Steak with Herbed Garlic Butter

I've talked here before about eating less meat but of better quality for the sake of our health, the environment, and so on.

When it comes to eating better meat, you can't go past Eye Fillet Beef Steak.

OK, I see you throwing your hands in the air and declaring (with only the mildest hint of indignation) that who, in the current economic climate, can afford fillet steak? It's not 1986 now, after all.
But here's the thing: Communities can.

Fillet steak follows the same rules in a supply/demand/price-point market as any other product, and suppliers know this. On a per kg basis, no, you can't necessarily afford to buy fillet steak in meal-sized portions off the supermarket shelf. We certainly can't.

But any good butcher or wholesaler (like, say Prestons or Moore Wilsons in NZ) will supply fillet steak in whole lengths, and the price per kg is significantly less than you would pay for cut, trimmed, packaged fillets from the coldshelf.

But still, you argue, the price of a whole fillet ranges into the $40-50 mark, and who can justify that sort of a spend on one piece of meat?

Well, consider this: You're not paying a cent for bone, and virtually nothing for fat. Hunt for a lean cut of fillet steak, and your price per kg is practically 1:1, top-notch meat to dollar. No amount of chops, sausages or stewing steak will give you that degree of economic return.

With a full cut, you can also poke and prod to your heart's content, finding the most tender specimen. Yes, a soft, tender hunk of raw meat will cook up more tender than a tough piece. Amazing, eh?

Sorry, did I say something about community? Why yes, I did. It comes back to that matter of outlay. Who has the outlay to buy these large, if delicious, cuts of meat? Restaurants, for one.

Restaurateurs understand the economy of the whole fillet, and it works even better for small groups of people. Let's say, for example, a 2kg fillet, costing $40, is bought by two couples. That's $20 each.

Now, each of those couples have 1kg of fillet steak. A nice decadent size for a fillet steak if 200g, so that's five steaks, each costing $4.00. That's an $8.00 steak meal for two; I challenge you to find 400g of pre-cut steak on the cold-shelf in NZ for less than $10.00.

And of course, you don't have to be decadent. You can cut that steak into six, or eight, or even ten pieces. You may have a smaller piece of steak, but you still have top quality. And for the sake of our bowels, we shouldn't eat more than 100g of red meat a day anyway.

The only catch is that a 200g steak will cook more nicely than a 100g steak, so to get around this, just cut to 200g, cook as a single steak, then slice and share. Perfect.

It does require someone have a freezer, and that you cut and store the steak in individual portions, but that's not a big deal these days. Freezers are our friends.

This is just one way that reaching out to the people around you can improve not only your budget, but the quality of the food you're eating as well.

Give it a go. You'll thank me for it.

Now, what to do with that delicious, top quality steak? I've already written a detailed post on how best to cook pretty much any steak, but here's another lovely option: Herbed Garlic Butter.
Cook your steak as per that post, but you can flag the garlic at the preparation stage. The Herbed Butter will do all the hard work for you. Eye fillet steak will require less tenderising than other cuts as well, but a little bit of a bash never hurt.

Herbed Garlic Butter
Ingredients:
100g soft, salted butter
2T fresh thyme leaves
4 cloves of garlic, minced
4T freshly grated parmesan cheese

Combine all ingredients in a mortal and pestle, or you can probably use a hand blender.
Scrape the butter onto a dish to pop on the table when the steak is served.
Be sure to fry a few mushrooms and onions around the side of the pan with the steak.
Scoop the butter onto the steak, along with the mushrooms and onions. Serve with oven-baked fries, eggs and a little green salad, just for colour.

The Taste of Pork

It seems that pork just isn't what it used to be.

Twice in the past month or so I've had conversations with family members from older generations who have lamented the decline in the taste of pork from how they remember it. As I understand it, the old adage that you are what you eat applies to livestock as well. I've commented before on the way free range meat tastes so much more real than bulk-produced stuff. We're lucky in NZ that our beef, lamb and mutton are pretty much free range by default, and it's only our chickens and pigs that are raised in confinement and fed grain.

