We don't know what we don't know. 

We trust the world will impart vital information to us through common sense and small talk. Through osmosis of the grand human experience we will be imparted universal truths and live a meaningful life.

There is no common knowledge, we live in a world of half truths, smoke, and mirrors.

So before I hunker down and get to work making digital things, I thought it might be fun to teach anyone who might stumble upon this blog how to cook a cheap steak and elevate it to F*CKING AWESOME. 

It's not hard, it's not too time consuming, it's rewarding, and it will impress the hell out of your dinner guests. You can use what you've learned here to cook all manner of tasty veggies and cuts of meat with a variety of new seasonings, sauces, or whatever you like.

ENOUGH DILLY DALLY LET'S HEAD TO THE KITCHEN!

Necessary items:

1 Big ol' cheap cut of meat

1 big knife

steak knives

dijon mustart

Salt

THAT'S IT! 

Now I don't want to hear, "I'm too poor to afford a decent kitchen knife". BUY ONE FOOL. The positives home cooked meals provide to your health, and the cost savings they provide far outweigh the cost of 30$ to buy a semi decent kitchen knife off the internet. And cooking provides discipline and purpose. It instills important life skills. And at the very core, if you're making something that can be ingested, you are at the very least not a totally worthless f*ck, you are providing the very basis of sustenance and life, and if you do it well, you help to make the world a better life spreading hearty, healthy food.

Step 1: Buy a whetstone

You can get a multi grit whetstone on Amazon for 10 dollars... 10 DOLLARS to improve every experience you have in the kitchen from cooking to eating. 

Maybe you've tried cutting meat before, maybe you pressed your dull blade into the kitchen counter for minutes without being able to get through the tendons, sinew, fat and tough meat before.

There is no excuse for not having a sharp knife. Don't have an expensive kitchen knife? No problem, it just means your cheap cutlery will sharpen even faster, it just won't maintain its edge as long.

Watch a youtube video on how to sharpen a knife, it will take you 2 minutes of your time. 

If you don't have a whetstone, one of those long knife sharpeners will sorta do, but they're not 1/4 as effective. If you have neither, borrow one from your neighbor while you wait for one in the mail!

Step 2: Sharpen your knives

THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT: We're going to sharpen more than just the larger knife you're going to cut the meat with, we're ALSO going to sharpen the serrated steak knives that you're going to use to eat the steak. Use the same sharpening technique you used on the kitchen knife, but apply it to only the unserrated side of the steak knife, you'll see a singular ridge near the cutting edge, that's the bit you're going to work against the stone. Don't bother using the finer grit of the sharpening stone for secondary stones and steak knives, that's for quality knives that retain an edge for a long time.

You will be amazed by how much easier it is now to cut sh*t and it will radically change the way you view cooking and eating steak.

WARNING: If you've only worked with dull knives, you have likely developed poor habits of allowing the blade to lightly graze you or not worrying about finger positioning as you never had to worry about the knife cutting through the food like butter and slicing directly into your flesh. Your knives will now pose a much greater threat to your fingers, act accordingly as you cut through things!

Now that our utensils are ready, let's get the meat ready, pull the meat out of the bag, but don't throw away the plastic bag it's in, if you like it bloody rare, cut it nice and thick at 2 inches, cut as many portions as needed. If someone likes their meat "well done" cut thinner.

What we're going for is the "best of both worlds" steak. Nice and juicy red inside, charred and crunchy flavorful on the outside.

Step 2: Prep the steak

Now generously salt the outside of the steak, if this is your first time doing this, use twice as much salt as you think you need. COVER THAT SUCKER, BOTH SIDES, mop up the salt that's spilled over by using the sides of the steak as a sponge. Now throw the steak in your fridge and let it sit there for at least 30 minutes, stand it on its side if possible or set it on a small rack, the salt is going to pull out the moisture, the refrigerator is going to dry the outside. This is important because we don't want a steamed steak, we want a delicious CHARRED steak, the removal of excess moisture from the outside will hasten the searing process. 

