Where's the Beef? It's Actually in My Freezer, Old Lady!

There's half of a cow in my freezer. Well, not an entire half of a cow. The things like horns, lungs, intestines, bones, and other organs and inedibles are wherever those kinds of things go when the cow is processed, to put it politely, but we have half of the meat that came off of the animal packaged neatly and stacked carefully in the upright freezer next to the dryer out in the utility room.

This cow, or more likely, this steer, was walking around a pasture about a mile from our house until earlier this month. One of the teachers K works with lives just down the road from us and her husband keeps a small herd, and they sold one of their calves to us to split with my parents. Our neighbor hauled our calf (by this time only a calf in name, not size) to the abattoir and brought the meat back to us, all packed away in butcher paper in all the usual cuts. K never had to see her food walking around on four legs or watch the actual act of it being turned from cute farm animal into meat. That was very important to her for some reason, but we won't have to purchase beef for at least a year now.

My only complaint is that along with the pancreas and gall bladder they threw out the tongue. You may be thinking, "Well, of course they threw out the tongue." After all, it's not a commonly consumed portion of the body in most American cuisine, but I really wanted to try it. However, despite, having always had an interest in trying this particular cut of meat, I've never been willing to pay for it. It's often found in grocery stores around here between the tripe and oxtail, but it's a rather large hunk of meat and therefore represented a rather large investment that I was unwilling to make for some reason. Plus, there's some Jewish deli in New York that's actually famous for its tongue sandwiches. Besides, you probably eat ham and that's from the same muscles in the pig that make up the butt cheeks. Which is really more disgusting, now?

But this was my chance. I could try tongue for more or less free. You're charged for the cow and the kill fee, not so much what you get in return for the cow. I would have paid the same if all I wanted from my cow was a lb. of hamburger meat as I would if I had asked for every last remotely edible scrap from the carcass, so I figured why not.

Unfortunately for my hopes of starting up a Jewish deli in a town where there are no Jews, by the time our neighbor called to relay my order, they'd already dispatched the animal and thrown away the tongue. Bastards.

And speaking of Jews, Courtney, there's actually a rather sizable, by local standards, Mormon church just behind the house where E goes to daycare.

I know that Jews and Mormons aren't the same thing. Do you? I was just making a joke since Courtney thought there wouldn't be any Mormons in my town a few posts ago.

We do have a seemingly infinite supply of T-bones, sirloins, roasts, hamburger meat and other wonderful muscle tissue, but I'm only feeling the pain of not having that wondrous slab of tongue to research, cook, and probably be disgusted by.

The hamburgers we had from Mr. Cow last night were pretty damn awesome, though. Maybe I'll be able to get over it eventually.