How to Cook A Steak Without a Grill

I'm a dude. I like meat but I do not like to cook. Actually, it is not so much that I do not like to cook as much as it is that I do not like to spend lots of time cooking. To that end, I am always looking for a way to cook good food with as little effort as possible. I just found a fantastic way to accomplish this by cooking a steak without a grill.

I started out with a nice ribeye steak I got from Trader Joe's. It cost me about $8.00 and it was big enough to feed both myself and my fiancee. Not too bad for a decent cut of meat. The way I prepared it was simple.

I let the steak come to room temperature and then I glazed it with a light coat of oil (try to find an oil that won't smoke too much, because you are about to create a lot of smoke). I seasoned the steak with some salt and some ground pepper and that was it. Good steaks should not need lots of seasoning.

I turned the oven on to 500 degrees. I put a skillet in there (make sure your skillet can go up to this temperature). I let the stove come up to temperature. After a few minutes I placed the hot skillet in an oven set to hi. Then I did the following:

• Cook on one side for 30 seconds
• Flip and cook for 30 seconds
• Place back in oven and let sit for 2 minutes
• Flip and continue to cook for 2 minutes
• Remove steak from oven and skillet. Let sit covered for 2 minutes. (This is important. Do not skip. The steak will continue to cook after you remove it from the oven)
  

And that was it. The above comes out to a medium rare steak so adjust times accordingly to get the steak the way you like it.

That was seriously it. A total of 5 minutes of cooking and 2 minutes of letting the steak rest. The steak comes out remarkably tasty and juicy. I was shocked how easy it was. The perfect guy recipe.

Small Town = Better Food

I'm not much of a small town type of guy. I like living in urban settings and so small towns don't do it for me. Recently though, on a trip, I went through several small towns. The thing that was most consistent in all these different small towns was that the quality of the food was very very good.

I'm not sure if this is true for all small towns, but it got me thinking about it. I wonder if the food is just better in small towns. As I started giving it some thought, it actually made sense to me that the food would be of higher quality. First off, most of these small towns did not have very many fast food places or national chains. When I travel, I tend to frequent national chains only because you know what you are going to get when you go there.

Now, since I didn't have this option, I was forced to go to these smaller places. This makes it more likely these types of places can stay open (although I would never condone not allowing a national chain to set up shop). Given such a small town, there can only be so many restaurants that can be supported. That means you better be pretty good because you are going to have to depend on repeat customers to stay in business.

Further, the pace of life is just slower, so I wouldn't be surprised if these small town restaurants just took more time and care in preparing their food. I mean, seriously, the food was fantastic. We had a great variety of food from pizza, burgers, fish, clam chowder (which is excellent all along the Oregon coast), and cookies. All of it was very good.

So how about you? Have you noticed a different quality of food in small town America?