Local, Grass Finished Lamb

I got the last two of the four grass finished lambs that I had ordered on Thursday from Touchstone Farms, now Rappahannock Farms, LLC. Today, we ate a rack of the lamb ribs. My husband and I easily polished off the entire rack. After he finished the last rib, Todd asked "can we make another rack?" I offered to thaw one for tomorrow to which he replied "I mean now." This is still hands down the best lamb we've ever tasted.

I've tried pastured, grass fed lamb from various farmers in the area and while I've had some very good lamb from other wonderful local farmers, I still have a certain loyalty to Touchstone Farms. Not only is the lamb super tender and delicious, Touchstone Farms is the farm that got me started on ordering whole animals and over the fear of using all the different cuts from one animal. Now I routinely order, in addition to whole lambs, a half cow, a half hog, a turkey or two, and between 6 to 12 whole chickens at a time. And if I ever can find a local farmer that will sell it, I would order a whole goat.

Todd and I are pretty fanatical about eating organic, grass fed, and local. Buying directly from the farmer allows me to choose farmers that grow and handle the food properly and sustainably, from what fertilizers go into the soil to whether an animal is humanely butchered. Buying local minimizes my carbon footprint and gives support to small local family farms that ensure the continuation of sustainable farming and biodiversity. And with my buying habits of whole animals and CSA shares, I've become much more diverse in my cooking, to the great benefit of our palates. Easily in the midst of growing season, we would eat in one week several types of meats and a dozen or two different vegetables.

A few tips on buying and using meats and vegetables in bulk:

• Keep a tab for at least a month on how much meat (in weight) and vegetables (in volume) you consume. Use your numbers to calculate how much meat you'll consume in a month, three months, six months, or a year. You should be able to determine from this whether your family will consume a quarter or half a cow, for example, in six months, or a year. For vegetables, calculate how much your family will consume on average in a week. You should be able to determine from this how large a CSA share to purchase.
• Invest in an upright freezer, at least 13 to 14 cu ft that can store food at sub zero.
• When you get a half or whole animal, sort the parts and stock different parts in different sections of the freezer.
• If the CSA offers different pick up days, pick a day when you know you can handle or process the vegetables that day or the day or two after. Since CSA produce are often picked that day or the day before and are picked ripe and ready, you want to make sure you take advantage of it and use the produce soon after you pick it up.
• Plan to make casseroles (like beef stew or braised meat dish) or soups towards the "end" of a CSA week. Often, we will throw the rest of what we haven't used up yet into a casserole or soup.
• Many vegetables can be successfully frozen. Leafy greens that are normally cooked can be washed, dried, and frozen, or blanched prior to freezing. Tomatoes can be frozen as is and tossed into sauces and stews later or cooked down or processed into a sauce prior to freezing. Fermenting is also a great way to preserve your vegetables. I have many a jar of delicious fermented spicy fermented radish in my fridge from all the daikons and jalapenos I got over the summer.
• Plan at least 2 to 4 days in advance for your meat dishes. Every night after dinner, I go "shopping" in my freezers (we have 2 separate upright freezers in addition to 2 fridges) and pull out something to thaw that we will eat in 2 to 4 days. I have the entire door of one of my fridges dedicated to defrosting. The meat goes into one or more of the bins in the door for defrosting, and the bin catches any leaks during defrosting and can easily be rinsed or washed. When I pull out something really big like a turkey, it goes into an empty veggy bin for defrosting.

Since we cook everything we eat and don't eat any pre-prepared or packaged foods, buying meat and produce in bulk really makes great economical sense. Once you get into a routine, you will find that you save not just in terms of the price of the food, but also in terms of time in sourcing and picking up the food.

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Salted Duck Eggs

I tested the salted duck eggs today. I started them on 2/25 and normally they go for a month, but since February was a short month, and the eggs were especially large, I let them go for a few days longer.

Salted duck eggs are traditional Chinese fare, entirely versatile. It can be eaten by itself as an accompaniment to congee, or you can use it boiled and cut up in soups, or mixed raw with ground pork to make Chinese steamed pork pattie. A popular Filipino salad features hard boiled salted duck eggs mixed with ripe tomatoes and red onions. The yolk, which turns hard, is usually dark orange and deliciously oily, and is often used in pastries like moon cakes or put into zongzi, a Chinese dumpling like food made of glutinous/sticky rice stuffed with either a salty or sweet filling.

Making salted duck eggs is easy. You can see my recipe for salted duck eggs in my recipes collection. Basically you take fresh duck eggs and keep them submerged in brine water for a month. Voila. Then you cook them up whichever way the recipe calls for them.

