Meat Cutting Week 6: The benefits of being a butcher

I got a book for Christmas last year called "My Last Supper". It profiles what 50 of the most famous chefs in the world would have for their last meal. The chefs also list who will cook the meal, who will accompany them and what music they will be playing, among other notes.

I have been a fan of Anthony Bourdain since I read "Kitchen Confidential". He actually wrote the forward to this book, and has been talking about this concept in his books and on his television show, No Reservations, for years. His last meal caught my eye, as did many of the meals in the book. He chose a dish that is served at St. John in London. It is a restaurant owned by Fergus Henderson, another chef featured in the book.

The dish is Roast bone marrow with parsely salad. Bourdain recently highlighted this dish on his Holiday episode of No Reservations. I got inspired the next day at work when I realized that all of our marrow bones go into the rendering barrell (waste). I asked Jeff, my boss, if I could take a few of them home for cooking and he gladly cut me a few and vacuum packed them for me! The recipe and pics of my version of Bourdain's last supper are below:

Roast bone marrow with parsely salad:

What you need:

2.5" beef marrow bones (I roasted 3 and it was a great portion for me)

1/2 shallot finely chopped

small amount of rough-chopped flat-leaf parsley

1 tablespoon olive oil

pinch of sea salt

french bread cut into 3 smaller pieces for thin toast

**the original recipe calls for capers and fresh squeezed lemon, but I ommitted them to get the full flavor of the marrow

How to make it:

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

2. Place marrow bones in oven dish or baking sheet, etc.

3. Bake marrow bones for about 17 minutes.

4. While bones are roasting, mix the parsley, shallot, sea salt and olive oil in a small bowl and mix with fingers until all is coated with oil.

5. With about 7 minutes left on the roasting, place the slices of bread in the oven to toast.

6. Remove bones and toast after 17 minutes is up. ***(Keep an eye on the bones to make sure the marrow is not liquifying and turning into oil on the pan. This may take some experimentation with time and heat. The marrow should be custardy and soft, but not liquid)

7. Let bones sit for a couple of minutes to finish cooking.

8. Use a small utensil to remove the brown/red/gray marrow from the bones and spread onto bread.

9. Salt the marrow lightly on the bread, and top with parsley salad

10. Enjoy!

****Marrow has officially jumped oysters to join my top 2 flavors of all time. I still think, pound-for-pound, bacon is the best flavor out there.

Meat Cutting: Post-Thanksgiving

Work and weather went well this past week. It was cold, but we didn't get the blizzard they were forecasting at the beginning of the week. Just a few inches of snow.

I had a breakthrough at work on Tueday. For the 1st 4 weeks of training, I was using a dull knife! There was a reason I was getting very frustrated not only by the pain in my hands, but at the slow pace of my work. I was not getting any faster. Jeff, my boss, was watching me use my steel, and realized that I was using it all wrong. I was actually rounding my blade by sliding my knife on my steel at a crazy angle. I was "honing" the knife at over a 45 degree angle, when I needed to be at the 22.5 degrees shown on the diagram below: After I sharpened my knife, and started using my steel correctly, my job got a lot easier, obviously. It was like my knife was moving through butter. Because of this breakthrough, we were able to finish 5 whole beefs on Wed., Thur. and Friday. It made an instant difference on my speed of work and on the pain in my hands. I am still a little apprehensive when using the track system to move beef around above me, but I am getting more confident by the day. The thought of a 300 lb. half of beef falling on me is not pleasant.

I got a couple of treats from people at work this week: brown, white and green eggs and fuji apples.

The eggs are from a friend of my co-worker Joanne. Her friend raises chickens in Elgin, OR. The green eggs are from a breed of chicken called Americauna, sometimes called the Easter Egg chicken. Not only was the color of the eggs different, but the color of the yolk and the flavor were both much more intense than regular grocery store eggs. I will be requesting more.

The apples are from just across the border with Washington. Very tasty.

Kool-Aid Pickles...sweet and sour goodness

Recently, I was researching different methods of pickling vegetables online when I came across something that sounded so ridiculous, I had to look. Kool-Aid pickles or "Koolickles" are basically cucumber dill pickles that are marinated in a kool-aid mixture. I made a batch of Fruit Punch last week, and fell in love. The flavor of the kool-aid is what you taste first, which really makes the pickle flavor dissapear. What the pickles deliver, however, is that classic dill pickle sourness/tartness. It is a perfect sweet/sour combination.

Here is what you will need to make them:

46 oz. jar of whole dill pickles (make sure they are classic dills, not the garlic or zesty flavored pickles).

2 packets of your favorite kool-aid flavor. I can't find Purple Saurus Rex, so I settled on Fruit Punch (the classic flavor offered in the Mississippi Delta region where these treats originated) and Orange (flavor pictured here).

1 cup of sugar

2 cups of water

What to do with the ingredients above:

1. Pour out and discard the "pickle juice" from the jar of pickles.

2. Remove pickles from the jar and slice them in half length-wise.

3. Move sliced pickles back to empty pickle jar.

4. In a separate container, mix the kool-aid, sugar and water until all sugar and kool-aid powder is dissolved.

5. Pour the kool-aid mixture into the jar of sliced pickles until the pickles are covered.

6. Put the lid on the jar, and place the pickles in the refrigerator for at least 24 hours to marinate.

Enjoy!