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Episode 31: My experiences buying local grass fed pasture raised beef. Verdict: It’s awesome!

By | January 27, 2012 | Cooking, Food Preservation | 6 Comments
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Episode 31: Buy some local grass fed beef [ 54:34 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1184)

Hello, my name is Nick LaDieu and I’m a beefaholic. I just can’t get enough of 3.80 cents a pound grass fed pasture raised Angus beef. I just love it and the fever is spreading. I’ve already spread the addiction to many of my friends here in Pittsburgh and I want to share it with you now.

Excuse #1:
I don’t have time to cook.

Your not going to the grocery store to shop for meat anymore and I bet that consumes a lot more time than you realize. Guess what? You can still eat fast food. That’s right! I eat fast food 5 or 6 times a week. In fact just yesterday I had 2 burritos from McLaDieu’s freezer section. One grass fed bean and beef burrito and one pasture raised pork sausage and free range egg burrito. It even featured some jalapeno peppers grown right in my backyard! I got home from work late (9:30pm!!) and threw them right in a microwave just like the ones from the gas station.

McLaDieu’s also features beef and barley soup, grass fed Angus and venison stew. Ham, sausage and egg casserole and a bunch of other nifty meals ready to go. The chef (Nick LaDieu) told me it took him about 3 hours on a Saturday to make 40 bean and beef burritos. To make beef stew was just about 40 minutes of prep (chopping vegetables mainly) and throw it in a crock pot or cast iron dutch oven. McLaDieu’s sources his grains from his local food co-op who can order them in bulk for him. So convenient!

Excuse #2:
I don’t have a chest freezer. This one is easy. Go get one! What the hell… your not even trying to come up with a valid excuse here. You can even get small chest freezers that could easily fit in an apartment. Let’s be a bit more creative with the excuses people. You will not regret this decision.

Excuse #3
I can’t afford to buy groceries so I have to eat all fast food.

Ok, this is a tricky one and I’ll drop the jokey tone to address this one. I truly feel for people who don’t have means to get good healthy food for their families, however for the vast majority of people there are a few other factors going on. One factor is lack of knowledge, I’d like to believe this is the major factor and that if people knew how much money they could save by eating something like grass fed beef that they would switch over immediately. I think most people are stuck in the “buy as you go” model of consuming and look at a place like whole foods and say “I can’t afford that stuff”… hell most people can’t!!

The “elephant in the room” is most people are too lazy to cook and their mindset and priorities are too mainstream to even process the idea of buying 150 pounds of cow. Sorry, I have to call it like I see it! This doesn’t have to be you though, you can get yourself some grass fed beef.

OK, so you are cash strapped and want to get yourself some grass fed beef. Here are some ideas I have:

1) Look for work share programs that farmers offer
2) Talk to the farmer! Work something out, these people want to sell you their beef and they are wonderful people.
3) Go in with people. Rally the troups and get as much as you can. I tried this year to find people in Pittsburgh to get in on an entire cow but failed. I ended up getting a side again this year, however I’m going to try again next year so I can pay a cheaper price per pound. The more you buy the more you save.
4) Respect the saying “Pay the grocer or pay the doctor” Get your mindset right, learn how to cook, and get yourself some meat!

 

Look at these beef prices from the local giant eagle grocery store:

I pay $3.25 hanging (or about $3.80 a pound) for my beef. The only thing I could find in the grocery store that cheap was the 92% lean ground beef and that weird beef “stuff” that comes in the tube. You know, the kind with the ammonia washed pink slime mixed in (YUM!!)

 

Excuse #4
Bla Bla Bla…. I don’t want to hear it. Get yourself some meat.

Resources to get er’ done:

What you need

* A chest freezer. This is the one I have: http://tinyurl.com/7l73wsz
* 1 KW minimum generator
* Rotate 15 gallons of gas (You’re going to use it anyway so this doesn’t cost you anything other than buying the containers and stabilizer)

Open your own fast food restaurant

(Fix it, Freeze it, Feast)
My review of this book: 5 stars. I’m a bit of a cooking enthusiast so I always like to add my own twists. For example for my bean and beef burritos I make my own re-fried beans from scratch, but to make it easy I do it in a slow cooker (crock pot). No soaking required!

