Secret Meatings

We did it. We broke the New Rules. We at meat, at home, in San Francisco. Well, now that we were going to burn in vegetarian hell, we might as well have fun with it.

I don't know about Jason, but I kinda always imagined that SOMEDAY I would eat meat again. I imagined myself as an old woman, eating loads of meat and having three-martini lunches. I kept little mental notes about what I'd like to eat if I did eat meat. I would think things like "If I ever eat meat again, I'm going to try that taco truck." Or "If I ever eat meat again, I'm going to fly to Philadelphia and get a cheesesteak."

So, as far as I was concerned, someday was here. Time to indulge our meat fantasies. But while we fessed up to our friends about tasting meat in Argentina, we were not ready to "out" ourselves as full-time carnivores just yet. Instead, we started having secret meat dates.

I think we really had two important things to accomplish:

1) Eat meat memories from our childhoods

2) Try all the meat things that we never even knew existed back when we ate meat...like bahn mi and tacos al pastor.

My mom was a South Philly Italian, and I grew up in multi-culti south Florida, so I had lots of meat memories that I wanted to catch up on - hoagies, macaroni with pork gravy, escarole soup with chicken broth, Jamaican meat patties, matzoh ball soup, Cuban picadillo, salami and more salami ...

Jason grew up in Ireland in the 70's & 80's, so his meat memories weren't quite as warm and fuzzy as mine. Although he wanted to eat some lamb (something I'd never had), pretty much all of it was new to him.

So, for our first official secret meat date, I took Jason for his first taste of real southern bbq.