WARNING! This is not my chicken cheese steak! But I must say, it is a pretty good ringer.
Many months have passed since my last post, and many events have transpired in my life since then…some good, some bad, but all –and this is where I slightly numb myself to my own annoyance at my latent Pollyanna tendencies– learning experiences that will probably help me in the long run. At least, that’s what I have to tell myself when life gets a little too sassy for my own taste.
The good: I’ve finished writing my wonderful thesis, of which I feel immensely proud and accomplished. I graduated with my Master’s and am now justified in walking around town feeling like a fancy pants. I adopted the world’s most wonderful puppy and revel in her cuteness on a near-daily basis (note to all: if you’re considering getting a pet, please adopt! Do some research and it totally pays off. Plus, what could be better than knowing you have given a deserving puppy a happy home? Now, you won’t get bummed out when you see those ultra depressing Sarah McLachlan ASPCA commercials).
The bad: The unbearable evils of summer heat. The realization that I may or may not have just wasted the last seven months of my life. The fact that my completed thesis has yet to be submitted to the school on account of some mysterious email glitch. Also, on a lighter note, I’m trying to grow out my hair and it is just taking waaaaaay too long. Oh, but let’s not forget the fact that I have a Master’s and I have virtually no compensation to show for it. But at least I have all those other millions of unemployed twenty-somethings to keep me company.
Back in November, I wrote that I was on the road to 75% happiness. Well, as it turns out, that just wasn’t good enough. Through some mysterious aberration in my own way of thinking, I’ve come to realize that anything short of perfection just doesn’t cut it with me. I’ve had faint inklings about this in the past (see: Pollo Veracruzana and peace of mind) But now, I have become fully aware of the extent of this thought process of mine. In November, I wasn’t really in a position to be very choosy. I hadn’t finished school yet. I had little to no free time. And poverty was giving me the stink eye every waking moment of my life. Today, I’d say two out of those three things are no longer a problem, and the last one that still is is that great catalyst –the fuel I’ll use to tenaciously find perfection.
Enter, the chicken cheese steak. Since my beloved Nicholas is, unfortuantely, a Nor Cal native (a fact he never lets me forget whenever we get stuck in traffic or the weather tops 90°) he often engages in the less-than-amusing habit of pointing out everything that’s wrong with Southern California. Granted, traffic and weather are jank down here. But when it comes to food, I refuse to believe that So Cal is in any way inferior to Nor Cal. For the most part, I’ve managed to get him to agree with me, except for one food genre: sandwiches.
He compares any sandwich to those golden sandwiches of his youth, consumed after long high school days and those lazy, listless weekends. In his mind, no So Cal sandwich has ever come close to being on par with the perfection he found at Italian Delite Submarine Sandwiches, and the creme de la creme of Italian Delite (at least, according to Nick) is their chicken cheese steak.
Over the course of the past five years, he’s quested to find something that rivals the paragon of chicken he has in his mind, only to be nonplussed by most of his findings. Frustrated and a little nostalgic, he decided that enough was enough, and the time had come to try his own hand at making the elusively perfect chicken cheese steak in his own kitchen. I was there for the whole thing, and I soaked up the bounty in the end.
The tools: sliced Provolone; chicken breast marinated with vinegar, sea salt, and cracked pepper; sliced white onions; lettuce; tomato; Frank’s RedHot Cayenne Pepper Sauce; crusty french bread. Ok, so the french bread got a little burned on the outside, thanks to Nick’s overzealous electric oven. Yet in spite of this little mishap, the end product was as lovely an imitation as could be imagined. Even Nick, the perpetually hard to please king of sassy criticism, was bowled over at what he had created.
In the end, who really wants to settle for…pleh? Why waste time eating remedial sandwiches when you can recreate perfection at home? Why devote months to a trip down a potentially blind alley when you can hope for the best, douse yourself in optimism, and shoot for what you really want? No more. Perfection is on my horizon, and I plan to run at it like whoa. Remember that oh-so-elusive dream job? The one that it broke my heart to move on from? Well, either there’s some sort of computer glitch that has been plaguing this “careers” website since November, or that dream job has yet to be filled. I’m hoping it’s the latter, and I’m hoping this time around, things end a little better.
Oh, dream job. Please let me make you my chicken cheese steak. I want to gobble you up and enjoy the satisfaction of regular employment and great-tasting burps.
Tags: Chicken, Cooking, Home, Love, Nicholas, Philly cheese, provolone, sandwiches, vinegar
