The One With The Dingo Steak

So, I’m in a country setting. Well, I’m in a forest to be exact. It’s late afternoon and I’m standing on a well worn track that runs through the forest. The surface of the track is basically compacted earth that, probably due to the volume of traffic that uses the track, is very solid and thus makes the track easily discernible from the forest floor either side of it. The track itself is covered with brown and orange leaves, so it’s autumn.

Now I’m just off to the side of the track, although I’m also behind what can best be described as a dark coloured sheet hung up between two trees. The sheet shields the area where I’m now standing from the track and the passing traffic, itself consisting mostly of horse-drawn carriages and people wearing dirty rags, travelling in either direction. With me behind this sheet is another man, although I can’t remember anything about his appearance. I do, however, know that he’s Australian as I can hear him talking and his Antipodean accent is clear. He’s challenging me to do something but I can’t make out what the challenge is at first. Then I see that there is a crude cooking hob in between us, with two heated rings on it. He’s challenging me to some kind of culinary cook-off.

He then sweeps away some errant leaves that have found their way from the branches above onto the hob and are slowly beginning to glow and burn. Then I notice that we both have frying pans. On closer inspection, it actually appears that I have a normal frying pan and my Australian friend has a kind of frying pan/skillet hybrid, basically a frying pan but where the surface of my frying pan is smooth, his is ridged, perfect for getting those griddle marks on steaks.

He tells me he’s going to go first, which I remember thinking was good because I didn’t know where the hell I was going to get any food from. Then he slaps a piece of meat, about the size of large dinner plate, into his pan. He then starts pummelling it with a tenderising mallet. Sparks start to fly out of the pan and I ask if he should have done the tenderising before putting the meat into the pan. This is met with a scowl and a brief explanation – ‘This is Dingo meat and it needs to be tenderised while being heated up’. So there it is, the Dingo steak being cooked and tenderised simultaneously. He pounds the steak a couple more times before declaring that it was nearly cooked. I find this hard to believe and go in for a closer inspection. He suddenly becomes very friendly and enthusiastically tells me that Dingo meat is best served rare. He slices into the meat and folds it back on itself to show the red inner. The steak is so thin by now that you can almost see though it, so quite how he managed to show me any of the inside is a bit of a mystery.

He slaps the steak onto a plate and holds it out to me, as if asking me to try it. Then I hear a voice from the track, beyond the sheet that’s shielding us from the view of any passing traffic. It wants to know what’s going on behind the sheet.

 

Then I wake up. Australians, Dingo steaks, cooking exotic steaks in the middle of a medieval forest…I’ve got nothing.