recipes

 Last night I made an excellent leg of goat. It's been really really really hot here in NYC (104 yesterday!) so I haven't had much desire to further heat up my apartment by turning on the oven. Thank goodness for crockpots and toaster ovens. I also got to try out my newest toy, a Jaccard Meat Tenderizer. 

It allows your meat to cook more quickly, but it also allows you to marinate things faster. I've been able to get shoulder to be grill cut for curries rather than a braising cut with this neat device. For the goat leg I used it to get a good lime-curry marinade. I also did a dry cooking method, which worked amazingly. Usually I cook with some sort of liquid in my crockpot like wine or broth, but this time I didn't use anything. In the morning there was a nice fatty broth. The meat had a better texture too. 

Someone posted on paleohacks about the layer of solid fat that such leftovers develop when you put them in the fridge. While it looks unappetizing, when you heat the leftovers up it will melt into the meat. It's also worth saving to use on cuts of the animal that are less fatty. There is no need for added fat (butter/ghee/coconut) in cooking most grass-fed meat if you buy a whole animal as long save fat from some braising cuts to use on the leaner parts. Some animals will be leaner than others though, depending on the pasture, age, breed, and season of slaughter. 

I learned about this meat tenderizing from The Butcher's Guide To Well-Raised Meat, by Joshua and Jessica Applestone, a married couple who own an organic butcher shop called Fleisher's. They have a location north of the city in Kingston, but will be opening in Park Slope this fall. 

Now while I have my meatshare buying club that allows me to buy good meat for very affordable prices. I'll be writing a booklet about how to organize one soon. But I do sometimes go to butcher shops like Fleisher's, The Meat Hook, and Dickson's. A butcher shop is going to cut with more of an eye towards customer needs and be able to make more delicious secondary products than the slaughterhouse butchers that my meatshare meat goes through. If I am strapped for time, I often go to the butcher and pick something up, like marrow bones or sausage. I don't get these in my meatshare. If you have more money than time, a butcher shop is probably a better place to get meat than a meatshare. Sadly, good butcher shops are few and far between. NYC is a rare hotspot of butcher shops selling pastured meat, some of them sell it exclusively. I've heard of such shops in Seattle, Austin, San Francisco, Portland, and Chicago...but even some major cities seem to lack them. I couldn't find one in Boston when I was there recently. 

The Butcher's Guide explains how this happened, how small butcher shops were crowded out when the industrial model emerged that emphasized cheap meat by cutting out the middleman. The cost of this cheap meat was disconnection from the source of the meat and a low-quality product pumped with additives. At the butcher shop you can learn so much about how to cook cuts you didn't even think about buying before and you can also quiz the butcher on the conditions that the animals lived in. Joshua Applestone was a vegan for over a decade because he objected to the way most animals were treated, so he vets his suppliers with care. His suppliers are mostly people who wouldn't work with a meatshare. They represent a different niche of medium-size operations where the farmer often has other jobs and lacks time and marketing know-how. Most meatshare farms are tiny operations that don't have enough product to fill a butcher counter for even a month.

A butcher shop needs a regular supply of consistent products. That's a bit of a limit, as truly grass-fed beef is a seasonal product, so some of the meat they sell in the winter is grain-fed. They also couldn't find a supplier that could provide them with enough pastured chickens, so they buy organic chickens instead. It reminds me of something I've been thinking about, that in the past chicken and pork were secondary products on a small farm. They were fed waste from grain and vegetable agriculture, which was a sustainable model, but didn't produce the amounts of chicken and pork that Americans are used to eating now. There was a kerfluffle in the paleo blogosphere about bacon, which I pretty much ignored since my suppliers are very small and slaughter seasonally. I really only end up getting pork once or twice a year. If they were truly only feeding the pigs secondary products, it would be once a year. Some of my friends who are from Eastern Europe fondly remember the yearly pig their family raised with spoiled crops and leftovers, which was slaughtered on Christmas. Soon the EU will make this home-slaughter illegal. 

A butcher shop also needs to move a variety of products because whole animals aren't just a butch of tenderloins and steak. I am skeptical when I visit restaurants that market themselves as sustainable, but that serve the same meat dishes day in and day out. A sustainable system is represented by restaurants like Northern Spy Food Company, a restaurant that goes through a whole Fleisher's pig a week, each day serving a different delicious part. 

Besides lots of information about the economics of meat and why you should buy pastured products (did you know that chicken waste is still considered an acceptable feed for cattle??), I also appreciated the book's practical tips on supplies like knives and cutting boards. Also information on basics like tying a roast. I didn't grow up cooking meat so some of this basic stuff is new to me. I was also interested to know that vacuum packed meat lasts much longer when sealed in the fridge than I thought, around 2-3 weeks!!! They also tell you what cuts need to be braised. For the more advanced, the book has instructions on DIY pig roasts and breaking down a lamb. There are also some interesting recipes I'm looking forward to trying. Overall this is a great and easy to read book that can help you purchase meat with more awareness of how the process works and also prepare it properly. 

