Confessions of a Butcher

Well it’s summer time, for the kids anyway. It’s not officially summer until the 21st or something like that but the weather is getting warmer and the sun comes out in between thunderstorms. That means we all want to fire up our grills and get to burning off some tasty chow.

I’ve got plans to do a brisket or two and I want to try slow cooking large hunks of boneless chuck roasts on the grill as well. I’ll keep you all posted.

Also this year I’m going to do some experimenting with the trout me and the boys bring home. Actually me, the boys and little Christy. Christy is our youngest. She turned 4 last October. She caught her very first fish just this April.

I had a day off a few weeks back and I was going to go down to the reservoir, here in Ashton, to try my luck when the Wife says I should take Christy. Well I thought that was a great idea especially since the wife wasn’t really suggesting. So Christy and I go down to the boat ramp there and she catches her very first fish.

I had to help her a little bit. I was able to get a fish on and then hand her the pole. She was so cute standing there holding the fishing pole while this nice 13 inch rainbow was jumping all out of the water all over the place. I told her to reel him in and she did. Once he was in she got real serious and said, “Let’s get a big one.” Well I thought that was pretty good idea.

Anyhow I don’t have a lot of experience with grilling fish but I did do up some nice fresh from the ocean Coho salmon a couple of times that turned out pretty good. Back in the old days you could get silver salmon (Coho) in season pretty darn cheap. Now I don’t know if the commercial fishermen are even allowed to catch any silvers anymore. I haven’t seen any in the stores for sometime.

I do my trout the same way as the salmon. I like to fillet my fish if they are big enough. I’ll take some aluminum foil (remember when it was called “tin foil”?}, and lay my fish on it skin side down. Next I will melt some butter and sauté a clove of chopped garlic with a little bit of finely chopped onion until tender. Then pour the butter mixture over the fish and salt and pepper to taste. Then I place the fish on the warmed up grill on low heat and close the hood. It will take ten to fifteen minutes depending on the grill and the size of the fish. Of course the bigger ones will take longer but I don’t usually have to worry about that. The trick is not to over cook it so keep an eye on it.

Vickie (my wonderful wife} got kind of creative with a bunch of our small rainbow fillets after me and the boys cleaned the reservoir out one day. She laid the fillets skin side down on a sheet pan and then covered some of them with sauerkraut and some with some kind of honey mustard stuff and then some….well I had no idea. I thought she was crazy but the fish actually was pretty good. The sauerkraut fish was our favorite. It was nice and tangy as you might guess and kind of good in a weird sort of way. A nice pasta salad along with the fish and some hot rolls from the oven and we were in pretty good shape.

Another thing you can do with the nice trout that are so abundant around here is to make up some trout Alfredo. Put a little butter in a fry pan place the trout fillets in the pan skin side down and cover and cook on medium heat until done (about ten minutes}. Then make up some Alfredo sauce or open a jar and warm it up, or the packets work ok with a little help, and then gently fold the flakes of boneless cooked trout into the sauce and then serve over pasta with a nice tossed salad and some hearty rolls and you’ve got yourself some good eatn’.

This is going to be a great summer.

________

The last couple of nights we’ve had graduations to attend so dinner had to be ready and quick.

On Wednesday I made tater tot casserole. You throw together frozen tater tots, drained green beans and cream of mushroom soup. I also added hamburger I had previously cooked up and frozen. You can add onion too if you like and just enough milk to make it goopy. Add salt and pepper to taste.

On Thursday I made spaghetti. I found some ground pork, browned it along with a couple of small onions I chopped in the Vitamix. I seasoned it with some Sweet Italian sausage seasonings and a spaghetti packet. Added tomato sauce until my pan was almost full, rinsing the cans with water to get every last drop of sauce out.

Both meals were served with romaine lettuce, chopped tomatoes, homemade oil and vinegar dressing and French bread from the store. I chose romaine lettuce as it was $1 a head, bigger and cheaper than my other lettuce options. I can hardly wait until our lettuce is big enough to eat right fresh from the garden. This is our first year to grow our own romaine and several open pollinated red varieties.
Vickie

Confessions of a Butcher is a book that I wrote to ease my conscience. You see I’m a butcher. In fact I’ve been a butcher for over 30 some years now, and over the years I have taken part, daily, in the retail meat industries universal scheme to get you, the unsuspecting consumer, to part with as much money as possible on your meat purchases. You see there is no need to spend the kind of money that most of you spend for meat.

