Saturday Steak.

After yesterday's weird green dinner, I feel a sudden craving for beef. I head out to pick up various necessities for Tuesday's cupcakes - pink cupcake liners, sugar flowers - and find that the Whole Foods parking lot is unusually uncrowded for a Saturday afternoon. I buy scallions and potatoes and apples, a few oranges, steak and chicken and bacon, two bunches of irises. Very soon I am staggering into the elevator at home with my four heavy bags as an impossibly gorgeous, glamorous (and tall) couple sweeps past me, with my hair every which way, scruffy jeans, flip-flops. Never mind. Dinner is ahead, and I have to get started.

The steak is seasoned with salt and pepper and left out on a plate for an hour or so. I cook it in gently foaming, browning butter as instructed by Jeffrey Steingarten, and it is soon crusty and brown without, rosy and medium-rare within. I heat up last night's creamed spinach in the toaster oven until it is bubbling and browning around the edges, and dinner is ready, with a few slices of a crusty olive loaf from Macrina on the side. And a Shirley Temple. I am addicted to Shirley Temples. It is all extremely satisfying, the perfect Saturday night dinner.

Then I make a milkshake with the Thin Mint ice cream still lurking in my freezer. It was an experiment, one of those rare creations that comes out exactly as I was hoping it would, and I can't wait to make it again. After I finish this batch.