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[laughoutlow]

The schnitzel strikes back

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! That was what I heard in the kitchen after the phrase "I will prepare schnitzel". For those who might don't know, a schnitzel is what we all know as a breaded steak, but Austrians apparently decided to name it as a dog. What I didn't know until then was that you had to load the calf with a hammer in your home before you start cooking (or at least that is what appeared from the blows that echoed throughout the room).

I wasn't sure at the time what was going to eat so I decided to make use of Google and check why the father had decided to recreate some kind of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" on a Friday night. Was the hammering really necessary? What kind of meat was that? These and other questions raced through my head while Wikipedia page was loading.

It turned out that the deck thingy seems to be the usual method of preparing schnitzel. So said section Features:

    The dish is prepared from butterfly cut, about 4 mm thin and pounded flat veal slices.

On the one hand, that relieved me a bit: seemed the father wasn't a potential cows killer. On the other hand, what kind of meat was that? Me myself, with my lack of experience in the kitchen, never had the need of hitting anything that didn't have a shell or happened to be an octopus. This guided me to my next thought: probably, the cow that schnitzel was part of at some point, had a life of tension that got her steaks to be possibly used as a dinner dish or as a projectile.

But you know what they say "do not judge a book by its cover", "looks can be deceiving" and all those things that came to my mind in order to maintain the hope that, perhaps, that dinner wasn't so bad.

Twenty minutes later, all my doubts disappeared. In front of me a huge piece of meat with a thickness that could be equated with a book in the series of Game of Thrones. Determined to enjoy this unappetizing mess of flesh, I stuck my knife with the intention of cutting the first piece and have a final verdict. Well, this wasn't easy, in fact I was about to throw the knife and eat the steak to Neanderthal style. My suspicions were confirmed: that thing had more nerves than a Chinese before his final exams.

- How is it? - Asked the father with a smile befitting a chef satisfied. - Very good.- That was my answer, trying to smile back, swallowing a bolus of meat that I had finally been able to cut.

That schnitzel took forever and, on more than one occasion, I was about to have an accident and send a chunk of meat flying around the table due to the tension accumulated on me trying to cut it. At the end, I saw how the boy had decided to make use of Neanderthal technique I had discarded; I regretted having done so.