My girlfriend at the time was either a vegetarian or just opposed to red meat specifically (I can't remember which), and she had been actively lobbying me to quit the stuff for years to no avail. Things changed in the summer of 1991.
My parents had just split after 25 years of marriage (popularly known as the "silver" or "divorce" anniversary), and my mother entered a phase where she wanted to travel to all the places that my father never took her. She decided that I would be an acceptable stand-in for my old man. It was the beginning of the surrogate role I'd unwittingly step into for the rest of my life.
Top on that list was Arizona and the Grand Canyon.
We tried to do the trip on the cheap, and that meant eating at a lot of fast food places on the way up there. I referred to the whole venture as the "Burger King Tour 1991." We ate at every Burger King from Los Angeles to the South Rim and back.And when I finally arrived home, my colon had made the decision for me: I will eat no more red meat forever.
(I thought my then-girlfriend would be happy about it, but not so. It wasn't enough that I gave up red meat — it was that she wanted me to do it specifically because she told me to.)
I didn't really touch beef again until the day I moved back to LA from Denver in 1996. For some reason, as soon as I hit the first In-N-Out Burger over the California state line, I pulled right in and got a Double Meat with pickles, grilled onions and ketchup.
I've eaten red meat in limited doses since, but over the last month I've had a few notable run-ins with it, starting with lamb chops at my favorite Santa Monica restaurant, Jiraffe.
Then I ate at Wilshire with Katy where I learned that she enjoys her filet prepared exactly the same way I do (cooked to a precarious point in between medium and medium well), and further learned that the chef at Wilshire did a spot-on job of cooking said filet to perfection.And lastly, I had lamb chops yet again. This time made by chef Mom.
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