Sally Breslin: My Life: SOMETIMES LIFE JUST ISN'T FAIR!

I eat chicken just about every day – to the point where I'm expecting to sprout feathers and lay an egg at any moment – but a couple times a month I crave beef.

And when I do, that craving is not taken lightly.

Grabbing a burger at a fast-food drive-thru won’t satisfy my craving. I mean, if you toss out the bun and all of the toppings, you’re left with a burger that might be big enough to feed a leprechaun, not someone of my girth.

So last week, when the craving for beef struck, I headed to the nearest supermarket to search for the perfect top-round steak, which was no simple task. By perfect, it had to be the perfect thickness, the perfect shade of red, have the perfect amount of marbling and, due to my budget restrictions, also be the perfect price (under $10).

Three stores later, I finally found “the one." The steak was such a work of art, it looked good enough to eat raw…and even better, it was only $6.96.

But the only thing that kept popping into my head as I drove home was the nagging fear that in my hands, this beautiful specimen of beef was about to be transformed into beef jerky. Never have I been able to pan-fry or broil a steak and have it come out tender…or even chewable. My friend's husband, however, can take a 5-inch thick chunk of steak, rub a little olive oil on it and toss it onto a grill, and it ends up juicy and fork-tender every time, without fail. The man is the Houdini of beef.

While I am the Bermuda Triangle of it.

So I took a new approach with this particular steak. I decided I was going to quickly sear it on each side, then toss it into a baking dish, slice some potatoes on top of it, add water to cover it and then let it slowly simmer in the oven, kind of like a stew or a pot roast.

Three hours later, I checked my experiment. To my shock, the potatoes had browned, the water had turned into gravy, and the beef was so tender, it fell apart when I merely looked at it.

I was excited…and ravenous…mainly because it was 11 PM by then. Cooking the beef had taken up most of my evening.

I sampled a bite as I dished the meat and potatoes onto my plate, and couldn’t believe I’d actually managed to cook something so tender and tasty. I couldn't wait to dig in.

As I was carrying the plate to the table and trying to control the trail of drool I was leaving in my wake, boom! The plate just suddenly broke in half! My Corelle plate by Corning, which was advertised as break-resistant and microwaveable, had snapped in two without any warning or provocation whatsoever.

The half my hand wasn’t gripping fell to the floor with a crash, sending my precious potatoes, gravy and beef splattering everywhere. Within a millisecond, my dogs swooped in on the carnage and sucked down every last morsel as if they were two furry vacuum-cleaners.

A piece of gravy-covered potato landed on my sockless foot and really burned, so I envisioned my dogs’ throats lined with blisters. But heck, they didn’t care. They were sniffing around for more of my dinner.

I glanced down at the portion of the plate I still was gripping and saw about four bites of the beef and potatoes precariously balancing on it, so I quickly moved to set it down on the table. When I picked up the other half of the plate from the floor, I noticed the break wasn’t jagged and had no sharp edges. It looked more like a nice clean laser-cut pattern of a smooth ocean wave.

It was weird.

It still pains me to look at this!

Just plain weird.

Well, let me tell you, I savored those four bites of food. They were so delicious, I seriously thought if the dogs hadn’t beaten me to it, I might have grabbed a spoon, knelt down on the floor and eaten the remnants of my meal from down there.

Needless to say, I’m still craving beef…more than a bull that’s just been released in a pasture full of sexy cows.

But I’m a realist. The odds are that even if I were to attempt to replicate the same meal and cook it again, it would be guaranteed to turn out like something I could use to re-sole my winter boots.

Life just isn’t fair sometimes.

Do you hear me, Corelle?

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Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net

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