Much as I take issue with pen-bred meat, I've also discussed on this blog the dilemmas of trying to eat well, and trying to retain some sort of ethical compass while keeping ourselves nutritionally healthy on a budget that we can afford. I imagine that I'll draw some criticism just by raising the issue of animal rights, but that's OK. Debate is healthy.

Like I've said before, if we could afford to eat all organic free range meat and produce we would, just like if I could grow all the fruit and veges I needed to feed my family I would. No doubt if we were forced into the situation of having to keep animals as a food source we would find ourselves eating a whole lot less meat overall. But the social and economic realities are that I only have so much time in a day, and while I make an effort to do what I can to support humane and sustainable food production, there comes a point when we have to look at what's on the shelf and what's in the wallet, and take what we can for what we can afford.

We all find different ways to manage the minefield of existing as an omnivore in a social order where our eating habits are largely driven by profit-geared corporations, their market placement and their advertising machines. I'm aware that we don't co-exist with our food sources, but exploit them and the land (or sea) that they live and grow on, not simply to survive but to fully enjoy the bounty that agribusiness can supply us with. However, for all my good intentions, I can't provide my family with protein and nutrients simply out of goodwill. And I've listened to all the arguments in favour of vegetarianism, and while I agree with a lot of it, particularly the stuff that relates to how we treat animals, I'm still an omnivore. I feel guilty only when I think about it too much, but never when I'm eating.

As a rule, we only buy free range eggs, and that's a win all round, since good FR eggs have more taste and thicker contents than cage eggs. I also get them from the market, where they're cheaper than similar products at the supermarket. I also buy lamb from the Wai-Ora stall at the market every week, as I've posted several times. I've been pleased to see these guys are bringing more product to the market now than they had been previously, which hopefully means that word-of-mouth advertising like mine in support of suppliers like them is working. And that in itself is a step in the right direction.

I've also made the point before, and I'll make it again: We all (and I mean all of us, not just the Kiwis reading this) need to learn how much is enough when it comes to eating meat in particular, and cut down. There are so many good reasons to do this that it would make a post all of its own, but suffice to say that it's better for the land, the animals, our wallets and our bowels to eat less meat. (I don't shy away from that image - after all, we're all animals made of meat and offal too, remember).

So far this summer, we've only had leftover meat after one barbeque, rather than after every one like we used to have, and those leftovers were eaten up the next day. Reduce the excess, reduce the waste, cook what you need, and enjoy it. And your finances will appreciate it too.

Which brings me back to my original point: If our pork is raised in pens now and is accordingly of a much lower quality and inferior taste to what it used to be, then that might go some way towards explaining why the old methods of cooking pork were fairly simple, letting the meat speak for itself (apologies for the bad imagery), while nowadays there seems to be a fixation with dressing pork up with chilli, herbs, spices, nuts, fruits, and other bits and pieces to give it flavour. Instead of being a taste explosion all its own, pork has become a blank canvas for a good chef to demonstrate his skills on.

It seems a shame. But until free range pork becomes affordable, I'll still eat what they stock in the supermarket (we have a butcher across the road from where I work who stocks organic, free range meats, but at $16.00 for 2 pork steaks, you can see why I'd prefer to pay $6.00 at the supermarket for unethically raised, bland, but affordable meat).

There's always wild pork, of course, but that's just as expensive, and a completely different flavour that Dessert Chef can't abide, so we won't be going down that road anytime soon.

And on that note, here's one of my most recent entries in the Dollying up the Pork stakes.

