This weekend I was flipping through the channels and stopped at Next Food Network Star. I’d never seen the show, never really wanted to, but since people seem to be talking about it I figured why the hell not. On this particular episode, the nine finalists were to create a recipe for Esquire magazine’s “Recipe for Men” section. Seems normal. But here’s my beef:

Most of the contestants went off on these rants about how “manly meals”= big slabs of meat. Apparently to some of these people, men only like meat and in a “man” recipe the main focus has to be a huge piece of meat. Hello, I’m a woman, and I like meat just as much as any guy out there. Now I don’t go walking around every day munching on giant turkey legs (well, I did  just that one time) , and some days I even go meatless. However, I often eat entire bags of beef jerkey in one sitting, and I’d die without sausage on my Dunkin Donuts sandwiches.  I know I cannot be some woman anomaly.  One of my grandmother’s favorite meals was rack of lamb, and she was a woman so feminine she never even wore pants.

Why the hell do “man” recipes even exist anyway? I mean, I eat the same things as my boyfriend and my father, although sometimes they eat larger quantities. If meat is a manly meal, what is a womanly meal? Vegetables?

(Pic: Steak with Red Wine Reduction)