Andy Richardson: Shame of overcooking beef to order

While most people decompress by sitting in front of the TV with a packet of fried snacks and an ice cold beer, I dream of spending an industrious 24 hours preparing seven courses for friends. And while most fellas long for an evening watching football on a flatscreen, I yearn to cook long, leisurely dinners that last late into the night with half a dozen friends.

Women lust for The Dream Boys: I lust to whip up something fancy in ten minutes for She Who Must Be Obeyed. Drinkers ache for whisky, I thirst to fry two-day old sourdough in rich, dirty, satisfying pork fat.

You can keep your footballs and your bottles of continental beer. Chopping, frying, roasting, mixing and seasoning is my idea of fun. I am seldom more satisfied than when dressed in an apron; rarely more contented than when holding a sharp, cold steel; never more jubilant than when combining protein, starch and fat.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. There are two other things that I think of as being relaxing. The first is running; though pounding my crumbling frame on a treadmill for 30 minutes and spending the next three days hobbling up and down stairs as ligaments recoil and display an absence of elasticity perhaps ought not to be considered ‘relaxation’. This one-time gazelle has turned into a wildebeest. The 13 marathons I ran seem as far away and distant as a trip to New Zealand. Though I will return.

Similarly, I’m in the less-than-one-per-cent who thinks work is the Best Thing Ever, apart from being a dad, having the coolest girlf this side of Halle Berry and being blessed with family and friends who are The Nuts. A friend recently commiserated as the New Year holidays ended and asked whether I’d got over the return to work. “Are you joking?” I laughed, like a dog who’d just been given a marrow-filled bone. “It’s great.” I’m the only person/nutter she knows who says that. And. Actually. Means. It.

But I digress. We were talking food and the way cooking transports this would-be Jason Atherton way across the wild blue yonder to distant, sun-kissed shores.

We’ll cut to the chase. An important dinner was arranged. It was for the girlf’s mother – AKA the might-one-day-be- mother-in-law MK III. And so I phoned a farmer mate who killed the fatted calf….. literally, then hung it out to dry.

A month or so later, I took a deep breath, swallowed hard on my overdraft and procured a delicious, 35-day-aged three rib-roast. The girlf was impressed, though insisted that however well I cooked the beef, however crunchy I made the roast potatoes and however much I might dazzle her with such whistles and bells as parsnip cream and cauliflower cheese veloute, no one – that’s NO ONE – would ever make Yorkshire Puddings as good as her mom’s. Fine. Though she is wrong, of course. My Yorkies make the Empire State look like a Lego tower. And now I shall hide tonight’s newspaper and disconnect our wifi connection so that she She Who Must Be Obeyed doesn’t read that bit.

I like my beef rare. Roast it at 45-50 celsius and the meat is beautifully pink. Take the dial up to 55-60 and it’s still the right side of tender. But take it to 65+ and you end up with the same stuff you get when you visit the carvery at your local boozer on a Sunday. And sacrificing an expensively-purchased three-rib roast to that fate is sacrilege.

But then I got to thinking. While I might like beef to be the same colour as a flamingo’s tailfeather, what if the girlf’s mother preferred it well done? And given my intention to spend the rest of my time on this mortal coil with her long-haired, irascible daughter, what would be the collateral damage if I served the potential mother-in-law meat that had only just stopped mooing? Might she think me unfit for her daughter? Might our relationship into a tailspin from which it would never recover.

So I committed a culinary crime. I turned up the dial. Pink turned to brown as the meat settled in for a long, lazy afternoon in front of the element. And after too-long roasting at too-high-a-temperature – a deliberate act, as I saw it, of sabotage – the meat was cooked the way I thought she’d like it.

I was right. Girlf’s mom thought the beef was excellent. She told her daughter that the man in her life knows exactly how to cook a decent roast and proclaimed herself happy for us to spend another few months together – until the next dinner.

And now I’m left with the shame of it all. I overcooked the beef to please a girl. Damn. It must be serious.