I haven't blogged much at all lately apart from the obligatory Paper Chef tracking and I've been missing it - but work is busy and pretty interesting too, so that's that. I have been cooking but nothing terribly memorable. Last night for example was the traditional garlic pasta. Accompanied by a variation on my normal greens - this time with purple kale, beet tops, leeks and seasoned with soy sauce and balsamic vinegar. To accompany this was my family's favorite ground beef dish. I fry the ground beef very high, pour off fat after it has browned and then continue to cook until it begins to become crunchy. Add a little soy sauce and keep cooking until dry again. Sounds horrible but is actually very tasty.

But eating ground beef led to a discussion of why we buy grass-fed, range beef (preferably organic) and how mad cow disease can be seen as an indicator of lots of other problems in our meat supply - for every cow with mad cow, thousands in similar situations have other food pathogens. So we get beef from places where we know they are clean, make ground beef out of a piece of a single cow and that cow has lived a relatively natural roaming life. As opposed to a cow penned, fed feed made of all kinds of garbage and then slaughtered, hacked up and ground with beef from several other cows along with whatever other bits of material got in the way.

This in turn reminded me of the friend of a friend who has a small herd of beef cows near Half Moon Bay that live in fields and eat grass and artichokes by the ocean. We can go in on a cow - he only sells a whole one at a time - and we reckon we need a total of about eight more people to get either an eighth or a sixteenth of a cow. If you are interested email me or leave a comment...

Tags: beef, meat, cow, organic, food

posted by Owen : 9:31 PM