This Father’s Day I have no plans to be cooking for a crowd. I am taking the weekend off. However, I have included a recipe for an absolutely delicious ribeye steak that would please any father on his special day. A wonderful way to honor your father or hubby.
As a child and having been raised by several aunts and uncles, and finally by Catholic nuns in a “boarding home” for young girls, I was taught many versions of the Almighty’s commandments. There was also “one” commandment, the “Eleventh” one, added on by my aged Baptist grandmother, that being… “Nary a drop of evil alcohol shall be consumed in my household.”
Because of grandma’s alcohol edict, there were many trips being made at family gatherings by the menfolk between grandma’s house and the trunks of their cars parked in her driveway.
My Irish-born father, James Patrick Callan, was one of those “out of the trunk” drinkers; so much so, my mother packed her and my belongings, dropped me off at an aunt’s house, and left town, never again to return.
My father? …It was in 1940, and Uncle Sam stepped in. My father spent the next four years under the watchful eye of the U.S. army. Once discharged, that evil alcohol became my father’s best friend.
A dear friend of mine dropped by this morning as I was writing this column and we sat in the sunshine in my garden, talking about “honoring” our fathers, both who had, as my grandmother called, “taken to the drink.” My friend has been able to continue loving her father; mine I have not.
As I was growing up in Aberdeen, Wash., my schoolmates would spend the week before Father’s Day, drawing pictures with crayons of their house with smoke curling up from its rooftop chimney, stick figures of their family holding hands lined up in front of the house and Happy Father’s Day scrawled at the bottom.
My pictures drawn with orange and green colored crayons were of my aunt and uncle’s house; the picture was void of people; however Happy Father’s Day was scrawled at the bottom.
Years later, I was given a box from my aunt and uncle’s home after they had passed, and that orange and green crayon picture, yellowed by age, was folded and in that box.
During the 1950s through the 1990s, high schools held a father-daughter dinner and dance night. Our convent school did not, as most fathers were absent from our lives.
I have been to so many weddings and at each of those weddings there was the father-daughter dance. And when my wedding day arrived, a elderly family friend from my past walked me down the aisle of St. Patrick’s church in Watsonville. There was a lovely reception, but no father-daughter dance. My father remained absent.
Today we are well into the month of June, the month of weddings and Father’s Day. I am hoping that all the daughters who are in the throes of wedding planning take time to think of their fathers who have been with them every step of the way; those fathers that go to work each day and return home each night in order to meet their family’s needs.
The sacrifices their fathers have made that no one knows about; the allowances handed out, the tantrums they have listened to, all the while smiling, knowing this too shall pass.
If my father were to come to dinner this coming Father’s Day, I have no idea how I would entertain him nor what food he would like, nor music to play. After all, I have never danced with my father.
I believe each one of us has been taught to Honor Thy Father; for me it has been most difficult.
In 1972, immediately after my father’s funeral in Seattle, I drove his old Plymouth car following the long-black hearse to Willamette National Cemetery in Portland, Ore.
High on that windy hilltop, in pouring rain, six veterans dressed in yellow-colored rain slickers carried my father’s coffin to his final resting place. Inside his coffin, was the orange and green crayon drawing of a house with Happy Father’s Day scrawled on the bottom of the page.
Perhaps this was my way of “honoring my father”; I don’t know.
Grilled Ribeye Steak with All the Trimmings
Marinade Sauce for 2 one-pound steaks
• 1 Tbsp. vegetable oil
• 2 Tbsp. Soy Sauce
• 1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tsp. lemon juice
• 1 tsp. minced garlic
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp pepper
Mix well and spread on both sides of steaks. Cover and refrigerate 2 hours.
When ready to grill, remove steaks and discard marinade.
Either on a BBQ or stove top, oil and heat a grill pan (425deg.)
When hot add steak and grill 3 minutes. Turn steak and grill until temperature reaches 110 deg. for rare.
Remove from pan, cover and rest 5 min.
Grilled Vegetables (carrots, onions, asparagus, mushrooms)
Add 2 Tbsp. oil to steak juices in grill pan.
Add vegetables to one side of grill pan and 1/4 inch thick sliced potatoes to other side. Lightly salt and pepper.
Grill vegetables until tender and potatoes until crisp on edges.
Colly Gruczelak, a Ben Lomond resident, loves people and loves to cook. Contact her at cz****@*****st.net.
