Fake Kabobs

This is more of a story about how an engineer thinks of cooking than actual cooking itself. Come along for the ride. If you think that math and cooking should be separate, and you have no desire to look into how my brain works, just skip ahead to the picture.
I like kabobs. Any meat on a stick cooked over an open fire is ok by me. They are sort of a pain to cook though. I can understand them if you've just butchered something and you have bits of meat laying around and you need to do something with them. By all means, stab away and get to cooking. But if you live in a world where you buy your meat at the store, you usually end up buying a big piece of meat, cutting it up, and reassembling it on sticks to cook. I've done this a lot, but I eventually had to ask myself what's the point? Why are kabobs better than just cooking a steak? Why are they worth the work? Surface area, that's why. The outside of a steak is always the best part and by cutting the steak up before you cook it, you gain a lot of surface area, and thereby, a lot of extra flavor.
So let's do a math problem, engineering style. You start with a piece of meat that is 4 inches by 6 inches by 1.5 inches, perfect for two hungry people. You have a surface area of (6x4)x2+(6x1.5)x2+(4x1.5)x2=78 square inches of perfect flavor on the outside. Now, if you cut that meat into strips half an inch wide, and 1.5 inches long so you get rectangles 1.5x1.5x.5 perfect for kabobs, you increase your area by (6x1.5)x7+(4x1.5)x3=81 square inches. You more than double the surface are from 78 to 159 square inches! More than twice the yummy flavor! No wonder I love them so much. It almost makes it worth all of the spearing to get them on the little kabob sticks. Almost.
I wondered though, what if I just left them in the 6 inch strips, what if I didn't make the final cut? Then I could just lay them on the grill and they wouldn't fall through and I wouldn't have to spear them. How much would I be giving up? Only the area of the final cuts which is (4x1.5)x3 or 18 square inches. This brought me down to 141 square inches, not quite double the flavor are of my original steak and only about 11% less than if I went through all of the real kabobing work. That's a cost benefit analysis I can get behind.
I've stopped spearing my meat on sticks, so I'm not actually making kabobs any more. I'm just marinating and cooking meat. They still sort of look like kabobs, and they taste like kabobs.They're fake kabobs.

Impress your friends and teach them geometry!

Midwestern style Fake Kabobs

I want to first apologize to all real kabob cultures. Those of us from the Midwest don't flavor our kabobs in any way that makes sense. We use Italian dressing. It's yummy. Sorry about that.

Chuck roast, about 1.5 inches thick, cut into 1/2 inch strips.

Italian dressing.

Put the meat in the dressing for 2-5 hours. Take the meat out. Cook it on the grill. Be amazed that such a simple meal gets compliments. Bask in those compliments.

You can use any Italian dressing that you find at the store. I make mine. Not because I feel that making it is necessarily better, but because it's easy and I always have the stuff around. Italian dressing is nothing more than vinegar, water, oil, sugar, salt, and some other spices. Sometimes I use an actual recipe, sometimes I just throw it together in amounts that make sense. If you've never made Italian dressing before I suggest searching the internet for a recipe, it's easier to accidentally make it bad than good.

If your kids ever struggle with their geometry and complain that they'll never use this stuff in real life, just point them over to this post. Life doesn't get any more real than this.