High On Protein

Beautiful Bison

What is it about meat? Good meat, I mean. Hormone-free, free-ranging, grass-fed, all natural, tasty, wonderful meat. Eating a hamburger from In-n-Out, no matter how good, is not quite the same as enjoying a nice, big, hand-cut, cooked to perfection piece of steak. I don’t eat it very often, if only because 1. I can’t cook it quite the way a professional can, and 2. it’s freakin’ expensive, the good stuff. I have no problem eating meat, but I want it to be great, I want it to melt in my mouth and let the wonderful earthy, grassy flavor engulf me. And I want the protein high.

Now, the protein high is not something I have always recognized. Only recently has it been brought to my attention that I get crazy high, goofy and witty all at the same time after I’ve consumed a fair amount of great meat. Saturday night it was a bison ribeye. Grilled to medium-rare perfectness, naked on my plate, lounging seductively on a bed of heavenly creamy white mashed potatoes (classic choice, and not one I mind in the least) and a few sautéed haricort verts, their long, lean green legs peaking out from under the bison. Otherwise, naked. I can be a purist when it comes to high quality meat. Sauces and such are only disguising the fact that your chosen cut is not confident enough to go bare.

I ate only half of the 14 ounces, but the first 7 was enough to make me loopy. My man claimed I was “unusually witty” and when I used the word “prehensile” in a sentence he nearly went over in his seat. Now, this of course leads me to believe he doesn’t normally find me witty, or even slightly funny for that matter, nor does he think my vocabulary includes anthropological words that I can actually use in a sentence. He thinks it’s the meat. And I am starting to believe him. It’s happened before. This time, though, I can definitely say I was not drunk. The meat high began after my first cocktail (a lovely and refreshing strawberry-basil-black pepper-vodka concoction) but before I finished my first glass of wine. And it was like being high—expensive, short-lived and fun, but more intelligent. Don’t get me wrong, I have had the most brilliant, well-conceived, near-perfect thoughts while high, ideas so amazing I rushed to write them down, convinced they were award-winners and fortune-makers. Of course, it was all in my head, and if I happened to share with my fellow imbibers, everything came out in jumble, just scrambled words with little to no linear sense. But the meat high seems natural, and functioning.

That bison ribeye was only the second of its kind I’ve had. The first, near Scottsdale, Arizona, was by far the better meal, but the atmosphere in which it was consumed was so sterile and stuffy that my high was subtly suppressed. Here in San Diego, at a downtown spot, having dinner at my favorite place in a restaurant—the bar—with my man, the protein got to my head, and that $38 piece of meat made me feel oh so fine.