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/refried-beans-without-the-refry/detail.aspx

Also toss in whatever peppers you happen to have also. You don’t need to stay in their sandbox but it is a great book to get good ideas and also get a handle on the volumes you need to deal with to make lots and lots of great bulk meals. Saves time and money.

Most importantly… Get the meat:

http://www.eatwild.com- I’m sure there are other worthy sites, but this is the one I used and it worked out great for me!

Meet my farmers (so far)

Don and Becky

Audrene

Where I might be getting my next pig after I determine if the bacon is up to snuff:
Millgate Farm

Episode 21 – HarvestEating.com

By | April 26, 2011 | Canning, Cooking, Food, Food Preservation | 1 Comment
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Episode 21: Harvest Eating with Chef Keith Snow [ 1:07:22 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2953)

Today we talk to Chef Keith Snow from HarvestEating.com

I forgot to mention on the Podcast that you can get a nice little discount on his membership program over at The Survival Podcast website by just clicking on the banner there.

We talk about why we think eating seasonally and locally is important including

  • Selecting the right culinary tools
  • How to buy quality ingredients and avoid junk
  • Why seasonal eating will be more important in the future due to rising fuel… build your skillset now
  • How to mix eating with a busy lifestyle
  • and much more!

Make sure to also check out Harvest Eating on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/HarvestEating

 

 

Homemade Peanut Butter Cups

By | February 21, 2011 | Cooking, Food, Traditional Skills | 5 Comments
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http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/homemade-peanut-butter-cups/Detail.aspx

Here is a quick video Juliet and I shot of making our own holiday treats, my favorite: Peanut Butter Cups. We’ve been trying to make more and more things from scratch and it’s a fun way for a family to spend some time together.

Fresh lentil sprouts from store bought lentils

By | February 10, 2011 | Cooking, Food | 1 Comment
Sprouts-Post

You can buy a 1 pound pack of lentils for a little over 1 dollar. I love lentils so they make up a big part of my dry long term storage.  One thing I like to do is whenever I go to the grocery store to buy anything I pick up one package of lentils, split peas, or dry beans. If you use this method of slow accumulation you will be filling 5 gallon buckets before you know it.

Sprouting is something I have been looking into to get more variety into my diet and also it gives me another way to use up long term storage items.

Check out this excellent tutorial on making sprouts from store bought lentils… seems nice and easy.

http://foodstoragemadeeasy.net/2009/02/19/how-to-grow-sprouts/

Traditional Long Boil Marmalade

By | February 2, 2011 | Canning, Cooking, Food Preservation | 2 Comments

The recipe comes from Ball’s Complete Book of Home Preserving

Quote from the book:

Traditional Marmalades

Due to their extended cooking times, traditional marmalades have a slightly caramelized flavor that spells perfection to marmalade aficionados. Before making one of these long-boil marmalades, review the gel state tests …

Gel State Tests: When not using something like pectin to make a spread you need to make sure your mix has reached “gel state”.

The easiest and best way to do this is with a candy thermometer.

Orange Chilli Marmalade:

2 1/4 pounds of oranges thinly sliced (I used mandarine which creates more peels, a bigger orange might have less peels, depends what you like)

6 cups of water

zest of one lemon

juice of one lemon

3 dried chilli pepers (they recommend habanero or New Mexico chili)

9 cups granulated sugar

  1. In a stock pot combine oranges, zest, water, juice.
  2. Bring to a boil over high heat stirring frequently
  3. Add peppers
  4. Reduce to a gentle boil, partially covered, for 40 minutes stirring occasionally until fruit is soft
  5. remove and discard peppers
  6. Bring mixture back to a full boil stirring constantly
  7. Gradually stir in sugar
  8. Wait until mixture reaches gel stage (about 15 minutes)
  9. Ladle into hot jars leaving 1/4″ headspace
  10. Process jars in boiling water for 10 minutes

An introduction to braising

By | January 17, 2011 | Cooking, Food | 2 Comments

This past week my article on cast iron cookware seemed to be among the most popular items I have posted to the website. I figured I would follow up on that with an article about braising, which will allow you to maximize your cast iron dutch oven.