When it's 30 minutes till meal time, pull out the steaks and grab the dijon mustard. Hit the side facing you with a glob of it and smear it around till everything but the bottom is covered, now flip it over setting it in the oven safe skillet, hit it with another glob of the mustard and spread it around.

"WHY ARE YOU PUTTING MUSTARD ON MY STEAK?"

I routinely cook for little people who think they don't like fish sauce in their food. They don't know it, but they LOVE fish sauce in their food.

The dijon mustard will only add notes of flavors, the majority of the dijon mustard will char as we cook it and provide a delightful texture and roasted flavor to the steak, the charred outside will also act as a seal to keep the inside moist as f*ck. Think of the mustard as the fuel, as dijon has just the right amount of sugar, vinegar, and salt content to provide just the right amount of char without requiring any fancy cooking tricks. 

**Dijon Mustard takes on an entirely new dimension when roasted, and I encourage you to try this ingredient as a glaze to roasts, chicken, ham, all sorts of things! You can use dijon mustard as a bas and combine it with things like hot sauces, herbs, spices, soy sauce, sugars, sky is the limit!

Step 3: BROIL!

Time to throw 'em under the broiler. The closer you can get to the heat the better, and the closer and stronger your broiler, the less time it's going to take to cook. On average about 10 mins per side should do it. The more blood red you want your steak in the middle, the thicker you should cut your steaks.

When putting your steak under the broiler, turn off the kitchen light, and turn off the oven light, this will allow you to see how the heat is distributing to the steak, we want the direct heat source to hit at about a 45 degree angle so the top and one side of the steak are both being hit, and this is much easier to see with the lights off.

Now cook with the oven open if possible, this will prevent indirect heat from cooking the insides of your steak too much, we want a charred outside, bloody inside.

Once you're happy with the char on the meat, use your oven mitts and a fork and simply flop the thing over. Repeat the same time on this side, getting the right coverage on the uncharred sides.

If you want to get fancy, now's the time, you could hit this with a dash of worcestershire sauce, some minced garlic, or maybe a sprig of rosemary, the VERY HOT pan will thicken any sauce at this point without outright destroying the flavors of these late additions. But be aware, you'll be surprised how much just the charred dijon mustard and some salt elevates the dish.

Step 4: Slice and eat

How you eat the steak is as important as any other bit of this guide! Remember that nicely sharpened steak knife we prepared earlier? That's going to allow us to easily cut through the meat, even if we're cutting it very thin from a very tough cut. 

Most will eat a cheap steak with a cheap knife and they resign to cutting of big chunks and chewing on it till their jaw hurts, cursing they can't afford a nice steak experience. A very thin cut of tough meat is as enjoyable to eat as a thick cut of very tender meat.

Stab your fork about a third of an inch in, now take your razor sharp steak knife and cut midway with nice long sweeping motions, let the weight of your arm do the work. You'll be amazed at how effortlessly the knife goes down, and don't grind your knife into the plate, that will dull it!

When we're used to doing things the wrong way, we mash our dull knife into the countertop or the plate, and we dull it even more. We resign ourselves to this life of doing things the wrong way, the hard way,  and we get tired of it and we give up. And then we eat junk food the rest of our lives and fade away.

Decay begets more decay... in all things.

Now enjoy a nice, easily chewable, thin, charred, perfectly flavored bite of delicious food that is healthy for you, and that you can enjoy knowing that you had a direct impact on the quality of that food. That you took a small bit of preparation to make the entire process easier, and that doing it again will be a breeze.

It takes only a bit of planning to be able to produce amazing food any time you like, and once you spend one night sharpening your core knives doing it again every few months is a breeze. But that first time is going to take a bit of work developing your process and making up for years of dulling. Once you can reliably cook steak, maybe you learn something else simple like cooking perfect rice. Then you combine the two and you're making a stir fry after buying a wok, and learning a few tricks to getting the eggs just right, and super heating the pan so it's non stick, and combining what you learned cooking the meat with the rice. 

