My best steak ever

Ok, that was amazing. Cheap cut of beef = boring steak? Not so, my friend. That was the finest meal I've had in months, and dead simple. Steak, Monterrey potatoes, and corn on the cob. Here's my playbook. Try it sometime.

Corn on the Cob

Can't go wrong with midwestern sweet corn.

1. Shuck corn.
2. Put in water
3. Boil
4. Serve with light butter. Don't add salt, good corn doesn't need it.

Monterrey Potatoes

This makes perfect FirstWatch-style potatoes. You can use other seasonings (I've had good luck with salt-free Mrs. Dash), but I'm trying to finish off the Monterrey seasoning. We inherited it from someone cleaning out a spice cabinet, and we don't use it for anything else.

1. Slice half an onion and put it in a cast-iron skillet
2. Dice potatoes until skillet is full
3. Add olive oil and Monterrey seasoning, toss. Add (stovetop) heat. Scrape and mix every time the potatoes start to stick.

Steak

This technique is called "salting" but it's not what you think. The salt doesn't cook in; quite the opposite. It's used to make the steak more tender. I used a relatively inexpensive cut of beef... $2.10 a pound. Here's how to make it awesome.

1. Put the raw steak on a plate and COVER it with a large-grained salt (Kosher or Sea Salt). Keep adding salt until it's all white... you shouldn't see any red. Then flip it over and do it again.
2a. Let it sit.
2b. Let it sit some more. I know you're thinking it's going to ruin the taste of the steak, but it's not. The salt breaks down the proteins on the outside of the steak, making them more tender. Also, this will help trap moisture inside.
2c. Let it sit. For a 1-inch steak, go 30 minutes.
3. Wash steak thoroughly under the sink. Get rid of all of the salt. Pat dry with a paper towel.
4. Rub with olive oil.
5. Grill. Grind black pepper over both sides.

Serve and eat the dinner of champions.

This is out of this world

People amaze me.

You're not so smart, you just show up a lot

I've really been enjoying a series of blog posts by Steve Blank. I have no idea who this guy is, but he's been rocking my world recently. The title of this post is taken from his most recent entries. You can find his blog here.

Steve is not, as far as I can tell, a Christian. He's a successful entrepreneur that is now retired from the biz and writing it up. I don't care at all about making stacks of money... my 2008 taxable income was HALF of what I made in 2004. Yay, ministry!

What's amazing, though, is the way that Steve's description of himself could just as well describe me, although he's far more successful. Steve is an entrepreneur. That's his identity. Maybe it's mine too.

He talks a lot about what it takes to make family work when you're an entrepreneur... I stand humbled. (See here and here). He talks about faith-based vision and fact-based execution, which is an interesting distinction for something I've pondered a long time. He talks about the curse of a new building... read that post and replace "office building" with "church building." Does anything change? Not a bit. It's hugely relevant.

Mostly, though, he talks about the mind of a "founder" and how it's different from the way other people think. This is hugely impacting my thinking right now, as it categorizes a lot of the stuff that's driven me crazy about myself over the years.

I don't do a good job at the slow, steady grind. I want to, and all of the people I respect are strong there. I've always seen it as a character flaw that I wanted to go start something new instead of building up the stuff that's already there. But that life is hard for me. It's hard for me to take the thing that's established and keep working at it... I want to get it most of the way there and then start the next thing.

Maybe this is a phase. Maybe I'll grow out of it. Maybe adding more discipline will eventually fix this in me.

But maybe I'm just wired different, and the stuff that excites me is different from the stuff that excites everyone else. I'm all in on the Kingdom, and I'm not interested in building anything else in the world. But I think I'm beginning to understand what my role is... and it's probably not the one I thought it was.

What it's like to see the future

From Popehat.

Who names their kid Ivan Odor?

My great-grandmother, that's who.

I'm totally wrung out. At the risk of using the blog as a boring tool for introspection and whining, allow me to say I'm closing out the hardest week I've had in a while. Earlier in the week we took what was supposed to be a vacation to Canada, but now I know why families with young kids often vacation at home. I did two weddings yesterday, which was awesome but exhausting (physically and emotionally).

But the weird thing that I still can't wrap my head around is that my grandfather died Friday at 9pm and Judi's grandfather died yesterday (Saturday) at 2pm. Two guys with nothing in common except great grandkids... 17 hours apart. What are the odds of that?

We'd planned for a quiet Father's Day at home to recupe from the week, but decided it made more sense to hang at mom and dad's, since the whole fam is coming to town for the funeral.

On my way from church to the house, I thought "Oh, this will be great. We'll be up at the house, so grandma and grandpa will be able to come over and see Jenna and Liam." And then I remembered that grandpa wouldn't be there.

I think sometimes grief looks like exhaustion. Good thing it's a nice, quiet week coming up at work. I don't have anything on my schedule except something called Summer of Service.

Dance Like You're Unstoppable

This is the best thing I've seen all week. One insane (probably drunk) dude having a ball at an outdoor concert/music festival ends up getting over a hundred people to dance.



Imagine if the dude had stopped dancing 30 seconds earlier.
Imagine if the second guy hadn't come, or the third.
Imagine if any of them had the presence of mind to realize "Holy cow, I look like an idiot."

I identify with Mr. Random Anonymous Dancer, and not just because he stole some of my best moves. On my very best days, this is what ministry feels like. The crazy awkward lonely grind at first, but the huge party as time goes on.

The trick is to keep going when you're all by yourself.

Robert Putnam and Social Capital

So one of the guys I find interesting, Robert Putnam, got a shout-out at VCC this past week. Putnam's not a Christian, but he's a big fan of churches... especially big evangelical megachurches. Here's a quote from a recent article about him:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/jul/18/communities.guardiansocietysupplement

Across many of these issues, Putnam's old interest, social capital, features. As he demonstrated in Bowling Alone, social capital has a crucial impact on crime reduction, educational achievement, even life expectancy. His research had exposed steep declines in all forms of social capital across much of the developed world, which he detailed in Bowling Alone with its central image of the end of US bowling leagues, but Putnam maintains he is "optimistic about social capital".

What fascinates him is tracking where the new forms of social capital are developing and why they are successful. One of his key areas of interest is religion - religious affiliations account for half of all US social capital. He cites US megachurches which, typically, attract tens of thousands of members, as "the most interesting social invention of late 20th century."

He identifies the secret of their success: "They have very low barriers to entry - the doors are open, there are folding chairs out on the patio - they make it very easy to surf by. You can leave easily. But then they ramp people up to a huge commitment - at some megachurches, half of all members are tithing [giving a tenth of their income]. How do they get from the low to the high commitment? By a honeycomb structure of thousands of small groups: they have the mountain bikers for God group, the volleyball players for God, the breast cancer survivors for God, the spouses of the breast cancer survivors for God, and so on.

"The intense tie is not to the theology but in the emotional commitment to others in their small group. Most of these people are seeking meaning in their lives but they are also seeking friends. The small groups spend two hours a week together - doing the volleyball or the mountain biking and praying; they become your closest friends," he says.

"These churches form in places of high mobility - people live there for six weeks and the church provides the community connection. When you lose your job, they'll tide you over, when your wife gets ill, they'll bring the chicken soup."

Like I said, interesting. I'm pretty widely studied on small groups in America, and I don't think he's totally got a firm grasp on it in terms of group identification. I'm also somewhat skeptical that most other non-religious organizations will be able to fully utilize a small group structure. Still, a pretty interesting perspective from a very smart outsider.

He has a book coming out this year that I'm really looking forward to.