What’s Your Beef?

I rarely have a pious moment, so indulge me and let me say a massive “I TOLD YOU SO”.

For the last 18 months I have been banging my drum about conscientious meat consumption. I’m hardly the first person to have talked about it, nor am I the most influential. So see me as an average member of the Joe Public who made a pledge and stuck to it – and it’s time you did too.

This little piggy went to…

I just realised that it’s my blog’s one year birthday. It was round about one year ago that I launched Meat in a Box, and changed my attitude to eating meat forever. It was also a nice coincidence that I found myself subconsciously cooking a similar dish to my very first blogged recipe – some 100 blog posts and eight meat boxes ago!

Rainy day steak pie

If you’re reading this in England, you will know that we have been having some seriously horridious weather recently. This weekend I defrosted my Aberdeen Angus stewing steak from the Dunwood Farm meat box, and set out to make the ultimate rainy weather recipe – steak pie.

Kipper kedgeree

Whenever my family sat round the table for dinner when I was young, our parents would regale us with tales of people we knew who had almost choked on fish bones, or spinach and so on. God knows why – I think it’s to do with being Chinese; we talk about food all the time anyway, and Chinese parents love to scare their kids with stories that usually have a moralistic value (i.e. chew your food properly and don’t talk when you eat). Anyway, ever since those days I have been terrified of cooking or eating any fish with tiny bones in them. The thing is, fish with the really tiny bones are actually fine to eat – the bones are so small that they can be swallowed unnoticed.

Unboxing the Farmer’s Choice meat box

These past couple of boxes have been moving slowly, for which I do apologise but can blame on work and life in general. It’s really quite spectacular to think that since September I have made my way through six different meat boxes. My next and seventh box is slightly different to the others – it’s from Farmer’s Choice, an online butcher that acts as a collective for local free range farms. Farmer’s Choice isn’t a farm itself and also offers products at a slightly lower price point, I suspect because everything is delivered flash frozen. I will disclaim that I was approached (and flattered!) by Farmer’s Choice to feature their stuff on my blog, and having found them an interesting proposition, I said yes.