Pork Chops with Sage and Apple Crust

(Serves 2, with a bit sliced off for the little fella)

In a small pan, heat some olive oil and fry the following:
2 Cloves of Garlic, minced;
1 Onion, finely chopped;
1 small Apple, finely diced;

Once the apple and onion have started to soften, add a splash of worcester sauce and 3T of brown sugar. As this reduces, add the leaves stripped from 3 stalks of fresh sage and 3 stems of fresh mint, roughly chopped. Once this has heated through and is a bit saucy, remove to a bowl and heat fresh oil in the pan.
Season two large pork chops with freshly ground pepper and salt, and place in the hot oil. Allow the chops to brown a little, then add a splash of white wine. Shake, and allow the wine to be absorbed. When the underside of the chops is nice and brown, turn over and repeat. Cook until there is no pink in the juices.

Spoon the apple mixture over one side of the chops, grate some parmesan cheese over top, and place under the grill to brown.
Serve with couscous cooked in chicken stock, fried mushrooms, and fresh veges.

Garden Update

I've made a lot of noise about growing your own garden, and how easy it is for everyone to get something green sprouting in whatever little space they have. My own efforts have, admittedly, been a bit hit-and-miss over the past few years, apart from fresh herbs and making compost. But since herbs are really just weeds with a useful side that's not saying terribly much, and you can't eat compost.

So when I started this blog, I decided I should really make a proper go of it myself, and got out planting.

Well, we've had successes and failures. The strawberry plant didn't fruit this year, to our untold sadness. We grew one beautiful broccoli, but were so proud of it that we didn't realise it was ready to eat, and it went to seed on the doorstep.

But I put a whole lot of pumpkin seeds down in a bunch of compost, and fed it all with lots of worm castings, and waited.
Then when the season turned, the garden suddenly came to life. Amongst the things growing up around the weeds were more pumpkin plants than I could count. My ulterior motive with growing the pumpkin plants was a lazy one really: I hoped that they would spread out and strangle all the weeds. It seems to be working.
Then these started to appear.
And then a few of these. Yesterday I counted 11 fruits growing in the pumpkin patch, as well as a few errant tomatoes that may or may not survive the strangling effects of the pumpkins.
Dessert Chef's potted tomato plants have also been shooting up, and with judicious applications of stakes, worm castings, water, compost, and a careful trim, they might be the big success story of the summer.
They've also popped out a bunch of these
And even a few of these.
And the random potatoes I planted in the back yard near the pumpkins have been our first proper harvest. Straight from the garden, we cooked these up the other night, and they were just beautiful. So much more flavour than the ones from the shop, or even from the market. You could almost taste the compost and the worm wees.

Hmm, maybe that's not what I'm really trying to say.

Anyway, I'm pleased to say that it looks like our efforts have not been in vain. There's also rhubarb growing, and onions, though I have to say I'm not sure what to do with those.

We'll see. I've put down more potatoes, and now I've got a better idea of what I need to do to get ready for the next planting season.

Now that wasn't so hard, was it?

The Grand Illusion

A few years ago I had a flatmate whose name now eludes me. He was an Australian guy, travelling with a German girl (whose name was Lisi and may have actually been Austrian), and they rented a room in our Brooklyn (Wellington) flat in the summer of late 1999. Accordingly, in those heady days of pre-millennium angst, there was much talk between those flatting there at the time or visiting (I seem to recall tents on the lawn at New Years, and more people than I care to remember sharing one little bathroom) about what the fateful tick-over into the dreaded year 2000 would really mean. We worried not so much about whether the Student Loan Office computers would sieze up and lose all records of any money we might owe the Government (we were pretty sure they'd have that well covered), nor about whether the videos we had hired on December 30th might be 1000 years overdue on January 2nd, so much as whether or not the archaic missile systems of post-Cold War Europe would poop themselves and rain nuclear armageddon down on the rest of the world.

That, of course, never happened.

