For the longest time, I’ve thought that living in an apartment sucked as I couldn’t have a BBQ, and thus, couldn’t cook a decent steak.

Well, I was wrong. All this time, and I’d never tried broiling a steak.

Molly and I are taking steps to try and eat better, which should hopefully result in loss of weight. This includes cooking more, and ordering out or eating out less. For this to work, we’ll need to eat more of the foods we like that are good for us, but there are so many that we thought we couldn’t cook in our apartment. Steak was one of them.

The law here in Toronto is that you are not allowed to have a gas BBQ on the balcony. I can understand why from an insurance standpoint; the owners of the apartment complex want to reduce the chances of a tenant affecting the structural integrity of the building should there be an accidental detonation. But, when was the last time you heard of any BBQ equipment blowing up? There are safety values on the BBQ tanks and the BBQs themselves, and the tanks are usually exchanged when you refill them. However, I can argue this until I am blue in the face, and it won’t change the fact that if I want to stay in my apartment, I can’t have a BBQ. I have a George Foreman electric BBQ that my Mom got for me, but I’ve never been able to cook anything on it but burgers (which taste amazing, BTW).

So, tonight, Molly and I wanted steak. She had bought two strip loin steaks for us, and I came across this on the Food Network site:

Preheat oven on broiler setting. Make foil ’snake’ out of aluminum foil to use to keep oven door slightly ajar so that broiler won’t turn off if it gets too hot. Brush steak with oil and salt and pepper, to taste. Place a piece of foil on the bottom rack as a drip pan. Place another rack in the position above this and put the steak directly on this rack. Cook steak in this position for 5 minutes. Flip steak and cook for another 5 minutes. Move rack with steak to top position in oven, moving rack with foil and drippings just underneath, and cook for 3 minutes. Flip 1 last time and cook for another 3 minutes. Transfer steak to wire rack and rest for 3 to 5 minutes. The above times are for medium doneness. Adjust cooking times up or down as desired.

So, we just did up the steaks as we wanted them, heated up the oven to “broil”, and put the steaks right onto the oven grill with a cooking sheet below for the drippings. I set the timer for six minutes per side, and they came out all crispy, juicy, and for me, medium-rare. I had some mixed vegetables as a side, and we ate while watching “Enterprise”. Good lord, did my steak taste good. Not as good as on a BBQ, but on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being a BBQ cooked steak, it was an 8.5. Leaps and bounds over a pan-fried steak (which is just WRONG in my opinion), and any other way you can cook a steak sans BBQ.

We’ll be having steak MUCH more often now. Awesomeness!