I can vouch for “essential.” I can vouch for “omnivore.” My brain and my body crave meat with my salad. In fact, I think I might die without it. For sure I’d go crazy. But, personally, I don’t know about “evil.” I’ll own it: There’s a part of me that likes to kill. When I do what I do with a hatchet and a chicken, I feel like crap, and I feel like God. I feel alive and in love and closer than ever to death. So I guess that is, for me, mixed feelings, yes. And the mix itself is welcome and intensely gratifying. In fact, it’s almost too much. Too swirly, too soupy. I can tell you that the part of this swirl which seems “good,” as opposed to “evil,” has absolutely nothing to do with foiling the chicken industry or saving the environment or taking personal responsibility for my role in the food chain. It has to do with getting a little bit bloody and gross, like the complicated, hungry animal that I am.

There Will Be Chicken Blood [Slate]

Share This

Michael Dietsch attended a butchering demo at Brooklyn Kitchen, where a Berkshire hog from upstate New York was dismembered and divided into twelve portions. He’s posted a large photoset showing the entire process, which is only grisly if you never thought about where your meat comes from.

Butchering the pig [Flickr via Kottke]

Share This

Ground Beef + aged Cheddar

As Samuel L. Jackson once said, “Now that’s a tasty burger!” How do you like yours? ‘Cause when it’s cooked right, there’s nothing like a juicy burger with a thick slice of Vermont cheddar on top. You can even taste the ketchup!

Store it cool, but drink it warm!

If only this were real! Dethroner advertising dollars would go through the roof! (or Joel would trade it all away for a case of Fish ‘n Chips flavor.)

Share This

The incident only came to the attention of senior officers after one of their fellow soldiers reported the fact that he had been asked to donate some blood for the scheme.
The man is reported to have said: “I have been asked to give blood for sausage-making and I want to know if this is against regulations.”

This never would have happened in the Carpathian Air Force.

Airmen made sausages from their blood [Telegraph.co.uk via Danger Room]

Share This

“Not Martha” made these stunning bacon cups by cooking bacon around a muffin tin. My mouth is watering just looking at them. Imagine how good they’d be without the garnish?

For the next step, someone needs to make these watertight and make bacon rocks glasses.

bacon cups [NotMartha.org via Serious Eats]

Share This

Though we just got back from our most recent culinary adventure, the 2.0somethings crew is already gearing up for our spring break plans: The First Annual Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival in Des Moines, Iowa. The festival will be held at the High Life Lounge on March 1. According to The Register, “PBR will be offered for $1 a draw, paired with succulent dishes such as bacon-wrapped shrimp, little bacon cheeseburgers, a bacon-wrapped jalapeno and tater tot – all the gourmet bacon foods.” The festival will also include bacon-flavored craft beers, a “Blazin’ Bacon Bloody Mary, served with a slice of peppered bacon,” and maple bacon cheesecake. No word on whether EMTs will be standing by to provide on-the-spot bypasses.

Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival [2.0somethings.com]

Share This

There’s nothing wrong with eating squirrel (although it’s some of my least favorite game meat). But that doesn’t make the soft focus cooking of Heidi “The Huntress” Wilson, star of an old Outdoor Channel television show, any less disturbing. I know she’s just trying to make eating squirrel seem like a normal American pastime, but that name doesn’t help.

[via Serious Eats]

Share This

Share This

This is Rob Huebel’s Meat Case. He explains: “I’m not a terrorist. I just get really hungry for meat when I’m in the air.”

[RobHuebel.com] (Thanks, Richard!)

Share This

Memorial Page [Canned-Bacon.com]

Share This

The first, from the Times, a piece by Mark Bittman about the high cost of meat production:

Americans eat about the same amount of meat as we have for some time, about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we “process” (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total.

Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.

The second, this profile in the Wall Street Journal of Kansas City tight-end Tony Gonzalez, who has gone from a high-meat diet to a vegan one:

Three weeks later, he walked into the weight room at the Chiefs’ training facility and got a shock. The 100-pound dumbbells he used to easily throw around felt like lead weights. “I was scared out of my mind,” he says. Standing on the scale, he learned he’d lost 10 pounds.

