Xian Mountain Steak

The Norton family Xi'an Mountain Steak contains a sweet taste due to raw, natural sugar in the sauce that lifts your palate up. It is balanced with vegetables like broccoli that absorb the majority of the whiskey remnants left behind after the flame of the flambe process.

This contrasts with the lighter taste of the tender meat with a darker taste that brings you back down to earth.

Mike ventured off the tourist path during his first climb up the Xi'an mountains, not necessarily caring whether he lived or died.

He had been enduring an existential crisis with severe depression at the time, gambling with his life in a manner called "The Doc Holliday Effect."

He discovered an off-road path that led to a hidden mountain village. The villagers there did not speak Mandarin but some kind of tribal or provincial dialect.

Instead of murdering Mike as an invader, they took him in and taught him how to survive in the mountains there, throughout all four seasons.

They had an abundance of alcohol, with which Mike learned how to flambe a variety of dishes that he eventually innovated into one he called the Xi'an Mountain Steak.

This dish is named in honor of the mountain range that transformed his character.

Mike, showing who eventually became his wife where the hidden village was when he returned to the mountains with her.