You can purchase very expensive Le Cruset cookware, or just a simple plain cast iron dutch oven from lodge logic. I personally own this one and it works quite well for my purposes: Lodge Dutch Oven, however it seems like the people on my facebook page think plain cast iron is the best, so this one might be a great option for that: 7 quart dutch oven. You can also get a dutch oven that can be held over a camp fire via a tripod of sticks, which is a cool way of cooking outside.

Braising is a very old technique of cooking. Traditional braising is when you sear a piece of meat and then cook it slowly in a cast iron dutch oven. A crock pot  (slow cooker) is a modern form of braising. I like both methods. Traditional braising is when meat was cooked over top of a bed of chopped vegetables. Little to no liquid is needed since the meat provides it’s own juices and the vegetables provide the rest of the moisture.

Is this making you hungry?

Braising is a great technique for cooking gamy meat, or lean meat is it imparts a lot of flavor into the meat and renders it very tender.

Typical cuts of meat used in braising are pot roasts, rumps, shanks, ribs, and vegetables such as brussel sprouts or radicchio, however it is pretty much possible to braise any sort of meat, including fish.

Here are the steps involved in doing a basic braised roast. You can adapt this technique or recipe for other types of cuts, or even cube the meat to make a nice stew.

Credit for this recipe goes to my Dad who introduced me to this method of cooking.

Ingredients
3 to 4 pound top round or other roast
4 to 5 large onions (chopped)
4 to 5 large tomatoes (quarter and then chop each piece in half)
5 cloves of garlic (minced)
Bay Leaf
Oregano

  1. Salt and pepper the meat on all sides
  2. Add a bit of oil or some lard to a dutch oven
  3. Add Beef.. sear on all sides (including ends)… make sure the dutch oven is nice and hot so it will quickly sear the meat
  4. Set meat aside for now
  5. Sauté onions and garlic until translucent in the beef juices
  6. Remove from heat
  7. Add tomatoes, bay leaf, oregano
  8. Add meat on top of the layer of vegetables
  9. On top of that add root vegetables
  10. Put dutch oven, with the lid on, into a 350 degree oven for 3 to 4 hours, beef should be falling apart

Alternative
Sear the meat in a normal frying pan and then place it in a crock pot. Cook your onions and garlic in the same frying pan and deglaze with a bit of wine and then add it all to crock pot. Add all other ingredients to the crock pot. Cook on low for 8 hours. I prefer the dutch oven if time allows, however the slow cooker is great for a weekday. You can prep the meat and sear it when you awake and then just leave it cook all day while you are at work. Most modern crock pots will have a “keep warm” options so if the pot is on for an extra few hours it will be nice and hot for you to eat when you return from work.

The large quantity of tomatoes and onions will cook down and provide the enough liquid to properly cook your roast. I’ve made this with canned tomatoes. I find 4 cans of stewed tomatoes will work nicely, however I still use fresh onions.

Here is one of my favorite braising recipes: Fall off the bone short ribs. I loved making the slaw this past year with fresh ingredients from the garden. One alteration I made is replacing the mayonnaise in the slaw with plain yogurt to make this dish a bit healthier, and I doubled the jalapenos to increase the heat.

Once you get the hang of it you can start making more fancy dishes such as Coq au Vin, a classic braised dish.

If you want to learn more about braising then I suggest this book All About Braising

You will be hard pressed to eat a bad meal if you use that cookbook.

