that went surprisingly well

so, before he left in the afternoon yesterday, the boss told me to run some sort of a rib eye steak special, cause we haven't been selling them much lately and we had a few in the walk-in that we needed to turn.  i actually threw four rib eyes out last week cause they were sour, but these ones were fine.  anyway, he told me to do whatever i wanted and just adjust the price accordingly.  it's awesome and very rare when he says "run a special...do whatever you want" and i was stoked cause we usually don't have a dinner special on wednesday.  so i initally thought about just doing some nice garlic mushrooms to serve on top of the steak, cooked in butter and white wine, but i like to have button mushrooms to do that and all we had is pre sliced shrooms and they didn't even look all that great, so i scrapped that idea.  then out of the blue i was like "bleu cheese balsamic!" and i (for the first time ever, actually) made a great balsamic reduction sauce.  just cooked the steaks and crumbled some bleu cheese on them, not too much, and then put my sauce in a squeezie bottle and drizzled it over the top.  some of you may be thinking, "dude, you've never reduced balsamic before?  and bleu cheese and balsamic isn't even very forward thinking and/or challenging!"  well, i'm not a chef, i've explained that before, and the place i work is far from fine dining, and none of our customers expect anything but good, home cooked, normal food to fill their bellies.  i actually thought the bleu cheese would turn most of our customers off.  anyway, we ended up selling like ten of them before i left, which is pretty awesome considering that it was a $16.99 special on a fucking wednesday, in a place that on tuesday runs $6.99 all you can eat spag and on thursday does $9.99 prime rib sammies all day.  i couldn't believe that old folks and truckers were shelling out seventeen bucks to eat a steak covered in skunky cheese and vinegar.  i was proud as hell of how it looked, too.  oh, and before dinner rush started, boss came back to get food to bring home to his wife and originally he just wanted two porkies (breaded pork chop burger type sammies), and he seemed interested and vaguely grossed out when i told him what i decided to do as a special, and he was like "just gimmie the porkies" and i put a bit of my balsamic drizzle on a spoon and made him try it and he kinda snapped it around his mouth for a second and said "ok, gimmie one of those specials too."  it was great.  tammy asked me at one point why boss doesn't let me do this (make up specials) all the time.  it's funny, he was just trying to get rid of some steaks, and i got to play around a bit and turned it into a pretty nice special, and we made a couple hundred bucks.  everybody's happy.

balsamic reduction
3/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1/4 cup honey
2 cloves garlic

i actually ran the garlic over my microplane and made paste so there wouldn't be any chunks stopping up my squeeze bottle.  bring everything to a boil and let reduce for fifteen, twenty minutes.  you'd think it would be too sweet with the honey but the garlic cuts it just right and you end up with a nice sweet/savory sticky sauce that works just as good on steak as it would on ice cream.