 I thought about getting my mother chocolates or flowers, but instead I got her something much more useful and healthy: kitchen tools! I hope she is enjoying them:

A microplane! If you like flavor you should get one of these. The design maximizes the surface area of the ingredient you are working with. I mostly use mine to grate cheese and zest citrus. I really don't think I could go back to a regular grater, microplanes are much easier to use.

A garlic peeler! Simple, small, and saves me time when working with delicious garlic. I can peel several cloves at once!

A brew basket! Last time I was home I noticed all we had were tea balls, which don't really allow the leaves to unfurl for a flavorful and healthy cup of tea. I also may have stolen the only nice tea steeper we had... Tea pots are OK, but these allow everyone to brew their own favorite tea and are much more portable. I use them both at home and in the office. The awesome thing is once you are done steeping, the lid doubles as a stand!! I wrote about them on cool tools. 

Edit: my sister got her another of my favorite tools!

A digital oven-safe meat thermometer. I love cooking with this because I don't have to open the oven to check on meat and lose valuable time by letting heat out! It also decreases the supervision time I spend. I can put it in the roast and just set it to alert me when it's the right temp. When I'm cooking meat in the frying pan and also cooking a side dish, I just stick it in the meat and can focus on the side dish and not worry about the meat too much.

 A few weeks ago, after one too many mediocre meals created by my standard issue cooking technique (which is put a piece of meat in the crockpot, cover it with water and broth, dump in some spices, and hope for the best in the morning), I decided to make a goal to actually start following recipes. I haven't been lately because I've been so busy and I've had some living situation issues. My last apartment unmotivated me to cook because my roommates weren't very clean and constantly left food out. 

Then I moved to a nicer place, but with a postage-size kitchen without many amenities. After moving I ate out more. But now I'm trying to get back into the game. I also have a bunch of cookbooks some folks have sent me to review. One of them was The Paleo Recipe Book. It's one of the few of them that has recipes that involve braising, which is important to me. I buy whole animals from farmers and that means I get mostly braising cuts. I had some shanks left over from my meatshare at B&Y farms, so I decided to make Roasted Lamb Shanks. 

It was a challenge because my goal was to actually follow recipes, not just be like "lalala I don't really want to go to the grocery store to buy this so maybe I can use this other thing." I like the idea of small family-run stores, which are encouraged by the zoning and density of the city, but damn is it annoying to have to go to three stores to get relatively common ingredients. I only had to go to two for this recipe, since at the first one all their sage was spoiled (I need to start growing my own herbs again and I have no excuse since I have a small front garden). I kinda wanted to also make some potatoes, but organic potatoes were only available in one pound bags and honestly I don't eat enough of them to justify that.

If you don't grow your own, fresh herbs are very expensive and can quickly run up the cost of the food. Another obstacle for me is that I hate raw onions. Sure, I'm fine with onions in a soup, but I can't stand them fresh. Chopping them is a form of torture and I'm horrified that people put fresh onions on salad. 

But luckily this recipe only called for you the halve the onion! Whew, saved. I used my own lamb stock and put in the stock veggies. Braising took some time, but luckily I had work to do at home. The braising liquid was used to make a wonderful brown sauce. That was definitely what made this so delicious. When this was done it was definitely a whole level above my normal cooking. Check out the recipe and pick up a copy of the cookbook here: 

Preliminary review:

Pros

• Recipes have a more gourmet bent
• Many recipes for braising and using the whole animal!
• You'll learn many good classical cooking techniques
• Beautifully illustrated and designed!

Cons: 

• Some ingredients expensive or hard to find
• Some more difficult techniques may be hard to learn from text-based recipes 

 I'm in the process of moving, so I haven't had time for fancy recipes. Luckily there are a few things that can make anything tasty: salt and acid. Adding a dash of acid to a dish can really improve the flavor profile. For example, on Sunday I made pork chops for Chris with rosemary, sea salt, pepper, and a dash of peach vinegar that I got from this awesome store called The Filling Station. Some great ideas for adding acid include: vinegars, fermented vegetables, and acidic pastes. 

My favorite vinegars are coconut vinegar, balsamic vinegar, and flavored vinegars. You can make your own flavored vinegar, like this fig vinegar or this peach vinegar. Trader Joes has some excellent vinegars like tangerine vinegar. The aforementioned Filling Station has at least 10 varieties and many online retailers also sell flavored vinegars. 

Fermented vegetables also add a tangy acid kick. Many restaurants I like serve pickled vegetables alongside entrees. Lot 2 in Windsor Terrace used to serve chicken confit with silky pickled mushrooms, which was amazing. 

Many acidic pastes are obvious: like tomato paste. There is a reason why tomatoes have been enthusiastically adopted by so many cultures. Another great one, which is the secret in many authentic Thai recipes, is tamarind paste. Many BBQ sauces actually contain this and it definitely tastes great with meat. I often marinate liver or heart with tamarind paste, lime juice, chili, ginger, and garlic overnight, which balances out some of the "mineral" flavor of these offal cuts. 

What acidic ingredients do you cook with? 

Edit: And duh...citrus! Using exotic citrus is also lots of fun!