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O God, sir, here’s a dish I love not. I cannot endure my lady Tongue.
Clearly, Benedick from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is referring to the acerbic wit of Beatrice and not the tender delicacy we ate tonight! We’ve been branching out a bit in recent days, and tonight’s experiment was beef tongue.
Okay, it was a little unnerving to pick up the tongue from its package and see how much it looked like…a tongue! Tastebuds and all. I called Rose, my little scientist, to come examine it with me. She was enthralled!
I cooked it slowly for about two and a half hours with onion, celery and carrot. The skin turned a very unappealing gray, but peeled off easily. Under the skin was meat that separated into strings, rather like a skirt steak that’s been pulled apart with a fork. I took this meat and diced it and put it in a skillet with a cup of water, a half cup of apple cider vinegar and a teaspoon of Rapadura. The liquid boiled off and left the meat so incredibly delicious. Biting into the meat was like biting into a forty-dollar filet. I served it over noodles and the sweet/sour of the meat was a wonderful foil to the bitterness of Brussels sprouts cooked with cream and shallots.
And lest you think I’ve lost my mind, tongue is a fatty part of the meat, and a traditional food. Tongue sandwiches were popular during the Great Depression, when muscle meats were hard to come by and expensive. I paid about $8 for a grassfed beef tongue that weighed in at just less than two pounds.
I had to add some other meat to stretch the meal in the photo for guests, so you’ll see in the photo two distinct types of meat. The tongue meat is the lighter brown with fewer “lines.” By the way, for those of you who cook for the very young, very old or otherwise dentally challenged, tongue meat is very easily chewed.
So, try some tongue, as Psychic Lunch said in a recent Twitter post, “It’s the meat that licks you back!”
This post is part of Fight Back Fridays, hosted by Food Renegade.
In this post at Throwback at Trapper Creek, the author details how to reverse engineer a garden for food storage. She’s really got this down to a science. I do a similar thing each January, but I can’t explain it nearly as well. Of course, my plans are just for “play,” and after I write it all out, I throw it away and start again for the dozen containers on my back patio.
Even though food gardens are on the rise, due to frequent contamination warnings, the economy and the “back to the land” movement hitting even urban dwellers, my own garden plans are still small.
This would be a perfect time in our lives to invest serious sweat equity in a large food garden. I have teens to help with the heavy work, young children to learn valuable lessons from the land, more than ample biomass to have a killer compost pile and worm garden. Growing food would be such a better use of the small lot on which our house sits than growing grass. I could also stand to lose a pound or two with the exercise a garden would require.
But, for now anyway, I’m looking at one more season of container gardening, providing what I can for my family without tearing up large chunks of sod in the yard, and dreaming.
Another e-friend, Jenna, has created a Facebook group called Barnheart. I’m a sufferer of Barnheart.
The symptoms are mild at first. You start glancing around the internet at homesteading forums and cheese making supply shops on your lunch break…
Her post is beautiful, poetry to my soul and worth a read for anyone who drools over seed catalogs or the Lehman’s site. “Someday,” I tell myself.
I hope you enjoy any or all of these links and think about maybe growing some of your own this year. It’s not to early to plan!
The Dark Side of Fat Loss