Now you're really cookin'! Every step of the way you now have exponentially more possibilities, more ways of combining new skills with ever expanding new potential feasts, new ingredients to try in new ways. It's a never ending journey with new skills and new frontiers to explore.

Try to keep at least 2 knives in the kitchen, one for hacking into Turkey on Thanksgiving , crushing through joints  and cutting through cartilage, and another for boneless cutting.

One of the great problems in this world, is we have become so far removed from the little things. We live lives of zero consequence. Why keep our knives sharpened? Why worry about a shopping list? Why worry about the quality or processes of anything? 

We sit in traffic because everyone goes to work at the exact same time for some reason, we go to our pointless jobs, punch pointless numbers into pointless spreadsheets, then pick up something on the way home, and we watch a show made by people we don't know using methods we don't understand, and we post nonsense into the void of the internet about subjects we are told we're supposed to have interests in. When do we ever think about how to improve our own lives? When do we ever take agency in making the world a truly better place.

All we know is that everything is going to be taken care of for us by people who obviously know what they're doing... right?

Cook a steak once in a while, take pride in it, sharpen your knives, try a new recipe here and there. Develop pipelines, learn what works, learn what doesn't work, make mistakes, learn from them. Take some kind of role in your life, aspire to be be better. 

Now WTF does cooking a steak have to do with gamedev?

Everything.

There is no such thing as a jack of all trades, master of none. You cannot master anything until you understand everything.

What does it take to cook the steak? Planning. Experience with seasonings. Experience with the pipelines of cleaning a kitchen, exposing it to heat, managing multiple elements at a time as you clean your countertops while the food cooks, then placing the table. Practiced techniques of sharpening the knives, trimming the fat, angling the cut so the slices go against the grain and produce quality portions.

Wax on, wax off.

The process of giving a damn about something, and seeking to improve at that venture are the same concepts time after time. It takes patience, it takes execution, it takes passion, and it takes repetition. Master these things, take pride in them, and you can become good at whatever you set yourself to. Anyone who excels in this life doing anything of consequence has learned to have a quality work ethic, has learned to power through trying elements that demand mastery over a long period of time, has learned to fail and persevere through it, and has learned that in order to truly succeed you need to push the envelope, you can't be happy with the status quo, you have to want to push the envelope, you have to give a damn.

Shame this world seems to go completely out of its way to stifle us from achieving these things, of providing worth to our own lives, to have a sense of ownership and to be able to take pride in working hard and executing at a high level. More and more the soft handed and decadent steal away the pride of working hard, the reward for a long day's work. Nihilism is celebrated, smarm is worshipped, bitching and moaning and pointing fingers is the only way to climb the ladder as backstabber and brown nosers are shoot up the ladder.

The things that pass for knowledge I can't understand.

The choice is ours, we don't have to cook our own steaks... we can eat our junk food, sit on the couch, watch our shallow nothings, fade into obscurity in a life of no consequence engorging in non nutritious processed cheese and corn syrups as we go through all the sophomoric, preconceived motions.

ANYWAYS!

Gearin' up to get to work, I'm burned out as hell, but who knows what might spring from work today. I want to sort some glaring bugs and broken materials and scene setups, and SOON I will open the project and all that will need doing is adding all the fun stuff waiting in the wings. Oh yeah... need to expand the item drop system so telling fish or chests to drop specific items is super simple.

Not expecting things to come together today. I expect today to be another unrewarding slog, but SOON. SeaCrit comes online...

I will NEVER get tired of linking this album cover in this blog

I TUNE FISH EVERY DAY, M*THER FUCKERS

Saw the "share on twitter button" for the first time, this is the first time i've posted anything on twitter, or "X" or whatever the heck we're calling it these days. Going to try to make a habit of this moving forward as I'm finally starting to think this game might be worth sharing! I don't think I'll do this for many blog posts as I think most my blathers are just self fulfilling slogs of personal notes, but if I think a blog post has a more mass appeal for gamedev as a whole, I think i'll go ahead and share it, what have I got to lose?