Looks like tuna

Our fish karma must be awfully good, because someone we barely know gave us tuna.

We know Shane only because he had a utility trailer for sale, and we were in the market for one. Kevin had already agreed to buy the trailer, and a few days ago he went to pick it up. He left at around 4:00, and came home two hours later with a utility trailer and two bags of frozen tuna. Shane, it turns out, is a serious – and prize-winning – fisherman, and tosses around tuna steaks the way other people toss around home-grown zucchini.

I invited my parents over to share the bounty, and set about marinating the steaks in a yogurt-based tandoori rub we use for both fish and meat. When I put them in with the marinade, I noticed that two of the steaks were bigger and rounder than the others, but I didn’t think much of it. We grilled them all together, and when I cut in to one of the big, round ones, I discovered it wasn’t tuna at all.

“This isn’t tuna,” I said to Kevin. “I think it’s beef.”

We looked, we tasted. It was delicious, but very lean for beef. “I think it’s venison,” Kevin said.

After dinner, I called Shane to thank him for the fish and tell him he’d made what I hoped wasn’t a terrible mistake.

“If I had realized it wasn’t tuna before I cooked it, I would have called you,” I said. I had visions of Shane’s wife opening the freezer and saying, “Honey, where’s that Kobe beef we’ve been saving for a special occasion? You know, the stuff we’re going to eat with the ’85 Bordeaux?”

Shane explained that it was indeed venison, from a deer bagged by his father-in-law. “There’s plenty more where that came from,” he told me.

We’re going to have Shane and his wife over for dinner some time next week. The zucchini should be ripe by then.

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