For the first six months of this year, I pretended to be a chef. Hence I have acquired some skills. Girls only date boys with skills, so as a public service I shall share a skill with you. Perhaps this will become a regular feature - Richard D. Bartlett's How to Score Babes Using Culinary Mastery...

Episode One: To Cook a Delicious Steak
Steak is delicious; someone said it is like a good cake with a particularly delicious icing. Steak has a lot of social gender associations that need to be kept at the forefront of your mind at all times. For instance, deep down, every woman wants a man to cook her a delicious steak, and for him to cook it perfectly. Also, to be a man, you must ensure your steak is more rare than that of the woman you are cooking it for. If you are eating out, ask for 'still moo-ing', to be really impressive. With this in mind, you can begin to consider purchasing a delicious steak.

Rule number one: Pak'N'Save hates you and wants you to die alone and miserable. Under no circumstances should you purchase steak from a discounted retailer. Thirty dollar steaks cost that much for a reason: they are delicious. If you must buy from a supermarket, New World will see you right, but if you have the time, go to Moore Wilson's - that's where all the restaurants go. Organic steak from Commonsense is also potentially delicious but tends to be somewhat hit-and-miss. Steak is like red wine, the price directly reflects the deliciousness, almost without exception. Remember, you are trying to impress a hot babe here; when it comes to hot babes, penny-pinchers, like nice guys, always come last. If you feel bad about paying $38.00/kg then just be sure to leave the receipt in an obvious place to ensure your babe knows how impressed she should be.

Now you have your delicious steak sitting in your fridge at home, the price tag burning into your conscience, making you feel a little sick - what next? Take it out of the fridge! Before you cook a steak it needs to be at room temperature, for two reasons. Number one, the temperature shock of cold steak on hot pan makes for a tough and non-delicious steak. Number two, because your steak is going to be rare, it is only going to spend a few glorious seconds on the pan and you want to make sure the centre is not cold.

A good way to bring a cold steak up to room temperature quickly is to massage it with your bare, muscular hands. You should always massage it, in any case. A big steak is a sizeable portion of a cow, an animal with a lot of mana, and you should respect it. Remember though, massage, not pulverize. A good steak won't need to be tenderized, you just want to loosen it up and prepare it for its delicious destiny.

Like everything ever, steak needs to be seasoned. Crack heaps of pepper all over it, but don't put any salt on it until after it is cooked - salting raw meat draws the delicious juices out (which is a bad thing).

So you have a delicious, expensive, massaged, room-temperature, peppered steak sitting there. So far you can't have done anything wrong. Now comes the crucial bit. You have to look your steak in the eye (that's a butchery joke) and say, "Listen steak, I respect you, but I am the man in this equation - you will bow to my skills and relinquish your deliciousness, for the sake of the eternal happiness of me and my babe." You absolutely must believe you have the skills to cook a delicious steak to perfection, otherwise you may as well be cooking patties.

Take the heaviest pan you have and get it hot. Ridiculously hot. Cookbooks, the kind that are a little edgy and tongue-in-cheek (but not so edgy as Jamie Oliver), tell you to get the pan 'as hot as you dare'. This is exactly right. Are you not a man? Can you not get the pan any hotter than that? I use the front left element on my stove, because the thermostat is broken and it gets so hot you can actually see the rift forming in the space-time continuum. This part is very important, please pay attention - the pan must be hot (that's also why you use a heavy pan, so the heat is spread out as evenly as possible).

Only when you have your pan so hot you want your mother to hold you, you can put a little fat or oil in. We used rice bran oil last week and it caused a sizeable fire and an immense volume of smoke. Therefore, I will henceforth stick to grapeseed oil, but I'm sure just about anything will do the trick. You want to cook each side of the steak for as long as you can without burning it, basically. A really hot pan will burn the living snot out of a steak in about 45 seconds. Proper chefs will tell you otherwise, but you really can keep checking every 5 seconds to make sure you are getting it browned without getting it blacked. When it is looking delicious, flip it and do the same to the other side. If you are a man, your steak is now ready and delicious. However, you can't expect hot babes to eat raw, dripping, delicious steak, so put it in a hot oven for three to six minutes.

You're welcome.