I remember talking to this flatmate, let's call him Oz, over a cold beer on a hot afternoon, and being awed by his world-weary wisdom. He mused that it would not be nuclear war that would bring an end to the granduer of the 20th Century, but that the demise of Western Civilisation, not just in the moral sense that the conservative right have been lamenting for sixty years now, would come about when the whole grand illusion of the world economy caved in on itself. America, he predicted, would bring about its own undoing when all the false realities of its financial system were laid bare, and everything would fall from there.

I'm sure that I don't need to summarise for anyone reading this just what has happened to the world markets in recent weeks and months. But here are a few things to consider, thinking about what Oz said to me that day 9 years ago:

• Last week, Wall St crashed further than it did in 1987, despite an injection by the US Govt of about 1 trillion dollars, suggesting that, like most things that are fundamntally flawed, simply throwing more money at the problem will not fix it.
• Iceland is bankrupt. This is a country we're talking about. An entire country. Bankrupt.
• Inflation in Zimbabwe is running at 1,000,000% per day. When faced with numbers like that, how can money mean anything at all?
• The Large Hadron Collider cost around 5 billion pounds over the past ten or so years, making it the most expensive science project ever. Yet the US Govt spends 1 billion dollars a day on its military activities in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world. After 7 years of this, how many worthwhile science projects that might have helped avert the global climate and food crises we're facing now might have been funded instead?

My question is this: Why could our world leaders not anticipate what has happened, given the pain and suffering it is causing and going to cause to so many, when a bright young tourist, who worked odd-jobs to pay his way tiki-touring around the globe, saw it coming at least a decade ago?

I would hazard a guess that the answer is that they always knew, but because the illusion is so deeply entrenched in the financial practices and the psyches of pretty much everyone on the planet (apart from those lucky subsistence hunters of the deep Amazon or nomadic herders of Inner Mongolia or Patagonia), there really was nothing they could do but wait for the dream to shatter. To try to fix it would have been to perpetuate the very fallout that we are now witnessing, and no-one wants to be remembered for unleashing such a thing on the world.

As someone said, to believe in the American Dream, it's best if you're asleep.

For another very lucid opinion on what has transpired and what is yet to come, check out this interview with Charles Hugh Smith.

And to bring it back down to earth, for those of us who can never pull the great puppet strings that rule the world, it's just another reminder that every day we should be striving for self-reliance, instead of depending on the world out there to provide for us. If you were in Iceland right now, you'd be wishing you didn't have to wait for the next boat to come in bringing your winter food supplies, because that boat isn't coming. And that is a very harsh reality to be facing, when it is not your doing that has brought this about.

I'm constantly inspired by the people I see making inroads into self-sustainability. Apart from the obvious examples like the Dervaes and Gallimaufree, Patrice Farmer is a single mother who is managing to raise not only her daughter but also several chickens and a garden that puts mine to shame, all the while doing so with a crippling bone disorder (arthritis I think - correct me if I'm wrong, Patrice). As I read her blog, I'm reminded that I have no excuse not to do more to break away from the grand illusion before my family and I become victims of its collapse.

Now, about buying local...

I keep going on about this, but it seems that every day I find another reason to bang the drum about growing your own food and buying locally if you can. Apologies in advance to my offshore readers: this might hurt a bit.

I've already had my say about NZ Garlic vs Chinese. Now it seems that we have even more reason to be wary of food imported from China. The scandal involving Chinese dairy company San Lu - 47% owned by NZ dairy giant Fonterra - which has left four children dead of melamine poisoning and thousands more seriously ill, brings to light the differences in food production standards between NZ and China, with whom we are the first country in the world to have a Free Trade Agreement. (Apologies to the family connection - I promise that I only raise this issue to make an important point)

While the impotent NZ Food Safety Authority sits on its hands about the issue of Country of Origin food labelling (the basic gist being that if it's not obviously from another country, ie, "Made in Thailand", then the redundant "Made from local or imported ingredients" is all the information the consumer needs to make a decision, whether those ingredients are from Australia or China), we find that there is indeed a Chinese product on our market that has been confirmed to be tainted with melamine, the same contaminant that has killed four Chinese babies. While we don't buy White Rabbit Candy, obviously enough people do to make it worthwhile importing here. Nor, you might say, do we eat candy like babies drink infant formula. But the question has to be asked, if we found it in the candy, what else is going to turn up that we don't yet know about?

