From Cow to Steak

     My beef is in. It is currently hanging at the Redmond Smokehouse and will be cut, wrapped and ready for me by the 16th. I had been told that the butcher would call and that I needed to know how I wanted it cut up. How I wanted it cut up? Are there options? Apparently there are and a quick education in beef cuts was in order.

     I started as I do all research - online. There are myriad sites that have detailed pictures of where each cut comes from and the difference between British and American butchering. I read about steak thickness and how best to store frozen meat. I studied diagrams of cows with dotted lines all over their bodies and little mouth watering words like "brisket" and "tenderloin". But I still didn't know how I wanted my beef. I guess everyone likes beef in different configurations so I had to think about how I liked to cook and eat beef. For instance I'm not much of a ground beef person. I would much rather have those tough cuts as stew meat, brisket or pot roast. Also I wanted to make sure I got everything usable, as I have a taste for offal, as well as dogs that will eat anything. 

     Through my Googling I found a forum that had all the info I could ever need. It turns out that Garden Web is not only an invaluable help for gardening but for just about everything you do at home. I asked the question about my beef and got enough info to gave me confidence when talking to the butcher. Here is the link to the thread gardenweb.com.

     I found a few other sites that are interesting in a homesteading kind of way. Backwoods Home Magazine is a bit extreme but has some down and dirty info on cutting up a cow. The usmef.org site (I have no idea what that stands for) has the most comprehensive list of beef offal I could find and has pictures of things you probably didn't know a cow had. 

     Now starts the education on how to cut up the pig I have coming......

The Staff of Life

     

I have decided that, although I am not a baker,  I am tired of paying someone else to make my bread. I LOVE Dave's Killer Bread and it is an Oregon product but it is spendy. I also love crusty, European style bread which is made locally but again, it is too expensive for me to buy on a regular basis. So I decided to take matters into my own hands and attempt to bake some edible bread.

     My first try landed me with a rather heavy disk of wheat bread that I relegated to bread crumbs and croutons. I used a recipe off of the Cook's Illustrated website, and in classic Laurie, style I substituted things that obviously should not have been substituted. I run into this every time I try to bake - I want to improvise, which does not work in the cuisine of chemistry.  

   With a little self-discipline and and a lot of fumbling with measuring cups, timers and parchment paper, my second attempt rendered a near perfect loaf. OK, I may be exaggerating but it was very edible - crusty, with an open crumb and really nice flavor. Again I used a Cooks Illustrated recipe that was adapted from a NY Times recipe for no fail crusty white bread. It is the "Almost No-Knead Bread" recipe that has gained recent fame in home baking circles. The recipe calls for instant yeast (not regular yeast), white vinegar (not wine vinegar) and a mild flavored lager. It is truly no fail IF you follow the directions exactly - something I'm still struggling with.

   In my most recent loaf I substituted an locally made Ale (Deshutes Cascade Ale) for the lager, as I wanted a bit more flavor. It turned out great - even better than the last.

   So I guess that is the beginning baking lesson I've learned - it's OK to improvise once you've mastered the tried and true formula. 

 

COOL

     The other day at the Grocery Outlet I noticed that all the veggies had the country they were grown in noted on the shelf price tags. I mentioned it to one of the clerks and he acted as though he hadn't noticed. I thought this was just a considerate thing to do so customers would know where their food was coming from. It turns out it is now law.   

     As of September 30,  2008 all agriculturally grown items must be labeled with country of origin. All red meats and foul, fish and shell fish, nuts and perishable agricultural commodities (read fruits and veggies) and ginseng fall into this category.  It is called "Country of Origin Labeling" or COOL for short. Which I think is rather (excuse the pun) cool. Even discount stores that get the cheapest from where ever, will need to reveal if they are getting bell peppers from Mexico, cucumbers from Canada or beef from Brazil (yes, some of that grocery store beef can come from Brazil even though it's inspected by the USDA upon entering the country).

    Although the labeling hardly helps someone trying to support their community by eating locally, at least it narrows it down a bit.  It is the first step to making the average consumer at the average big box super market see where their food is coming from and maybe give it a little thought. Eating locally is hard for a number of reasons and inadequate labeling is one - COOL is at the very least, a place to start. 

To Brine or Not to Brine...

     I am not the first nor will I be the last to ponder over whether brining is all it's cracked up to be. I'm new to brining, having been more of a dry rub or marinating kind of a gal. But a good friend that is the best cook I know swears by brining so I thought I'd better give it a try. 

     After some way too salty chicken breasts and a few birds with moist meat but soggy skin I am not convinced. 

