Tuesday, June 07, 2016

Should I get a grill?

I just got back from picking up my first CSA share. This year I signed up for a meat share. I'm still not sure if I picked the right amount - my fear over the last several weeks, in anticipation, is that I've committed to more meat than I can eat in a month. 

I got home and unpacked the meat. It's all frozen so I just popped the goodies into the freezer. My freezer has always been lightly loaded. It's only ever full when I'm battling the moths and trying to freeze them out of my linens/clothes.  And now it seems packed. Granted there is a large box of my boxed off items (corn, peas, potstickers). And there are two bags of wool blankets. But the rest of the free space is now packed up with meat. 

As I'm sitting writing this, Webster is sniffing the plastic bags and cooler that I've unpacked. This is what I've unpacked - most of the meats don't have the weights on the labels, so I'm guessing. 

Pork:
- two racks of pork spare ribs (1.8# each)
- two packages ground pork (1# each)
- one package pork breakfast sausage patties (1#)

Beef:
- one boneless sirloin steak (guessing 2-3#s)
- three packages of ground beef (guessing about 1# each)

Poultry:
- two packages of young chicken thighs (4 thighs per package)
- one pound ground turkey 50/50 white/dark meat

There was some pork sausages that had cheese and sugar in them that I was able to switch out for a package of ground pork. I really haven't cooked with most of these meats. I've done coq au vin with chicken thighs and I've cooked with ground beef. But not this type of ground beef. I don't know if you can see in the picture, but the ground beef is this dark red with barely any white. They said it's close to 95% to 99% lean. And that is the cases it hall the meat they told me.  Since the animals are pasture and not factory grown, they are much leaner so the cooking time is a lot less. They said marinades are your friend with this type of meats. 

So I'm off to find some new recipes. It will be interesting to see if I can find marinades, especially for the ribs, that don't have sugars. And see if can cook these meats in the oven/stove since I'm not a big grill person. I like grilled meats, but don't love the clean up. 

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