This winter my husband and I decided to go in with a group of people to split a cow from a local farmer. I am not a huge red meat eater, but I wanted to find out what the experience was like and to stock our freezer a bit. We split all parts of the cow and the parts that we didn’t eat we gave to our dog. This was really an added bonus, free dog food! She had lots of liver, the heart, the tail and the tongue, but I think we may keep the tongue for ourselves.
There were about 8-10 people that we were splitting with, so we only had roughly 20 pounds worth, which was really plenty for me. We had a few different steak type cuts of meat, some ground beef and beef patties that the butcher pre-made. It can be really fun to have a lot of one type of meat because it allows some experimenting with different recipes. While we had the typical hamburgers with some exotic toppings, I also made some delicious meatballs to store in the freezer for later, stuffed peppers and the steaks of course.
As luck would have it I had just received a package of POM Wonderful (the pomegranate juice drink) and gave it a try in my cooking. I have had POM Wonderful to drink before and I love the taste, but I had never cooked with it. The POM Wonderful website offers all sorts of delicious recipe ideas and I decided to try a variation on a steak I was preparing. I marinated the steak in simply POM wonderful juice, some red wine and used a little bit of fresh rosemary and salt and pepper. The steak was seared on the stovetop and then cooked in the oven. It was delicious! Very juicy and tender and the POM Wonderful added just a bit of sweetness to the flavor.
We picked up our meat at the beginning of the year and we are down to one large steak and the tounge. We plan to put the large steak in the crockpot, as it it thawing in the fridge as we speak and I was recommended to boil the tounge. We did receive all of the meat forzen, although I’m sure we could have asked the butcher for some fresh, it was all still very tender and juicy.
I’d recommend if you haven’t tried any local, fresh, natural meats to try something like splitting an animal with a group of friends. Not only can you visit the animal before it is slaughtered (which we did not do), but you can talk to the farmer who raised the animal. Was it ever given antibiotics? Was it exclusively grass-fed? Did it have free-range of the farm? These are questions that the farmer would gladly answer, as I’m sure you can’t say the same about your local grocer. The ods are that the person working behind the meat counter doesn’t even know what state the meat come from, let alone the way in which it was raised. For me, the label “organic” is not enough, I was to know who raised the meat, where it came from, and how it was treated.
