TracyFood

Monkey Monday: many confessions edition. 24 September 2007 2:43 pm

Posted by Tracy in : cooking,eating,health,meat,nepal,not even vegetarian,seasonality,soup,travel , trackback

In which I confess: Friday’s post was so late it went up on Saturday, I forgot the illustration for the miso soup piece, but it’s okay because I’ll use it in another post, I ate a big (for me) steak on Saturday night, and um, I’m going to Nepal next month. I promise to write about the dead cow last and give lots of warnings so everybody who hates that stuff can bail out before then and not have to read it.

Wait.. you’re going where?

Yeah, you read that right, I said Nepal, and I said next month. My aunt Beth was in the Peace Corps there some 30 years ago, and she’s going back for a trek this October, and she invited several family members, including my parents, who invited me and my brother. We’ve all been freaking out about the travel plans for several weeks now, but I’m still having trouble with the reality of this trip sinking in, which is perhaps why I haven’t posted about it until now. I plan to set up automated posts sharing the itinerary for the trip, and then I’ll post more detailed stuff written after I get back and I’ve actually been there and done that and given my t-shirts away to the Sherpas. (Honest to monkeys, we’re going to have porters on this trip, and cooks, and basically more support staff than I’m really comfortable thinking about it and yes I will be taking all kinds of notes on that experience and everything else I can think of while I’m not too busy going “Holy crap those mountains are big!”)

A few weeks ago I hit my friendly local public library for all the books I could find about Nepal, and was very happy to score The Nepal Cookbook, which suggests I will be eating a lot of lentils, eggs, and potatoes on this trip, by which of course I mean color me psyched. (Also, I hear there will be tea.) So far, my research suggests that Nepali food looks a lot like what I think of as the cuisine of northern India, only with more millet because rice doesn’t grow so well at super-high altitudes. Today’s emails from the fellow organizing the trip included a little more discussion about what we can expect to eat on the trip, which somehow helps make the whole adventure seem much more real than any of the gear lists or maps I keep trying to study only to get distracted by the nearest shiny thing (or cat). Anyway, expect to hear more about me freaking out about this trip as it gets closer, and closer, and closer (eeeek!) You can bet I will take copious notes about everything I eat.

Miso mishaps

So I was super-late finally writing up my almost-instant miso soup recipe post last week — so late it didn’t appear on Friday but rather Saturday. Also I completely forgot to include a picture in the post — but since Janelle posted a good question in the comments to that entry, I’ll be saving the visual aid for my follow-up response thingy.

Forgive me veg*ns, for I have sinned

If you don’t want to know any more about my steak dinner on Saturday night, now is the time to stop reading this post. You could check out my latest Flickr pictures, perhaps starting with the awesome potato-and-pepper-and-shallot fritatta I made that morning instead:

or better still this stunning (and entirely vegan) yellow Brandywine tomato:

or if you’d rather read some deeply weird news that will make you angry at not just me but rather the entire world, check out this Chicago Tribune story about vegan teacher’s losing battle with his school district. I’m a little confused about the part where he says he wants to keep his job but won’t go back to school until they take animal products off the cafeteria menu — that just sounds like a really backhanded way of quitting to me, but whatever. As a recent eater of dead cow, I’m pretty sure my opinion about this story is null and void.

So. About that dead cow I ate.

It was delicious. Like I admitted last Monday, I’d sort of been craving a steak for awhile, but not just any steak — a really good, pan-seared, home-cooked piece of meat from a happy, grass-fed cow that had one really bad day and ended up dead. Eventually I went with the steak frites recipe from the January-February 2007 issue of Cook’s Illustrated”, because I knew our CSA box was bringing us russet potatoes well-suited to the frites part of the recipe. Officially the magazine called for boneless ribeye, but Peter got us a little under 16 ounces of top sirloin from Deck Family Farm at the Eugene Saturday farmers’ market, and I really cannot complain about his choice one little bit, oh no. First of all, check out that website. We’re not talking nasty mystery meat here, people. Second of all, did I mention delicious? I cooked it just sprinkled with salt and pepper and seared in my best cast iron pan, the steak was thinly cut enough I didn’t have to bother with any of Alton Brown’s schmancy oven-finishing business. If anything I may have overcooked it a bit — but only a bit, because it smelled so good I couldn’t wait to get it out of the pan and spread it with herb butter and let it sit while I finished the fries so we could eat! (Little bitty side confession: I give in. I want — no, I might even need — a deep fryer. There. I’ve said it.)

The steak turned out so well I actually — and possibly for the first time in my life — complained that there too many fries, because I almost filled up on them in my effort to eat the delicious thin-cut crunchy spud-things before they got cold. Now, of course, I’m done eating cow for another six months or so, or until February drives me to it. If you’d like a little more reading about the kind of meat I feel okay eating as a very picky not even vegetarian, I recommend checking out:

the Linkery’s awesome article about different kinds of meat (pastured, branded, and commodity — that last better known as “cheap, scary mystery crap”),
this advice column about how to find sustainable meat (hint: if the restaurant isn’t loudly and proudly advertising the good stuff, you might want to stick to their veg*n options and leave the dead animal cooking and eating for stuff you’ve researched and feel happy to let into your home)
and this excerpt from The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall over at Culinate. (Note to self: see if the library’s got that one.) If you don’t want to click on the link, here’s one of the bits that inspired my Saturday night dinner: “Are you among the millions of consumers putting pressure on farmers to produce mountains of cheap meat of dubious quality, by dubious means? Perhaps it would make sense to spend a little more on it, a little less often.” Say whatever you want about my choice of steak, but it renewed my commitment to avoiding mystery meat whenever possible.

To make a long story short (too late!), dear readers, I hope that everything you eat is as worth it to you as that steak (and, for that matter, the vegetarian fritatta and vegan homegrown tomato) was to me.