Sourcing duck eggs isn't so easy. Some farmer's market vendors carry them, but since vendors that carry duck eggs are so few and far between and they are so highly prized amongst gourmet chefs, they are often out of stock. Whole Foods carries duck eggs along with other exotic eggs in the produce area, but I found them not so fresh; about half of them went rotten on me when I tried making salted duck eggs. They were well within the use by date, but they seemed old, even older than the batch of eggs that I ordered once that got lost in the mail for three weeks.

This time, I found a farmer in Virginia carrying pastured duck eggs that will ship to me. I try to eat as local as possible, but I was craving salted duck eggs and my steamed pork pattie, so I ordered two dozen. I spent almost two hours looking for a farm close by that had it in stock, and felt better at least knowing that it was being shipped within Virginia.

Once salted, the duck eggs can keep in the fridge for a few months. I usually just keep them in the brine and use them up after two months, although they get really really salty. The saltiness isn't harsh though if you use natural sea salt, and it lends great flavor especially if you're using it in cooking other dishes.

This batch of duck eggs turned out really good. Of course, I used them in the Chinese pork pattie recipe. The yolks are our favorite and the small bites embedded at the top of the pork pattie left us longing for more. I think next time, I will use two yolks instead.

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Buying meat in bulk

I got my half a hog from Polyface today. Now my freezer is gloriously stocked with about 70 to 80 lbs of pastured pork. Buying this pig makes me feel happy, not only because pastured pork is so delicious or that it came from a happy pig that was allowed to roam. It's also because it came from a sustainable local farmer, and in buying from Polyface, I'm playing my part in reducing man's carbon footprint and rebuilding and enhancing the land.

Polyface pigs are no doubt happy pigs. During the summer and fall, they are allowed to roam in savannah pastures. At times, they are let into the woods to forage for roots and fallen nuts. However, they also play an integral part in the farm in cycling waste and building it into rich compost to be returned to the land. They are given corn in a shed where the cows lounge that contain wood chips, sawdust, and old hay and as the pigs root and look for the corn, they turn and aerate this bedding into a fertile compost pile.

We started buying meat straight from local farmers about three years ago. It was unfamiliar territory and took some time getting used to in the beginning. Instead of walking into a grocery store at anytime, I had to plan ahead and place my orders a week or two in advance. I also had to plan my work day around picking up the food, which often was at a local drop location with a very specific window of time for picking up. It didn't seem worth it in concept. I was already buying organic free range meats from Whole Foods and Trader Joes. This seemed much more inconvenient and how much better can the quality be?

After the first few orders, I was hooked. The meat tasted much more like meat should taste. The beef was beefier; the pork porkier, and the chicken was full of flavor, unlike the birds in grocery stores that have a dull chicken taste with almost a tofu-like texture. Eventually, we got to the point we couldn' t bear to eat meat from a grocery store. The best way I could describe it was that the grocery store meat, even the "free range" organic stuff tasted dead. I started looking for local sustainable farmers for everything we buy regularly.

That was our entry into buying bulk meat. My husband loves lamb, and I was buying many racks of lamb ribs and packages of arm and shoulder chops at the time from Trader Joes and Whole Foods. Lamb was about the only meat item at the grocery store we were buying anymore, since we were sourcing all our beef, pork, and chicken cuts straight from local farmers. I looked around, and finally found a lamb farmer that truly pasture their animals that was local -- Touchstone Farms. And they even offered delivery. The minimum order was 1/2 lamb. I placed the order, and the lamb was expected to arrive in a couple of months.

What will we do with a half lamb? My fridge freezer wasn't very big and it was already packed to the gills to ensure that we were well stocked with pastured meat and didn't have to eat grocery store meat. Plus we had gone to a raw food diet for my cats and their raw meat mixes also contributed to the crowded conditions in the freezer. My husband and I decided to get an upright freezer. Three weeks before the lamb arrived, a moderately sized 16.7 cu ft freezer was delivered and placed in our basement. I couldn't wait to fill it up with the lamb!

To my surprise, when the lamb arrived, it didn't even take up one shelf of the new freezer. A whole lamb weighs in around 35 to 50 lbs, and half of that really isn't that much meat. After breaking into buying meat in bulk with the lamb, we ventured into buying a split half cow. Quickly that grew into a half cow and a half hog at a time, and another freezer, a 20.6 cu ft to store it all.

As for the lamb, it was the best lamb my husband and I both have ever tasted. We quickly placed another order for a whole lamb, and then after that, two lambs. The best time to slaughter pastured lamb is in the fall, after they've fattened up over the summer over green grass and forage. We got our lambs this year in October and November, and unfortunately, we have only one rack of ribs left from the two lambs. I just put in our order for this fall, this time, ordering four lambs to ensure we have some for the entire year.

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