Hooray! I've Burnt Dinner Again!

With Wifey away at Puppy School tonight, I thought I'd whip up something nice for her to come home to - a steak variant of one of my all-time favorite dishes: schnitzel. Honestly, if I had boneless pork chops, I would have tried making traditional schnitzel, but one must do the best one can with the resources available, so beef was the target of my culinary deviancy.

The recipe was pretty simple - beat the meat to desired flatness, dredge in flour, dredge in beaten egg, dredge in bread crumbs, then fry in a skillet with 1/4 cup oil.

Yeah, right... I prepare the meat, do the proper dredging, heat the oil, and "start to set the meat to cookin'! YeeeeeeHaaaaa!" For one shining moment, I am the Dinner God. For one brief moment in time, I feel like all the celebrity cooks I've ever seen on TV. I feel like I'm Bobby Flay, whipping up some obscure Cuban dish with talapia and roasted chili peppers. Or Rachael Ray, fighting back the urge to turn to some non-existent camera and say how easy this meal is to prepare in under 30 minutes. I threw the first "faux schnitel" in the pan, thinking that a couple of minutes on each side should adequately complete the cooking.

As it turned out, I preheated the oil at a much higher temperature than should be used. After a couple of minutes in the oil, one side of my first "faux schnitzel" was damn-near black from charring. I quickly flipped it over, thinking to myself, "if I reduce the cooking time for this side, I should be able to salvage this shipwreck of an entree'". No such luck, the damage was done. The first cut of meat emerged from the skillet looking like something I had intentionally set ablaze in the morning, then left it to burn for most of the day, just to come back, scratching my head, and asking, "I wonder why THAT happened?"

The second and third pieces of meat were, in turn, added to the frying pan. I was rewarded with similar results, despite turning the stove's burner down "a notch". Careful planning and preparation on my part has yielded three charcoal-like hunks of breaded meat the likes of which would more likely be appropriate as spare pucks in a minor-league hockey game. They're hard enough!

Without missing a beat, I started baking some tator tots in the oven. At least we can enjoy an item from the typical school lunch menu! If there's one thing I can do, that's tots!