How to save money on meat book

Confessions of a Butcher is designed to empower you the consumer. With my book in hand you will be able to circumvent the traps in the meat counters of your local supermarkets and still get just the right cut of beef or pork with just the right dimensions, juiciness and tenderness that you desire but for less money, sometimes a lot less.

How can this be, you ask? It’s quite simple. My butcher colleagues and I have been taking the few primals (large sections of beef) and cutting them into hundreds of shapes and sizes and selling them for more and more money for several generations now. This is called merchandising. What I do in my book is show you how to demerchandise and get the cut of beef or pork that you want in just the right size, dimensions and quality for less money.

Confessions of a Butcher lists virtually every single cut of beef and pork and what I like to call their alternative cuts that will save you money. With my book in hand you will be the master of the meat department. No longer will you pay the asking price for the cuts of meat that you want.

My book also contains many tips and helpful tidbits on Lamb, veal and poultry along with a few of my favorite recipes.
John Smith

P.S. Confessions of a Butcher is a must have if you would like to save money on your meat purchases. John Smith, the author, has been a butcher for over thirty years and in his book he lets us in on the secrets of his profession. This book is liable to revolutionize the way we shop for meat. If we want a certain cut of meat we just refer to Confessions of a Butcher and find a cheaper alternative that, according to John, will “eat just as good”. John’s book also contains helpful tips and information that will help you become the informed shopper that will be the envy of all.

Tomorrow, the June 15th edition of Bottom Line Financial is coming out with a nice interview of John.

John the Butcher

We’re kind of excited and want to welcome you all to our site.  I created an introduction/welcome page link at the top and hope you will feel free to ask any questions and let us know if we can be of any assistance.  With this tight economy many are cutting back and that is one thing we are experts on.

Thanks for stopping by
John and Vickie

You every have one those days when you don’t know whether you are coming or going? Well today is one of those days and I need to come up with something to write about for this column. I guess I could do like my favorite columnist Dave Berry of the Miami Herald did in one of his pieces, where he just talked about how long his column needed to be and how It was his job to come up with so many words for each one and so on and so forth until he had filled up the required space in his paper. Or….

I guess I could tell you some stories. How about the time one of our new buck privates right out of Marine Corps Cook school attempted to thicken the egg drop soup he was making. He took a big 10 pound box of corn starch and dumped it into the simmering soup without mixing it up with water or anything. I couldn’t believe the size of those lumps. Great big softball sized gelatinized gobs of goo. There wasn’t time to start over so we elected to put it out on the steam line for the troops. We placed a large ladle into the container of soup and watched as each of the Marines came through the line. They would ready their bowl, grab a hold of the ladle and pull it up, only to see this great big gob of goop the size of a grapefruit. They would stare at it in disbelief then drop the ladle and give us a dirty look and some times let out a few choice words. What fun!

Or Maybe I could tell you about the time another one of our well trained privates dropped a whole bag of salt into his beef stew. It looked beautiful with a gorgeous rich brown hew with just a shimmer of red tint from the proper amount of tomato sauce. He was really on his way to a masterpiece. Oh well. We didn’t have time to do anything about the stew either so we put it out on the steam line and waited.

This time the troops came by and the stew looked so good that just about everyone of them took a very generous helping. It wasn’t long however when three very perturbed Marines came marching up to us with their bowls of stew in their hands.

“This stew tastes funny,” Said the one Marine with the other two nodding in disgust,

“Well it should,” Said our chief cook, “We had a lot of laughs making it.”

There was never a dull moment in the Corps.

