I hope you and yours enjoyed a Father's Day as lovely as mine was, but an ill-advised Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) probably wishes he'd spent his far away from social media.
"Our family has lived in an apartment building for all our years," the Senate Majority Leader posted to X on Sunday, "but my daughter and her wife just bought a house with a backyard and for the first time we're having a barbecue with hot dogs and hamburgers on the grill!"
The post included a lovely photo of Schumer... DOING WHAT TO PERFECTLY GOOD MEAT?
There's a primal appeal to the classic combination of fire, smoke, and meat — one that many city folks, sadly, haven't experienced. Our here in the exurbs, I spent the first half of Father's Day smoking beef jerky — I'll post my recipe at the end of this column — and the evening grilling ribeyes so thick and flavorful that four of us didn't even come close to eating two of them. And out of the four of us, two of them were ravenous teenage boys. This is the way.
But I digress.
Witness, because I insist, Chuck Schumer manning (for lack of a better word) the family grill.
That certainly isn't barbeque but I'm not sure it's grilling, either.
The dogs look OK, I suppose, although I prefer diagonal hash marks so they look less like they just got rolled down the street or something. But I don't know what's going on with those gray burgers and why there's a slice of cheese on one that looks raw. Or maybe they are cooked — I won't say "grilled" — but he used such low heat that there's no sear?
I dunno. But I know I'm glad I didn't have to fake my way through enjoying one of his burgers.
Schumer got raked over the internet coals so badly that this one was of the more generous exchanges.
We don’t call that “Barbecue” in North Carolina either. That’s an Ecoli bound cookout or grilling.
— Margo (@MargoinWNC) June 17, 2024
"Fuc$&?g communists," indeed.
One Jewish paper took Schumer to task for "transgressing a basic Torah law – the prohibition of milk and meat." VIN News called it "the latest of many displays by Schumer (who does not claim to be religious) that make it clear that he has no connection nor concern about his Jewish heritage, and is not embarrassed to publicize his indifference to his religion (until he’s called out by critics)."
ASIDE: I've written before about the superiority of charcoal over gas grills, but I honestly wouldn't expect a couple of women in a gentrified part of New York City to know or care. They get a pass on that one — and at least they do have a backyard and a grill.
Apropos of not much, aside from how Schumer must be seen outside of his home state, here's what my preferred search engine — Kagi — thought users might want to know about the 73-year-old senator.
I don't know who's been asking that question so often that Kagi made it their top Quick Peek selection, but I feel like we could cry into our drinks together over it.
But back to the subject at hand, which is Schumer's grilling skills — or lack thereof.
When you're going to post yourself on social media doing something that you don't know how to do, you have two options. The first is to have someone who does know what they're doing help you set the stage. The second is to play up your ignorance for laughs. I've done both over the years and they're both fun.
Actually, there is a third option: don't post it all. That's the superior option to posting, getting publicly roasted (not grilled), and then deleting the post—only to get one painful reminder after another that the internet is, indeed, forever.
As promised, here's my jerky recipe — inspired by The Smokehouse in Chesterfield, Missouri, where they make my favorite jerky in the world.
Start with a lean beef, sliced thin and evenly. Use Eye of Round Roast if you're watching your food costs (it's what I almost always use) or flank steak if you're feeling spendy.
Brine for 12 hours in:
- 1 tsp Prague powder #2
- 1 cup low-sodium soy sauce
- 3 tbsp brown sugar
Good for about 2.5 lbs of meat. Add water if the brine doesn’t cover the beef but add some extra soy sauce and brown sugar if you need to add more than a cup or so of water.
Smoke for 3-4 hours over hickory wood or pellets set at 180°. I don't recommend using liquid "smoke" and doing this in the oven. You can get a decent smoker for not too much money (I have Traeger's bottom-of-the-line pellet smoker and LOVE it), and the results are far superior to anything you'll get out of an oven or even an electric smoker.
You'll know the jerky is done with this simple test. Bend a piece the long way, and if it breaks but doesn't snap in half, then it's done. If it doesn't break, smoke it some more. If it snaps... sorry, you should have taken it off the smoker 30 minutes ago.
The recipe makes a deliciously bacony beef jerky.
Enjoy!
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