     With my last local chicken - a beast of a bird - I decided to try once again. I made my salty concoction and immersed the giant foul for 2 hours. While it bathed in saline solution, I logged on to Cooks Illustrated  to see what they said about dull, mushy skin on a brined chicken. Apparently you are supposed to start the whole process the day before, since, according to them, it should be able to dry out completely in the frig before cooking. Considering my chicken just started it's bath 4 hrs before dinner, complete air drying was not an option. 

     I came up with what I thought was the next best thing - my blow dryer. I figured 15 minutes of 1200 watts of hot air should do the trick. After it was coiffed I rubbed it with a bacon grease, hoping that that would help with the crisping.

     Once again, the meat was moist and flavorful but the skin was unappetizing. To me the best part of a roast chicken is the crackly, fatty skin and I, for one, am not willing to give that up. 

     So until I can start my chicken dinners a full 24 hours in advance (and purchase a bigger frig) I doubt brining will be the future of my yard birds.

     Pork is a different story......

End of the Month Blues

     I had to cave. For most of the summer and into the third week of Oct I was able to buy about 90% of my food locally. But then I got to this last week and with a diminishing bank account, I went to Trader Joe's, Grocery Outlet and Food For Less for a few things that I just couldn't do without. At Trader Joe's I got some hazelnuts (I usually get them from Strictly Organic's other company, Mom's Nuts) which were a quarter of what I usually pay. Being that almost all hazelnuts are from Oregon, that purchase didn't cause to much guilt. I also bought some dried fruit and a chicken - not from the Northwest. I then crossed the parking lot to Food For Less since I had heard they had specials on Washington apples and squash from Hood River. At $.68/lb (for 10 lbs or more) for Yakima Fugi's, it was a great deal. They did have Acorn squash at $.98/lb from Hood River and a variety from Sauvie Island (near Portland). I also got 5lbs of sugar (obviously not local) but using local raw honey as our only sweetner is breaking the bank. At the Grocery Outlet I got some organic cheddar (from Wisconsin and $1.99/lb), some Naked smoothies for my sons lunch, and a GREAT bottle of Chilean Merlot for $2.99. 

     Of course I am still getting all that I can from my CSAs but when the pennies are few and the refrigerator is empty, it becomes crystal clear how under priced industrialized food is, and how it may take some time to learn to appropriately budget for 90% of my families diet to be of food produced with out subsidies, chemicals, 1000's of miles of transport or inhumane treatment.

Update 11/10/08 

Those hazelnuts I got at Trader Joe's? They were rancid - ended up taking them back and splurging on Mom's Nuts. It usually pays to go with what you know is quality. 

MMMMMilk....

    Recently I started getting my dairy products from Windy Acres Farm, a dairy farm in Prineville. Billie, the owner, offers rich creamy raw milk with no antibiotics, hormones or other bad juju. Unfortunately she is not allowed to sell her milk products because they are raw. Instead I (and all her other customers) have a "herd share" - in other words we buy into the herd and get the byproducts for "free". Each week a load of milk, butter, cream, yogurt, kefir and sometimes cheese curds are brought to Bend and left in restaurant sized frigs outside of a house near Hollinshead park. Every Weds I hop on my bike and ride over to pick up my half-gallon of milk, loaf of butter and pint of cream. Sometimes, because Billie farms other things as well as dairy cows, there will be quarts of honey, years of corn and cuts of frozen beef from a cow that wasn't preforming up to par. 

     To buy into Billie's herd is $35/year plus a monthly fee. Two gallons per month is $19. That sounds like a lot but compare it to Strauss at $4.50/half gallon which is a good company but not part of our local economy. Fifty cents extra is a small price to pay for wholesome, local and raw.

    Why raw? Isn't it dangerous? Well, yes. if it is contaminated, just as any food that is produced in a dirty environment would be. The reason pasteurization

is so necessary in large scale factory milking farms is because it is impossible to keep the milking house clean. But Billie's milking house is spotless, disinfected daily as well as the meticulous disinfection of the cows udders before milking. I have read in numerous places (www.realmilk.com and www.westonaprice.org to name a couple) that raw dairy products are healthier because they are less processed and because they have to come from cleaner, healthier cows. These days you can get eColi from factory farmed spinach, tomatoes and hamburger. There is no guarantees with food - that is why I want to know where it's coming from and who is handling it before I feed it to my son. And the only way to do that is by buying local.

