Today we took all the kids on an ag field trip to two farms. One is a ranch with pasture raised beef and pigs as well as a major composting operation. The next was a USDA sheep farm where we enjoyed her handmade, delicious sheep milk kefir with honey from her own hives. The kids got to play with and feed pigs, goats, baby sheep, LSG dogs, cows. Did you know that sheeps milk is naturally homogeneous and can therefore be frozen and thawed with zero change to it's quality? TIL! Anyway. My child is bloodthirsty and spent a lot of time collecting and then playing with these. Do you live near farms? Do you visit them or shop directly from them? If not, look something up in your area. Its spring and beautiful outside and you should go to a farm. Happy Friday! Whatcho doing?
The small rural town I grew up and currently live in used to have a lot of small farms including at least three dairy operations within a mile or two of each other. They’re all gone now. There’s some people with a couple of cows here and there but that’s about it. Dairy is a tough business. There’s a beef farmer a few miles away who’s done okay and a lot of people here buy from him. But it’s been getting tougher for him and he recently posted online that he got a lucrative offer to buy out his herd:
Man... that sucks. I can't imagine how hard it must be for the smaller producers right now. I know that I've shifted a lot of my buying behaviour so that I'm now ordering directly from local farms for my beef, pork, and lamb. There are a few farms around here that have embraced direct to consumer selling, and it's amazing. Most of them basically take a day every week or two and hop in their truck and drive around making their deliveries. All at prices that are somewhat comparable to other suppliers, but with insanely better quality. My last pork delivery even had a few treats in it for Zoe, as the young girl that goes with her dad on the deliveries likes Zoe, so that's how she got some pigs ears to gnaw on.
I’m seeing that more and more on a regional basis, but nothing here in my immediate area. At least not that I’m aware of.
Google the term "CSA" or "Community Supported Agriculture." I used to have a subscription box to a ranch that would hook me up with like 20 lbs of beef at a time.
Yeah. I've got a lamb supplier that will basically butcher on demand. I just call them up and tell them what I want and it shows up in the next delivery cycle. (They don't even have an online store, just a web page with a phone number). I have a lamb shoulder in the fridge that will be roasted tomorrow. (It's pissing rain and snow this weekend, like seriously, wtf, so I figured a good roasted lamb dinner and a nice bottle of red would be good comfort food). Pork supplier is the same... I can get a whole pig up to 50 lbs, or pretty well any cut I'm looking for. I've got a big shoulder that I'll be curing next week as prep for a cottage roll. They're starting to make their own sausage, and I've tried it, but it needs some work. The best part is I gave them some feedback and they're adjusting accordingly. I'm more than happy to pay butcher prices for this stuff, cutting out the middle man for them.
Neighbors I grew up with raise beef cattle and process maybe 6-8 a year and we get half a cow. It's usually ~350-400lbs of beef. Right after we paid for our beef this year we happened to get a flyer from a local supermarket advertising a sale on ground beef. My wife ran the numbers and we easily save over $500 by buying half a cow each year. Easily worth the eight hour round trip to pick it up.
Yeah. If you're willing to put in a bit of time and effort, you can save big by buying in bulk from the source. The more butchering you're willing to do, the better. I usually try and get big unbutchered cuts that I can then slice up and vacuum pack as I want. A good chamber vacuum is worth its weight in gold for long term frozen food storage.
We’ve bought a 1/4 pig or a portion of cow in the past, but with it being just the wife and I now it’s really more than we need. And we don’t eat a lot of beef anymore. There was a store that opened a few years ago that sold fresh meats from a nearby farm. I enjoyed buying from him despite the price. His homemade sausage was to die for. But not enough people were willing to pay the price so he closed up and moved to a more affluent section of the state. I still follow his Facebook page and it looks like he’s doing well there. I may have to stop if we’re ever out that way again just for his jalepeno and cheese sausage.
I rarely buy red meat these days. If there's something I can make a stew out of that's been marked down I'll purchase, and we still eat pork breakfast sausage (bacon only when it's on sale now). Otherwise we eat chicken and turkey sparingly. My kid doesn't care for meat much either which makes these habits easier. Over the years we have scaled back a ton on meat, red meat especially, due to factory farming and environmental concerns, but the costs + my kid's dislike has put us over the line on dropping these habits for good. Last night I made tacos with lentils. It sounds crazy but it was delicious and all of us enjoyed it. I used to use ground turkey as our ground meat of choice so the flavor of lentils was easy to transition to. If we were used to the taste of beef it would have been a more noticeable substitute.
I make an exclusive exception for Conecuh Sausage. I will fill my freezer with it. My mom froze me a ton and she's supposed to deliver next month. Gimme.
I should care about factory farming but the reason i cut back is because of the dam cost. Eye/inside/outside round is like 8-9 dollars a pound.
I should have cut back *more* but the cost is what did it for me as a permanent lifestyle change as well. Plus the thing about my kid... Lil B can verbalize in very specific terms now so there's no question about feelings on the matter. But seriously, try the lentils. It is surprisingly good. I love beans and lentils... How they taste and how they make me feel after a meal... And finding new ways to feature them excites me.
Tacos are a great vessel for non-meat substitutes. We make lentil and roasted cauliflower tacos that are great.
Roasted cauliflower is radically underappreciated. I love it roasted with some inferno piri piri spice or curry and it's amazing. Some people tend to under roast them, but when they're nice and golden brown they have a fantastic flavour. It also makes a great thickener for gravy. Blend it in with an immersion blender instead of using flour or corn starch.
Hard roasted cauliflower + garlic farro + chopped sun-dried tomatoes + spinach (wilted if you want an incorporated "bowl", uncooked if you want a "salad"), topped with sliced avocado. Super easy to assemble and amazingly delicious. But yeah, golden brown cauliflower is great on almost everything.
Another radically unused ingredient. I also keep a big jar of roasted red peppers in oil in the fridge that I use a lot.
Same. My wife's family always gives us marinated peppers whenever we see them. Can't remember the last time we did have them in the fridge. We put that on everything.
Not a fridge ingredient, but I feel like za'atar also makes everything better. I've been putting it on my avocado toast lately because I am a proper millennial and still eat avocado toast all the time.
I finally got in contact with the landscaper doing the ground prep for our new garage the other day. Id been trying and not getting a response, which is highly unusual for him.Turns out he’d gotten a new phone and wasn’t getting messages, voicemails, etc but finally I got through. He somehow managed to send me a sketch the Amish guy did along with the materials and total price. The sketch looks nothing like what I’d sent to the landscaper to show him. Now when we talked, he mentioned the Amish guy didn’t know where and what I wanted for windows. Plus, he never sent me the estimate for his part, which, again, is unusual. So after waiting a couple days I called him and got through. He hasn’t received anything I’ve sent him over the past month. Including the initial sketches and measurements I’d sent him the day after he was here. As well as the offer to drive down and meet the Amish guy to go over it all. And he’s having a hell of a time because he’s locked out of his Apple account, customers and suppliers can’t reach him. He sent the estimate from his phone on Monday and it never sent to me. His wife, sitting right next to him, couldn’t text him. All he can do is make and receive phone calls. So after work I’m gonna drop in on the Amish guy, unannounced, and go over the project with him. I may swing by the landscaper’s house to get the estimate as well. You gotta laugh… two guys I need to communicate on a project with and one has a phone that doesn’t work. The other doesn’t have one at all.