Cleaning, Seasoning, and Cooking with Cast Iron Cookware

By | January 12, 2011 | Cooking, Traditional Skills | 17 Comments
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I love cast iron. You can spend a fortune on all-clad cookware that probably won’t work as well or last as long as a cheap cast iron skillet. I got my skillet at Dick’s Sporting goods of all places.

I was talking to my friend the other day and he was talking about how he gingerly cares for his cast iron cookware. He was telling me some of the problems he was having with his new cast iron pans. I’ve been using cast iron cookware for many years now and thought I would share with everyone some of my tips for cast iron cooking and seasoning

Cleaning

It is always best to clean the cast iron when it is hot.

To clean your hot pan I use just plain hot water and a plain sponge . If your pan is nice and hot you won’t need to apply very much pressure to clean it off. Never try to clean a room temperature pan.
If you have let food cake on your pan for days, as I sometimes do… it is no problem at all to clean it off. Just fill the bottom of the pan with water and bring it to a boil for a minute or two, then dump the water and clean it immediately.

Dry off your pan with a towel as soon as you are done cleaning it. Put your pan back on the burner on a very low heat for a minute or two to ensure that it is 100% dry.

If you haven’t been cooking fatty foods on your pans you might need to apply a bit of oil, lard, or bacon grease at this point to the pan to maintain the seasoning. Just put a dab in the pan and spread it around to coat the pan. Now just heat it up on very low heat until the grease gets to the smoke point and then remove it from the heat. Let the pan cool down and then just wipe off the excess grease and store it away.

If you want to be safe you can do this every time, however the key times to do it are when you are cooking with high acid products such as tomatoes or vinegar. If you just cooked a pound of bacon you probably don’t need to add any more lard to the pan!

Seasoning is something that gets better over time. Cast iron cookware is one of the few consumer items that really gets much better with age. When your children inherit your cast iron cookware it will be really humming!

Seasoning and Re-Seasoning

Occasionally you may end up wrecking the seasoning on a pan by accident or maybe you got a new pan off craigslist that needs some help. I’ve done this twice before by accident. I have left pans on the burner unattended and all of the seasoning has burnt off. Unlike an aluminum pan that would have been ruined, my cast iron pan just needed to be re-seasoned.

  • Heat up the oven to 500 degrees
  • Coat the pan in lard or grease such as bacon grease
  • Put the pan in the oven upside down on top of something such as some foil
  • Remove from heat 30 minutes

There are other ways to re-season the pan, but as long as you have access to a stove this is the method that seems to work best.

After you season your pan, plan to cook something greasy like bacon in it initially and this will help to reinforce your seasoning.

If your cooking stuff, such as hash browns or eggs, and it is constantly sticking to the pan then you need to re-season your pan.

Cooking

I, unfortunately, have an electric range. The trick to success with cast iron pans on an electric range is to preheat them slowly. I keep the heat at a medium to low heat until the entire pan is warmed and then I can raise it from there. No matter what type of heat you are using you should make sure that your pan is up to temperature before cooking, it is going to take longer to evenly heat up your cast iron cookware than it would your steel or aluminum cookware.

Removing Rust

My grill’s cast iron grates tend to get rusty here and there. The first winter I had that grill my grill cover had a leak over the winter and when I pulled the cover off in the spring the grates were 100% rusty. Luckily knocking out rust is pretty easy to do.

Just put your cast iron in your oven and set it to “self clean” cycle. Once they have completed this cycle just wipe the rust off with a bit of hot water and a steel scouring pad. It will wipe right off. Be sure to do this while it is still hot, and be careful not to burn yourself.

If you come across some old cast iron cookware that you want to restore this method will work well for that.

Once your cast iron has cooled to room temperature coat it down in lard and season it as per the instructions above.

Misc tip

Avoid those burnt hands! The handles can get quite hot while cooking and sometimes we forget about it. Be sure to have handle covers for all of your various skillets.

These are available online or even at big box stores

Did I get it correct? Let me know in the comments.