My First Local Chicken

     This last Thursday a fresh frozen chicken was dropped off with my weekly egg delivery. I am a part of a "herd share" at Fresh Start Farms out in Alfalfa. This is a polyculture farm raising pigs, steers, chickens and heirloom turkeys with the help of 12 at-risk foster kids. Kathy, the farms owner, is a stanch advocate of locally produced, family farmed food and will fill your ear with why current policies and regulation are squeezing out small farms. Some call her Crazy Kathy, but after I visited the farm and tasted her food I consider it the good kind of crazy. I would put a link to her website but she doesn't have one. Her number is 541.317.5925.

     This chicken was HUGE - almost mini turkey sized - and absolutely yummy. I roasted it with a bacon, honey and lavender glaze (honey and bacon from Windy Acres and lavender from Sisters Botanicals) vegetables from Fields and Wintergreen Farm tossed in rosemary I picked while in California, created gravy with cream and butter from Windy Acres (another herd share I'll get to later) and had a friend bring an apple tart made with apples from Hood River and Yakima and bread she made in her outdoor backyard oven. We had a salad with greens from Groundworks Organics with chopped hazelnuts from Mom's Nuts and slices of Hood River pears. We drank Oregon Wine - lots of it - and although most at this dinner party didn't care one way or another if everything they were eating was local, it made me feel good and even a bit proud of myself.  This was the most "local" meal I've ever served. Now the challenge is to keep it up....

Successes and Failures

After my beginners luck with the peaches I moved on to the Claude Reine plums. I made a very nice but not unusual plum preserve. It has a pleasant yellow green color and is sweeter than a traditional plum jam. Then full of confidence I attempted plum jelly. I picked a load of purple plums (on both the inside and out) at a friends house when I was in California and thought it would make a pretty, smooth, deep purple spread. I cooked the fruit with a little water and sugar and then strained it all through a colander. There was no big chunks but it wasn't clear either, but that was OK by me. I then followed the instructions on the Sure-Jel package (cooking with copious amounts of sugar and boxes of powdery pectin) in the hopes of getting it to set up after it's water bath. No such luck. I had ten half-pints of plum liquid. About a week later I tried again - following the instructions for "If your jam doesn't set up". I emptied all ten jars into a the big soup pot, added more sugar and more pectin. Water bathed them all again, and again, no luck. Still plum liquid. Soooo....now I am calling it plum syrup and am hoping to find some suitable syrup bottles with sealing lids and redo the whole thing. Live and learn I guess, except I still don't know exactly what I did wrong....so much for the learning part.

Canning 101

     The most I have ever done in the way of food preservation is some fig jam. Well, I did try green tomato pickles that went very wrong and some flavored vinegars that turned into viscous, cloudy goo. I am big into freezing but there's really no skill involved with putting something in the freezer. But I need to free up my freezer for my soon to arrive local meat (more about that later)  so I jumped into canning. 

     I started with the easy stuff like fruit and tomatoes. My 5 year old son and I set off pushing the Burley trailer, dogs in tow, to pick some fruit. I like to call it my Federal Loop - I go down the alley's of the streets near me and pick the unwanted fruit. I always choose trees that are hanging into the alley and that are obviously not being harvested by the owners. Peaches (3 small crates), purple plums (4 small crates), Claude Reine plums (3 small crates) and 2 different kinds of apples (5 small crates) made up our take for that balmy fall day. 

     I started with the peaches since they were the ripest and made a FABULOUS (if I do say so myself) spiced peach preserve. I found some recipes on line to get a feel for the basic preparation then created my own combo - peeled/pitted peaches, honey , cinnamon sticks, cloves, ground nutmeg and whole allspice berries. No pectin or "fruit stabilizer", what ever that is - just the good stuff. 

Spiced Peach Preserves

A big soup pot 2/3 full of halved, peeled and pitted peaches

3-4 cinnamon sticks, broken in half

15-20 whole cloves

10 whole all-spice berries

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

2 cups honey

Cook over low heat,  stirring until bubbling. Simmer for 20 minutes, smashing peaches slightly for desired consistency. Water bath can in quarts, pints or 1/2 pint jars leaving spices in**

** I like the way the spices look left in the preserves but if that is not your thing - put all the spices in a muslin spice/tea bag before cooking and remove before canning. 

"You just can't eat locally in Central Oregon". I hear this time and time again when the question of local food comes up. Granted, it's not easy as we are blessed with a 90 day growing season and nights that can freeze the sparkler right out of your hand on the 4th of July. But I know people lived here before grocery stores started shipping in cantaloupes from Mexico and milk from Wisconsin. With  a lot of effort and a few modern-day exemptions I am going to try to make 2009 a 90% local year. Here's hoping all my fall 2008 preparations will get us through the winter and spring.....