Steaks with Parsley Sauce

I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to do something I’m so bad at.

I’m not talking about cooking: I was never bad at cooking. I was insecure, I had things I couldn’t make, but everything went along a learning curve, and for someone who was teaching themselves using Epicurious as her only guide and nonstick pans bought from a place called Honest Ed’s in Toronto, I think I learned pretty quickly.

I’m talking about surfing.

For those of you who read this blog and know that I tend to gallavant from one exotic place to another without much regard for the real world at all, it may come as a shock that I have certain travel dreams that I have yet to conquer.

For example, I’ve always wanted to work a ski season at a mountain (preferably Okemo in Ludlow, VT, but I’m not picky). I imagined working all day and skiing as soon as I got off work… it seemed like perfection.

I’ve also always wanted to go work on an organic farm for a few months. There’s a program that sends volunteers to different farms in different countries, and from the moment I read about it in the Herald Tribune three years ago, “milking carrots in Argentina,” as I jokingly refer to it with the English One, has been on my radar.

The last: surfing. I know that most people have some sort of repressed urge to move to Hawaii and surf all day, but because my travel dreams have always been able to become my reality, I never really suppressed it, and now I have my chance.

I mentioned yesterday that I’m currently in San Sebastian: I’ll be here for two months, surfing and learning Spanish. I started surf lessons two days ago, and as much as I tried to talk myself into loving it as I walked down to the surf school, part of me would worry that my dream would not be all that it was cracked up to be, that I would try and fail and move on, as I tend to do (I’m not proud of it, but there it is, and why have a blog if not to tell the truth to total strangers).

But surprisingly, at least to me, I fell immediately in love with it: like my favorite childhood sport of boogie boarding, only ten times more fun and ten times more tiring–after an hour of trying to stand and falling, I was exhauted, but I had done it.

And, with the sort of lousy lead-in that we food bloggers are, every so often, guilty of using, I present something else that I used to do poorly but that I loved anyway: steak. More precisely, steak with parsley sauce, similar to an Argentinian chimichurri, but I took too much liberty to really call it that. It’s spicy and garlicky and fresh, and I understand now, after hours and hours spent in the sun, why the Argentians, with their warm weather, decide to top their steaks with something so fresh and green and bright.

Steaks with Parsley Sauce
1 large bunch of fresh flat leaf parsley, washed, stemmed, and dried
4 cloves of garlic, peeled
1 shallot, minced
1 small carrot, grated
2 Tbsp. lemon juice
2 Tbsp. lime juice
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. dried oregano
1/2 tsp. Peri-Peri sauce or your favorite hot sauce
1/2 tsp. black pepper
about 1 cup extra virgin olive oil (I tend to need a bit less)

Serve with your favorite steaks. The rest of the sauce makes a great dip, pasta sauce or topping for anything from chicken to burgers! Store it as you would pesto, with a thin layer of oil over the top to keep the color green.