The rhetoric coming from Fonterra as this crisis has escalated largely concludes that due to the scale of the operation, ie, the Chinese marketplace, it's virtually impossible to rule out every source of poison or contamination in the supply chain and to guarantee the safety of the product generated thereof. And lucky old NZ is the first country in the world to allow a free flow of Chinese goods - foodstuffs included, under the half-lidded eyes of the FSA - over our borders.

So, should we be happier to hear that the US has now opened up negotiations with our Government regarding a Free Trade Agreement? The farmers sure are, just like they were happy to know that Fonterra wanted all that milk powder to send to China. Now, I have nothing against farmers of any kind, but would we all be so happy if our own market was suddenly flooded with cheap food from the US? I only ask this with dire hesitation because of a few things I've been following in the news lately.

One of those things is the concessions that the US is likely to expect us to make to enable this FTA. They take issue with:

• Restrictions on GM crops;
• Our current pathetically weak labelling scheme for GM products (informing consumers is a barrier to trade!);
• Import restrictions on potentially diseased food (stopping people from getting BSE is a barrier to trade!);
• Sane copyright law which recognises the rights of customers;
• Voluntary local content quotas for TV and radio (customer preferences are a barrier to trade!);
• The Overseas Investment Act (requiring that investment actually be beneficial is a barrier to trade!);
• Pharmac.

(Hat Tip: Idiot/Savant - quoted in full, even the non-food related stuff)

But it gets better. For the past few weeks I've been watching with growing disquiet the American FDA (Food and Drug Administration) pushing to have all salad greens and other veges that might carry bugs or other harmful living things like bacteria "pasteurised". As far as labelling that the food has been "pasteurised", they want to place only this innocuous symbol on the produce packaging:
What they don't want people to know is that "pasteurisation" is a synonym for "irradiation". Is that what this image suggests to you? Kirk James Murphy, MD, gives a concise scientific rundown of how NOT GOOD it would be to expose food to massive doses of radiation, while Jeff Fenske sums it up in a few short sentences. Butnerblogspot gives us a rundown on how the FDA plan to pull the wool over the American public's eyes regarding the "Irradiation/Pasteurisation" sham.

I shook my head and wondered where it was going to end when I first read these stories, but it wasn't something that I, all the way over here in clean green New Zealand, might ever have to worry about.

Until now. And so, as I was saying, there is no better time to think very hard about how much effort you might want to go to to know that the food you're buying isn't going to be poisoned or irradiated or whatever else might be happening to it out there before it gets to you.

At least my lettuce will only be irradiated if I microwave it.

Poll Results: Whats more important?

On the surface, I guess it seemed that this poll was really a bit of a no-brainer.

The options were: Organic; Free Range; Both; or Neither.

Essentially what was being asked was:
What matters more: our health; the welfare of the animals we exploit; both; or neither?

Not surprisingly, an overwhelming 50% of readers (4) voted for both. 25% voted for organic, 25% for free range, and no-one voted for neither. Whether this is indicative of the moral norm of the traffic through this site or the simple failure of the poll to really pose a challenging moral dilemma cannot be known. If I had qualified this with the consequences of these choices, particularly the financial impact, then would the survey result have been the same? Or was the number of responses too small to draw any real conclusions from?

