Holiday Reading: Uncle Dave's Cow

This holiday we’ve had some fun meat adventures. Here was another: processing two hind legs from a deer generously gifted to us by the son of a co-worker. One is not able to buy deer meat because it is absolutely illegal to sell it. That means we are thinking of other ways to show our appreciation to the hunter, an exciting challenge. Any ideas are welcome!

Cubing the hind quarter of venison. Two hind legs yielded about 6 packages of stew meat, 6 small roasts, and about 15 pounds of ground meat.

A clean bone. Well, as clean as I can get it anyway. Deer meat comes apart nicely in muscle groups, but I still find the overall butchering process challenging, especially cutting around the bone. 

Kyle does the grinding. There is nothing quite like making your own ground meat.  It is weighty and firm in your hand, not fluffy or mushy like some water-infused grocery store meat can be. Look how rich and red it is.

Meanwhile, what I did on my Christmas vacation…

Picked up a copy of Leslie Ann Miller’s newly released book Uncle Dave’s Cow and Other Whole Animals My Freezer Has Known. Turns out I am not the only (young-ish) woman into the meat thing (a whole post on women in the meat trade coming soon). I would like to thank my friend and co-worker John Clemens out in Washington state for the book recommendation. He happens to be right in the author’s neighborhood, but I’m convinced the message in this book will soon be sweeping the land. Thanks for the tip, John!

If any of you are considering the whole-animal lifestyle, this quick, accessible read is for you. The author is a former-vegetarian-turned-whole-animal-meat expert and lays out in wonderful detail how one goes about buying a whole animal and the benefits of buying meat this way. She happens to have some farmer/producer relatives who helped nudge her in this direction (and away from vegetarianism). Having someone in the family who’s in the meat business made it easier for her to ask questions about the process, a gift she wants to pass on to her readers.

Much less academic than Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma or Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, both of which she mentions. Miller’s book has a similar message, that change is afoot about how we buy and eat food in this country, but is much more the how-to of procuring good-quality, sustainable meat without having to hunt all your own food (Pollan) or having to drop everything and be a farmer (Kingsolver)! Thus, Uncle Dave’s Cow (the book) was born.

Unlike me, she is not interested in home butchering, rather, she just picks up her processed meat in nice neat pre-cut bundles wrapped in white butcher paper. Like me, however, she’s not really into the hunting or slaughtering, but she does spend some time talking about methods, which I think is good to know and may even make you feel better about your meat-buying choices. 

She doesn’t spend much time talking about meat curing, but she says enough to let you know that she does it and that she has a whole curing room dedicated to it in her house. This made me wonder if she came to the whole-animal thing like I did (basically I started buying whole animal BECAUSE I was interested in curing) or if she started curing to have new ways to enjoy the animals she was buying. Either way, it works for me!

Leslie Miller, author of Uncle Dave's Cow

Lastly, her commentary on offal, or organ meat, is interesting. She’s not opposed to eating it and, indeed, likes some of it, but makes very clear that despite the several times she’s tried tripe, she really, really doesn’t like it. Her main advice here is to go in on whole animals with people you know like organ meat (a good idea but not sure how realistic it is--so many people will reject it outright). As you know, many of the organ meats are on my list to try for this blog, so her take, as someone who appears very open to the possibilities, is something I couldn’t ignore. That said, all the recipes she offers in her book (she covers beef, pork, lamb, and goat) are for the meat of the animal, and they look both accessible and delicious. I give it five cows, er, stars.