As we all know there are many things that are available to us now that were not just a few years ago. (When you get older a “few” years has many meanings). In any case, the other day, The Blonde in the house commented that a friend had told her about a “thawing” tray. Apparently, you could take a stone cold piece of meat out of the freezer, put it on the tray and it would thaw many times faster than just putting it on the counter. I indicated that it brought back memories of the miracle salad maker that we had purchased. This marvelous contraption had a plastic lid with cuts in it running in various directions. The purpose being you could put all your salad ingredients on the plate, stick a knife in the openings and cut up a salad to serve as easy as pie.
It may be the seller was thinking of the mathematical “pi”, because it definitely did not cut the salad in a pie like manner as demonstrated so flawlessly on TV. Despite that, we decided to go on the internet and see what we could find out about a thawing tray. To our surprise (mine in particular), we found a slew of thawing trays. They all guaranteed to thaw frozen meat or other food in nanoseconds. Well, perhaps not that fast but at least six times or so faster than laying the stuff on a table and then hoping that it would thaw by the time you needed it. Now all of the trays were made from a space age metal which needed no cords, charging units or batteries to do their thawing best.
Since we normally decide about an hour ahead of time that we should grill steaks or something, we thought we might as well purchase one as we could always return it, if it didn’t work. Since there were a slew of them, I chugged through them checking the reviews. I finally decided on one that the majority of those who purchased it thought was a good investment. We ordered one, it came, we tested – and danged if it didn’t work. So now about an hour before we need it, we plop the meat on the thawing unit and it is ready for easy use. The darn thing has no obvious heating unit, but it does the job.
This does not mean that all of the fun of grilling has been eliminated. As you know some folks want rare, others medium rare or medium well and so on.
Achieving the goal of perfection for each has been something that I have never been able to master. This applies even when there is just the two of us. The Blonde wants medium rare, and I want medium well. I have never been able to figure out what the center of the steak looks like from the outside. What I am leading up to here is a space age button with a sharp point on the bottom that you could stick in the steak. This fabulous tool would be connected by wi-fi to Alexa. When the meat got to medium rare, Alexa would holler out “Hey, guy get out there or the steak will lose its rareness”. It would do the same for medium well, or whatever. However, if you want it blackened like shoe leather, then you most likely would not need the button.
I may work on this myself. It would be easy to name as the obvious choice would be the “Barry Button.” It would certain be of great value since I would not be faced with “the look” from The Blonde when she cuts into the steak and it is not medium rare (or even close to it)!
Barry Evans writes about Life in The Villages for Villages-News.com