I'll say this much: If we could, most people would chose products that are both free range and organic, because most people have it in them to care both for the well-being of the creatures that we eat as well as their own long-term health concerns. But in reality, as I've said before, most families in NZ can't afford to exclusively eat free range or organic meat and produce. The extra costs of producing food this way - the real costs of producing healthy guilt-free food - are more than most of us can absorb in these days of higher interest rates, soaring fuel costs, and the general trend towards recession and the tightening of the purse-strings. The fact is, of course, that we have become accustomed to these cheaper prices for mass-produced food simply because the produce market is driven by intensive agriculture, fueled by cheap oil and the indiscriminate application of fertilisers to thousands of acres of farmland, the true costs of which are now starting to show themselves. For several decades, we have been indulging in this short term gain for what will amount to a nett loss in terms of the environmental and health costs which we are seeing appear now.

So why can we not afford to pay for food that is natural and humane, when it is the food we would have been eating barely a hundred years ago? Ironically, it would seem to be the same consumerism that has made everything else so desirable, cheap, and wasteful. So many families are mortgaged to the hilt and bogged down with credit card and HP debt in this country that we now struggle just to provide the basics. But just like trying to spread the word that it's worthwhile to grow a garden if you can, and that the more we can live as smaller communities sharing what is good between us and the less we rely on mass consumerism the better off we'll be, it's a monumental task for most families to try and wipe out their debt and take steps to break away from the economic models that chain us to our possessions, our desires, and our debt.

Which brings us back to the poll. No-one voted for Neither. Of the whopping 8 votes that the poll received, everyone wishes that they had the option of buying and eating better than what the mass market offers. But there is a cycle of economic hardship and financial ignorance in NZ that needs to be broken. The only question is, will that happen as a matter of market forces, as a result of the potential recession which is threatening, and in the process hurt everyone from big business to mum and dad?; or will it come from the ground up, from people's desire to rise above the economic machine that ties us down? With babies crying in one ear and creditors howling in the other, it's pretty hard to predict.

One Chicken - Three Meals!

There are many reasons why I love to cook, and thats what this blog is all about. Food is our link to the earth. Eating should remind us that there is an alternative to the pleasure of satiation, and that is hunger. Every day I am thankful that we live in a country where we have such an abundance of fantastic food. There are millions of people in the world who do not, and I think that sometimes we take for granted how good we've got it here. It seems a shame that so many people lose sight of this in the rush and pressures of the world, and turn to eating instant this and express that. It's the way of things, but it doesn't always need to be.

In a society that is driven by the desire to save time to be able to do more with our lives, it seems to me that we should spend more of that time appreciating not only our food, but the process of engaging with our food.

Its the meal that matters. More on this philosophy later.

With the economy tightening around us and the price of food rising, it seems important to me that we all learn to make the most of everything we put on our tables. Our grandparents knew how to do this, and I'm ever grateful to those older generations who have shared with me over the years the secrets of making a little go a long way. It not only makes good economic sense, it also impacts on our consumption patterns and our carbon footprint.

Now watch, and believe your eyes, as one size-16 chicken makes 2 dinners for 3 adults and a one-year-old and 2 lunches for one hungry young man.

D

Roast a Chicken. Do a pile of roast veges, more than you need. Watch this space in the future for delectable variations on this theme. Make sure you roast at least one whole bulb of garlic and a couple of onions. you'll figure out the quantities after a couple of goes.

Meal 1: Dish up the legs, wings, and thighs with steamed and roast veges and gravy. Should serve 2 or 3 depending on how hungry you all are.

Meal 2: Reserve the breast meat, allow to cool, covered, and refrigerate. The following day, chop this up and stir through pasta with cheese sauce or something similar with fresh greens and Parmesan. Once again, watch this space for more detailed recipes.

Meal 3: Roast Vege Soup. Collect all the chicken scraps, including all the bones from the legs and wings. Combine with any vegetable water you might have. Boil for about 20 mins then allow to simmer for 1&1/2 to 2 hours. Chop the leftover roast veges up into a bowl. When the stock is ready, pour into the bowl with the veges and grind up with a hand blender. Make it as smooth or chunky as you prefer. Season to taste. Transfer to lunch size containers, to be frozen for later and eaten with toast or bagels.

Mmmm.