So, I am planning on posting more "real" food recipes. But before I start that, I wanted to write a little bit about meat.
Up until the fall of 2008, I hadn't eaten any red meat for 8 years. When I was younger, hamburgers were probably my favorite meal. But during my first semester of freshman year in college, I read "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser. That book changed the way I thought about meat. From what I understood of the book (keep in mind this was a long time ago, my memory is a little foggy and my then-freshman brain was programmed to read the assignment as fast as possible), meatpacking plants had become sloppy and dangerous places to work. The priority had become quantity, not quality. Poor conditions and unskilled workers compounded the problem, and the result was tainted meat. The book boiled it down to one particular line which made my stomach churn and caused me to go cold-turkey on beef: "There is shit in the meat."
Being the germ-o-phobe that I am, I stuck with my conviction and didn't eat a drop of beef for years. I wasn't even tempted. However, my friend Grace recently told me about local farmers who raise their own animals on their own farms, and then sell the meat to their supporters. The animals are raised to be all-natural, grass-fed, happy creatures. Grace found one farm in particular, Chestnut Farm, which seemed great. Besides the fact that the grass-fed animals are a million times healthier for you than hormone-injected/corn-fed ones (read this about how grassfed beef has only a tiny bit more fat than commercial chicken!), the meatpacking process seems a lot more controlled and healthy. I'll take it! I signed right up and have been getting 10 pounds of meat a month since the fall. We get a mix of beef, lamb, chicken, turkey, and ham/pork depending on the month. Let me tell you that first bite of beef was hard... and I started slow... but now I am loving it. Sometimes we get a weird cut that I don't know what to do with, like a tiny pack of ribs, but I figure one of these days we'll just throw it all in the crockpot.
I made two small legs of lamb over the weekend, post coming soon!
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3 comments:
wow, im so glad you came back to the dark side (but in a very healthy and organic way). how do you typically cook all that meat you get? do you freeze some? do you eat cheeseburgers?!! HMM HMMM what about the core!? :)
The meat all comes frozen, so I put it all right in the freezer when we get it. I'll take it out to let it thaw in the fridge a day or two before I want to cook it. We DO eat cheeseburgers, since we often get ground beef!! But this meat is super healthy and low in fat, so it is almost core :)
We cook it in all different ways... depends on what it is. Crockpot, grill, oven- anything goes! I'll start posting these cooking adventures soon!
Hey Kim... It's kind of an adventure because you never know what you're going to get. We've spent a lot of time on the internet figuring out how to prepare the different cuts of meat. Very fun, but we definitely have the same problem as Mer and Dan - a bunch of strange cuts on the bottom of the freezer. Bring them over to Mer's for the crockpot, I imagine.
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