Actually the food for the most part was pretty good. There was a couple of mess halls that I was assigned to though that must have been conducting some kind of military experiment. We served powdered eggs from World War 2 and I think the fresh already skinned potatoes were from the same time period as well. The rumor though was that the government had a large stock pile of Agent Orange to get rid of once the ban was in place over in Viet Nam. We had further word that the Agent Orange was issued to the potato processing plant to use as a preservative. Well I tell you what, those potatoes never lost their beautiful white color. There was just one little problem though, besides glowing in the dark, you couldn’t get them to cook up tender. They were like little rubber balls. We tried baking them, frying them and mashing them. They would not brown and they would not get tender enough to mash. Finally I tried to boil a bunch of them very vigorously for several hours. They all burst open and the insides ran out leaving this thick rubber shell. From then on we just boiled them until they were hot and garnished with butter and paprika and served them to the troops. You gotta be tough to be a Marine.

That brings up another subject. I hear all the time how tough our mean green fighting machine, ground pounding grunts in the Marine corps are, but never do we cooks get any recognition for our toughness. We’re tough too!

I know what you are thinking.

“Yeah right, cooks are tough.”

Ok, you try serving rubberized potatoes, and gelatinized goo to hungry trained killers three times a day.

There, I did it. I filled up the whole required space without even mentioning that I need at least 800 words or there abouts.

Buffalo Versus Beef

You know how hunters are always bragging about how great their elk or venison meat is, or how tasty moose is or how much better than beef buffalo is? I have to admit that I don’t mind some good venison, and I do enjoy elk, and I do believe that moose is even better than either of them, even though I’ve never tried it, but I just can’t buy the argument that Buffalo is better than beef.

If buffalo was better than beef we would be eating buffalo instead of beef, right? I mean this is America and if we want something we get it. We want the best. It’s our nature. So how come we are eating beef instead of buffalo if buffalo is really better?

The other day at work I was given the opportunity to find out for myself what all this fuss about buffalo is. I was able to purchase 4 pounds of fresh ground buffalo at a ridiculous price because the packages were poofy, giving the appearance of age. Normally I wouldn’t go near a package of ground buffalo priced at $6.99 a pound, but this was my lucky day.

I took home that ground buffalo and made patties as soon as I got home while the wife scurried to the store to get some suitable buns for the occasion. Normally she would whip up a batch of homemade but she thought that buffalo deserved something a little nicer. I don’t know what she’s talking about. I think her buns are great. Oh Well.

Anyhow I fired up our griddle and slapped the ground buffalo patties onto it. I seasoned each patty with a generous dose of soy sauce. I just love soy sauce on hamburgers and steaks. It gives the meat a caramelized flavor that can’t be beat. Then I sloshed more than a generous dose of Worcestershire sauce onto each patty.

Whatever happened to the Worcestershire sauce that only took a tiny drop to over season something? Now I can pour the whole bottle over my hamburger patty and can just barely taste it.

Anyway I found that if you cook the Worcestershire and the soy sauce onto your meat it will taste much better than if you use it like a condiment at the end of the cooking process or mix it into the meat. Have you noticed how barbecue sauce gets a mellower, and I think, much better flavor if allowed to cook onto the meat instead of just lathered onto it just before serving?

Well I cooked up the patties and everyone got their large, beautiful store bought sesame seed buns ready as I was taking them off the grill. We love hamburgers here at the Smith plantation and as usual the kids were drooling in anticipation. After saying grace, (ever notice how quick the prayer over the food goes when there is something yummy on the table), they all tore into their burgers. I was running behind so I had to hurry and fix my bun with condiments, cheese, pickles, tomatoes, onions and lettuce and get to chomping. Sometimes in our house if you snooze you loose, especially with our three boys getting bigger and bigger all the time.

The buffalo burgers were delicious. In fact they were so tasty I didn’t realize until I had eaten almost all of my first burger that I had forgotten the ketchup. That’s not like me. I have to have ketchup on my burgers. The meat was very flavorful and moist. Everybody was very happy with the buffalo.

Is buffalo better than beef? It just might be. It’s at the very least just as good as beef. The ground buffalo was like some of the very highest quality ground beef you can buy. So why as Americans are we not eating buffalo as our main source of meat instead of beef? That’s a good question. Probably the buffalo steaks aren’t as good as the beef steaks, and the buffalo roasts are probably not as good as the beef roasts. If they were we would be eating the buffalo instead of the beef right? I guess this argument will continue at least until I get a deal on some more buffalo.