Friday, October 3, 2008

Beef Hangover

Pretty much all of last week was lackluster in the kitchen. We got knee-deep in a bunch of beef without really meaning to. It started out with the burgers from last Saturday. We had some leftover sirloin and I figured we’d just use it in some ghetto spaghetti or something (I knew we’d be busy bees this week and I’ve been kind of easing off the food reading for a couple of days, trying to focus on my thesis). Monday we had leftover burgers. Mark had purchased, with my encouragement, a lamb burger stuffed and studded with feta and spinach. I’m so silly; I can’t bring myself to eat lamb,* but I often think of fixing it for Mark because I know he loves it so.

*(I’ve tasted it, but it’s just hard for me to swallow…pun intended? I’ve seen too many of those little pamphlets about how lambs are treated…I mean, I know that depending on where you buy your meat, pretty much any animal you eat has a fair chance of being prodded inappropriately or worse, I don’t even want to know, but lamb… lambs = sweet baby Jesus and, though the Baptist may have been leached out of me, I still can’t think of eating lamb and enjoying it…we’ll see what happens though, I think I need a food sherpa and I’m accepting applications).

On Tuesday, our neighbor Lisa asked us to “check in” on her son, Dakota. Mark’s been giving him drum lessons for a little while now and they’ve developed a sweet friendship. Mark’s idea was to have a shortened lesson and bring Dakota over to help out with dinner. I mistakenly said we could have tacos or ghetto spaghetti, and Dakota naturally leaned towards tacos, but we didn’t have enough meat, only enough for about 3 tacos probably. No matter how much I sweet talked the idea of spaghetti to them, their little faces still registered disappointment. So Mark and Dakota ran to Kroger and got more beef – Ugh. Mark and I had committed to a limited amount of grocery trips/expenditures this week, but it was okay, because this was a special occasion. We’ve never had Dakota over and I was really trying to be mindful of an 8th graders tastes. We made ghetto tacos and then Mark and Dakota played Nintendo Wii while I worked upstairs until Lisa came home. It all worked out, but we got stuck with too much beef. Our bowels have not really forgiven us yet.

I finally got some of the last sweet corn from a little produce stand near where I work. I made a lovely little salad to take for lunch:

It’s a tahini dressing, thinned hummus basically with some raw corn kernels, red onion, spinach, and some scallions.

2 comments:

Salt said...

I used to abstain from lamb too. While growing up, I had an aversion to baby animal meat- somehow it seemed more cruel to eat something that had not had a full life. Now that I know a little more about how our food is raised, I realized that mass-produced meat does not really come from animals that had a nice, pleasant, full life.

I still have only ever eaten veal in France- I only learned that I had eaten it after the fact. However, I changed my mind on lamb after reading in "How to Cook Everything" that lamb is usually more humanely raised than many other meats in the U.S. Bitten's reasoning was that lamb has never really been popular in the U.S. to the point that it has been produced on the massive scale that other meats have (I looked this up to make sure I remembered the source correctly, P.477 if you own the cookbook). However, I have to admit that I am not the most informed on this subject.

Amanda said...

Oh Lord, when we were in Barcelona, Brandon ordered some rare veal, and you could practically still hear it bleating. If a calf bleats, not sure about that. For my humble Decatur County palate, duck is the most exotic meat/poultry I have discovered that I love. OhmyGod, I love duck. Although they are cute.

That raw corn reminds me of my mother & grandmother's warnings to me when we'd be fixing corn; some vague threat about diarrhea or constipation. I remain, to this day, mercifully unaffected by either when feasting on raw corn.