Grass-fed sirloin steak, mushrooms and onions sauteed in extra-virgin olive oil from the Greek island of Crete, a little bit of Celtic sea salt, freshly ground-pepper, some oregano to taste, and perhaps some raw goats-milk kefalotyri cheese.  That is what I call a real cheesesteak.  Where can one find such a cheesesteak?  Not in the city of Philadelphia, unless of course, I am there and equipped with a wood-burning oven.

So, I wake up early in the morning, it is Labor Day 2012, and I decide to take a trip to Pat’s King of Steaks in South Philadelphia before making the drive back to New York.  I order two cheesesteaks from the guy trying to impersonate the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld.  There was only one person in front of me, and nobody behind me, and they still tried to pressure them into “ordering fast”, to give you the impression that they are like the Soup Nazi, or perhaps to practice their “Soup Nazi” routine for when tourists were to be around.  Sorry, I didn’t buy it.

As I was eating my cheesesteak I kept staring at the meat and kept thinking that this looks a lot like the pre-cooked meat you get when ordering a steak-like-meat sandwich during one of those special promotions at McDonalds/Burger King.  Actually, I think I can hit the nail on the head perfectly for you… Imagine your son or daughter comes home from school one day and tells you that they had a great Philly Cheesesteak sandwich at school in the cafeteria!  That’s right! The meat looked like public-school cafeteria meat.  Got it?  Anyway, the onions also looked like they were lovingly sauteed by a robot with Artificial Intelligence in some factory in Ohio, freshly canned and shipped over to Philadelphia.  As for the mushrooms? I don’t think they were grown on dirt from the planet earth.  I still don’t know how I used to find these “sandwiches” tasty back in the day when I was a student at Philadelphia’s Drexel University.  Come to think of it, cheesesteaks at Pat’s were or are supposed to be the best in all of Philadelhpia.  In other words, cheesesteaks from everywhere else in the city are horrible when compared to those of Pat’s King of Steaks, or from those of neighboring Geno’s.

After I finished my Pat’s cheese steak, I decided to go the bomb-Iran/we need TSA checkpoints on highways, union supporting Geno’s Steaks.  Geno’s was different than Pat’s in that it was littered with “Support Our Troops” and other “patriotic” stickers, along with one that particularly caught my eye that said  “Press 1 for English, Press 2 for Deportation”.  Nevertheless, there were no stickers saying “Bring our Troops home”, or “End the wars”, or “End the Wars and Fix Veterans Healthcare First” stickers.  Incidentally, this is the same place that once gave a free tee-shirt to myself and a good friend of mine named Russel from Oklahoma, all because the lady behind the glass thought we both had amazing blue eyes.

The cheesesteak from Geno’s tasted almost exactly the same as the one from Pat’s.  So much for surprises, Pat’s = McDonalds, Geno’s = Burger King.  Here is a picture of the Geno’s cheesesteak in all of its glory:

So I decide to buy an extra cheesesteak from both establishments to bring home to my brother in New York so that he could try them and see what he was “missing”.  Back home in New York, I couldn’t finish my portion of these cheesesteaks without drowning them in ketchup.  How do people eat this stuff almost daily in the city of Philadelphia?  Well, at least we now have Obama care, because every single “civilized” western nation has free health insurance to cover people who eat crap food like this, get fat and subsequently get heart attacks and cancer by eating this chemical-laced, hormone/antibiotic pumped, factory produced “meat-like” products.

So the Philly Cheesesteaks were not a hit, but the Reading Terminal Market was.  I arrived in Philadelphia on the Sunday morning the day before Labor day and was not expecting to see raw milk for sale in the Reading Terminal Market.  For if I were expecting it I would have brought the largest cooler I have and would have packed it with ice and as much raw goat’s and cow’s milk as I could put in it!  So I was unfortunate and had to buy a smaller portion of milk.  My hotel room wasn’t even ready by the time I got there, so I decided to sit in the lobby and enjoy some of my recently purchased raw goat’s milk:

The cow’s milk was second on my list of drinks to enjoy, and I ended up finishing it while driving back home to New York:

Philadelphia, when I return to you I will get more raw milk from you, but a cheesesteak? Never again!

That’s all for today, and this is John signing off and telling you remember, eat whole foods. Why? Because there is a reason they are called “whole” in the first place.  The word whole means complete, entire, not missing anything.  They call that big supermarket chain which has its headquarters in Austin, Texas Whole Foods for a reason.  They didn’t call it “Skim Foods”, or “Mechanically Separated Milk Foods”, they called it whole foods.  Think about it, would you rather enjoy the company of a wholesome person or of a non-wholesome person?  Words don’t lie…  and words don’t get their definitions by edict, neither from  Congress nor from Obama or the Supreme Court.  So from now on, drink only raw whole milk.  And if you are lucky enough to live in Philadelphia, you know where to get it from!