OND = FML

Work is getting busier and busier by the day. This is good for my wallet but bad for my cooking at home. For those that don't know what OND is, it's October, November, December. This is the time of the year that can make or break you. I've been working more and more hours, and when I get home I'm not in the mood to cook. Unfortunately Sundays when we go  grocery shopping we buy produce and meat thinking we will get back on the cooking at home wagon. So today I made myself cook a simple 10 minute meal. Unforgivably all our produce went bad. We thought it could go two weeks. We were wrong; so, we had to skip a vegetable for this meal. The kids in us were over joyed, the hard working adults in us just didn't give a fuck.

So this was a really simple meal. Sunday we bought thin pan fry steaks. I love this cut of meat. They are easy to cook, usually have a little extra fat (I'm a fat kid in disguise after all), they taste great and you get to feel like a giant eating tiny little steaks. Season both sides of the steak with sea salt and fresh ground pepper and you have perfectly seasoned, tiny steaks. Cooking these are the easiest thing. In a cast iron skillet, add a small amount of oil (just enough to keep the steaks from sticking to the skillet), turn the heat on medium/high and wait for the pan to get hot (you when it's ready when the oil starts to smoke a little). Throw the steaks on the pan and cook two minutes for the first side, then take the skillet off the heat, flip and cook for a minute. Yes take the skillet off the heat, it's cast iron and keeps heat for a while, and yes two minutes on one side and a minute the other side. These are thin steaks; any more time and you will overcook them. They came out perfectly medium rare, actually more on the medium side. If I have to tell you how to cook the Mac and Cheese from a box that I had with the meal- then stay out of the kitchen, because you are useless.

As I said, it's OND, and that means in the middle of the day of showing wines, your company can sell out of a wine and you may not get it back for a few weeks. So what do you do with this wine? Well, drink it after a long, grueling day of selling wine. Besides you might as well sell what you got. My job rocks. I can't imagine do anything else. Come on- I get free wine all the time and usually have something open at my house. Today's wine is from Down Under. It's a big, full bodied, jammy Shiraz from Stalking Horse in the McLaren Vale. This is a very small production, single vineyard wine. Less then 1000 cases are made each vintage. This wine has a nose that smells like a hug of dark fruit, bacon (mmmm bacon), and grilled meat. The palate doesn't disappoint with its rich, velvety, meaty, spicy plum goodness. Every sip will make you want more. This wine will make you revisit Australia's wine industry.