minutes post-frying to allow the juices to settle and the meat to tenderise. Of course, during the course of these unofficial cooking lessons he taught me how to actually cook the dishes  but the lessons were deeper than that. It was the small things – like resting the steak – that left the biggest impression. It was adding mustard seeds to oil and frying them gently to start the curry sauce. It was chopping the garlic in a specific way that allowed the maximum flavour to enhance the Thai Pork Noodles. Those small additions of attention made the difference between a good dish and a great dish. I slowly began to understand the results of doing something properly. 

After being at my dads place and learning a new meal I would often repeat the dish again the following week at my mums house. My mum was, until recently, a terrible cook so naturally if I wanted to eat something tasty I had to make it myself. By the age of 12 or 13 I could confidently cook myself a medium rare steak, curries, stir fry and even meringues. I would sometimes cook meals at my mums house for the whole family and people would comment on how good the dishes tasted. I started to try new dishes and practice them on my own, without the help of my dad. I quickly found that if you really read the recipes and follow the instructions properly, in sequence with an awareness of nuance; cooking was relatively easy. I persuaded my mum to invest in better tools for the job; a non-stick pan, sharp knives, one chopping board for meat and one for veg. I would often get things wrong and more often than not the reason for the failure of the dish was down to some small, seemingly inconsequential step that I had inadvertently skipped .

It may seem like an abstract connection but I think the importance of valuing the small steps can be applied far wider than the kitchen. Whether it be relationships, your career, studies, or exercise; the key or at least a large part in determining how efficient and successful you can be, how good the outcome is, is dependant on the small things; like the resting of a steak. 

Inabit x