At the end of May, one of my best friends got married, and at his wedding I learned that he had become a vegetarian. Actually, he had told me this about a year earlier, but since he lived in Washington, DC and I lived in Miami, I had kind of forgotten, and I didn’t really believe him until I saw him turn away the surf and turf – which was excellent – at his own wedding dinner.

The man became a vegetarian as a result of his becoming a doctor. Apparently there were things he learned in med school that convinced him that meat-free was the way to go. Plus, he’s always been a dog person, which I believe had some bearing on his decision as well.

At around the same time as the wedding, my sister got a new baby dachshund. Her (the dog’s) name is Madison:

The pup’s got personality, and is even more adorable in real life, if you can believe it. So I grew kind of attached to little Madison.

Now, obviously, I would never eat a dog, and I would flip out in a major way if anyone I knew told me that he or she had just eaten dog for dinner last night. But this got me thinking: cows, pigs, and most other animals have personalities, too. People give them names, keep them as pets, take them to the vet, talk to them in baby-talk voices, and all that.

I ate them. Regularly. In huge quantities.

You can see where I’m going with this. Like countless nine-year-olds who get their first dog, cat, or hamster, I felt like a criminal for eating animals, who, had they been a little luckier, could have lived happy lives as people’s pets. Also, I had the expert advice of a close friend who was (and is still) walking the vegetarian walk. So I, too, decided to become a vegetarian.

Unfortunately, about a month after I made this decision (and I had stuck to it for the whole month!), I moved to Buenos Aires.

This is a place where, by my estimate, 90% of the restaurants are steakhouses. So I caved. Over the past few months, I’ve eaten an obscene amount of steak (more than at any previous point in my life). The best was at Cabaña Las Lilas in Puerto Madero.

(You don’t have to my word for it, though, check out this write-up by the New York Times from 2006, part of a piece called “Meals Worth the Price of a Plane Ticket” – pay no attention to the prices, however. Because Argentina’s continuing inflation problem, everything has gotten dramatically more expensive, on the order of 2 - 3X, since the review was written.)

Las Lilas provided perhaps the best meal I’ve ever eaten in my life. No joke. I had the “lomo” (beef tenderloin), but I would imagine that everything else there is pretty spectacular, too.

People have said that the restaurant is touristy, overrated, and overpriced. Touristy, maybe (I managed to find it, after all), but it is, without question, rated appropriately, and it would be well worth a visit at twice the price (which it almost certainly will be by this time next year).

Buenos Aires is also a place in which supermarkets sell a 12 oz. cut of Angus beef for the same price as a cup of Ramen noodles (AR$5.00 or about US$1.55; you can check the current exchange rate here).

If you’re living here, and you do decide to go the supermarket route, I can recommend no better recipe than Patent and the Pantry’s Balsamic Steaks. I’ve made them like five times since I’ve been here. The taste-to-effort ratio on this recipe is ridiculously high. Virtually no effort for a fantastic meal. When you’re finished cooking, your plate will look like this:

(That’s not my picture, it’s Gwendolyn Richards’, but the plate really will look like that. Mine did. If this woman hasn’t already published a cookbook, she really should.)

The bad news is that these recommendations - of a steakhouse and an easy, delicious recipe for cooking steak - come with a surprise ending. That picture of Madison has gotten to me again, and I am trying to be healthier. I’m giving vegetarianism another shot. That’s right. I’m going to do it incrementally this time. Red meat will be the first thing to go.

I just can’t look at pictures like this one:

without thinking that somewhere, someone thinks that it would be perfectly normal to kill poor little Madison and eat her, and that I might be doing the same thing to an animal that’s just like someone else’s loving, loyal pet.

But I don’t mean to stop you from enjoying the recommendations I’ve just provided. I’m serious. Go ahead. Do whatever you want.