Finally, a super moist, perfectly cooked turkey using an old school technique – Brining

By | January 3, 2011 | Cooking, Food Preservation | 5 Comments

I know what you are thinking? A how to cook and awesome turkey post on January 3rd? Well I apologize I have to put these things out as I find them out myself and didn’t want to hold onto this recipe until next thanksgiving.

Along with smoking, I would guess that salt is probably one of the oldest forms of food preservation. In the old days people would keep their meat in large 50 gallon barrels layered between salt, and thus keep their meat stored through the winter.

When you salt meat you draw out the blood from the meat and dehydrates it. This process is more commonly known as curing.

Brining is a method of preserving where you soak your meat in water saturated with salt. This is also called pickling, which almost everyone is familiar with. Brining does not preserve your meat nearly as long as salt curing, however what it does do is make your turkey and chicken taste wonderful and retain much moisture.

Over the years I had pretty much accepted that turkey was dry and in need of copious amounts of gravy to become palatable, however during some research on food preservation I came across the promise of brining to deliver a moist and succulent turkey. Once I discovered it was endorsed by Alton Brown I knew I had a winner.

I differed my brine recipe a from Alton’s just because I would prefer to make my own stock as opposed to using stock from the grocery store.

  • In a large stock pot add two gallons of water
  • Add 3/4 cup of sugar and 3/4 cup of salt
  • Add a mire pouix which is a fancy french word for carrots, celery, and onions. I diced mine and added about a handful of each. Your going to toss stock so feel free to not bother peeling the onions or carrots
  • Then add whatever other herbs you would like. I took a few pieces of garlic and crushed them with my knife and also tossed in a bunch of whole pepper corns
  • Bring the brine to a full boil
  • Reduce to a simmer for about 1 hour to really extract the flavor from the veggies
  • Cool your brine to room temperature. I added a ton of ice to it to speed up this process
  • Take a 5 gallon bucket and put in your thawed, room temperature, turkey
  • Fill the bucket with the brine, making sure it si 100% submerged. Add weights if necessary.
  • Keep the turkey refrigerated, in my case I put it out on my sun porch due to it being winter.
  • I brined my turkey for about 18 hours, however I have read online that you can go up to 3 days for maximum effect.
  • For cooking the turkey I used Alton’s method exactly

My Review?
Awesome! The turkey was ridiculously moist and perfectly cooked. Oh brine! Where have you been all my life. So many thanksgivings gone by without you!

Also Alton’s method cooked my 22lb turkey SUPER fast which is awesome. I was completely convinced that my meat thermometer had to be wrong, however I double checked it against my instant read thermometer and it was on the money.

Here is the link: Alton Brown Good Eats Roast Turkey

How to make and can your own habanero hot sauce

By | December 13, 2010 | Canning, Cooking, Food Preservation | 10 Comments
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I’ve finally got a bit of free time to catch up on my videos. I made this video in early November at my brother’s house in Harrisburg PA. He grows quite a bit of hot peppers and I suggested that we can up some hot sauce.

This sauce is excellent, don’t let the name fool you, it isn’t super hot. You could easily make this sauce hotter by adding in seeds from the peppers. I’ll let you decide that.

This is literally the first time I canned anything in my life, so hopefully you can all get a chuckle as I hold the jar lifter upside down and in general just goof off with my friends.

We learn a couple of skills in this video:

  • Canning via the hot water bath method
  • Saving seeds from pepper
  • How to make hot sauce (obviously)

Here is the link to the recipe I used: Bob’s Habanero Hot Sauce

Video Demonstration of the $10 Cheese Press

By | October 26, 2010 | Cooking, Traditional Skills | 3 Comments

by Jason Akers from http://www.theselfsufficientgardener.com. The Self Sufficient Gardener is a blog and podcast about growing your own food and living off the land.


In my last post I took you through the process of making a cheese press.  Today I take you through the process of filling said press with delicious cheddar cheese.

I will apologize beforehand about my lack of video skills.

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