Mr. Gonzalez considered scrapping the diet altogether and returning to the Chiefs’ standard gut-busting menu. First, though, he called Mr. Campbell, who put him in touch with Jon Hinds, himself a vegan and the former strength coach for the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team. Mr. Hinds suggested plant foods with more protein.

Share This

Share This

I appreciate the verve and passion with which this Texan informs the Jimmy Dean sausage company about his feelings about their new smaller, 12-ounce packages. I also like that in Texas, Jimmy Dean sausage goes great with a T-bone steak.

Share This

A new species of wild pig previously unknown to science has been discovered in the Brazilian jungle.

The large creature grows to a length of more than four feet and is almost twice as heavy as its nearest relative. … Named the ‘giant peccary’, the creature was unknown until the skins and bones of animals killed by local hunters.

Yet another reason I must travel to Brazil, and soon. I will teach the locals the power of salt curing; I will be their king.

New species of ‘giant wild pig’ discovered hidden in the Amazon jungle [DailyMail.co.uk]

Share This

Not just stand-up. Funny stand-up. About bacon.

Share This

Watch a man fry cracklins and stuff smoked sausage. Turn off the sound because whatever he has to say is unimportant — this man is processing pork. via [offthebroiler.wordpress.com]

Share This

Susie and I have made a bit of a name for ourselves among our friends here in Brooklyn for being BBQ nerds. Which is fine—I make some great ribs; she has a killer pulled pork recipe. But we often try to explain to our friends as they cram meat down their gullets why BBQ is so important to us, having both grown up in Kansas City.

Next time, I’ll just link them this great piece about KC BBQ by Donna Pierce for the Chicago Tribune. It’s worth the time to read, but here are a couple early highlights:

Located midway between two barbecue bastions — Memphis and Texas — the city borrows from those destinations: slow-cooking pork ribs seasoned with a dry rub, a la Memphis, and the beef brisket, hot links and ham from Texas. But it also adds pulled pork topped with coleslaw in the Carolina-style and trimmed lamb ribs in the Denver tradition.

That’s such an important factor in Kansas City’s BBQ culture. It isn’t so much that KC has a particular style—although the obsession about sauces, including the common spicy-sweet hybrids, may be unique—but that BBQ in all its forms is lauded and embraced.

And it’s not just all styles that are welcomed, but BBQ both low and high. Kansas City is the only town I know that has a chain of fast-food BBQ restaurants (”Gates”; HimayIhepyou?!) as well as fine-dining BBQ establishments (including my favorite, to much disagreement, Fiorella’s “Jack Stack”). BBQ isn’t an occasional treat in KC. It is seriously, no-foolin’ a way of life.

When Susie and I run across a fellow KC native here in New York, the topic almost always turns to BBQ. “Found any good BBQ places yet?” There’s some decent BBQ in New York, but nothing sublime. It’s hard to match the best output of a town engaged in a hundred-year-old BBQ arms race.

Kansas City is barbecue bountiful, but it wasn’t always that way. A century ago, records indicate the presence of only one commercial barbecue venture. According to barbecue historian Doug Worgul, smoked meats did not become a commodity in Kansas City until 1907, when Henry Perry, from Shelby County, Tenn., opened the city’s first barbecue stand. He smoked pork, beef, possum and raccoon, sauced them and sold them like English fish and chips, wrapped in newspaper.

I’ve never heard of BBQ’d possum and racoon, but now I’ve got a new mission.

Tell me if I’m wrong, but KC is the only place I’ve been where BBQ sauce is a regular tabletop condiment for everything. In fact, the best thing about Gates isn’t the meat (which is good, but not spectacular), but the thick-cut fries, perfect for dipping in one of their three house sauces.

Arriving at the crossroads [ChicagoTribune.com] (Thanks, Ryan!)

Bonus link: Kansas City Rampage: 2 Chowists, 10 Hours, 7 Meals (PICS) [ITHForum.com] Including a stop at one of my all-time favorite KC BBQ joints, L.C.’s!

Share This

Share This