Accidental Atkin’s [17/100]

One summer, my parents bought a big Weber grill. Before that, we didn’t do much grilling — almost every night, we would have a few dishes of Chinese food that my mom prepared.

That summer, we had a lot of steak. My parents got very into buying meat at Costco and trying different ways to grill steak. It was actually probably way less work than the tedious prep that goes into Chinese stir-fries (chopping, slicing, julienning, marinating). Of course, we still had a rice-cooker-ful of rice at every meal, but usually we would split one or two big steaks as a family. Usually my brother — who was eating an absurd amount of food as a teenage boy — would get one, and we would split the other one between the rest of us. When we couldn’t finish what was on our plate, we were always urged to eat the meat first and leave the rice.

So we all sort of accidentally went on the Atkin’s diet that summer. Collectively, as a family of four, we lost almost 40 pounds. And then as fast as the steak trend came, it also left. The novelty of the grill wore off, and we really weren’t used to consuming that much meat. A year or so ago, a distantly related cousin reached out to me on Facebook. “I remember the steak your parents made was soooooo good,” he said. He must have visited that summer.