On Monday night, Wife pulled some lamb loin chops out of the freezer. Each chop was probably 4-5oz (bone in). So again, small.

Backing up….

The lamb was not an intended purchase. But when we were talking with the farmer’s wife she mentioned lamb and asked if we wanted one. Wife jumped at the opportunity. We’ve only had lamb a handful of times, and it’s never really worked out well. Overcooked or dry or just didn’t taste good. I wondered if lamb was worth it, but I figured it had to be more a matter of how it was cooked… or more appropriately, how it wasn’t cooked. So why not get some and try it ourselves, eh?

While there isn’t much yield of course (the live weight was 85# and the hanging weight 42#, so maybe only 35-ish pounds of meat?), the results?

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Wife did something very simple. Just salt, pepper, some garlic, then a really hot pan. They were cooked to just a hair past medium-rare (tho not quite medium)… flesh was cooked, but still pink with a nice crust on the outside.

And fatty.

And thus, so delicious.

Tender.

And there’s this flavor to lamb… minerally? some might say “gamey”… but it’s not that. But if you’ve had lamb you probably know what I’m talking about. That flavor was there, but mild, and not bothersome at all. I’ve had it before where it was strong and just made the meat not taste so good. But this? This was wonderful.

So yes folks… there’s better out there. You just have to find the right source for it. Once you find it, cherish it, support it, nurture it.

I know my description of the grass-fed calf meat might not have sounded good, but read what Rog said on Facebook:

Our palates have been conditioned by corn fed feedlot beef to expect that beef should have a a mild “sweet” flavor imparted by a grain diet. That “grassy” flavor is what beef traditionally tasted like before corn became such a cheap commodity that you could use it to cheaply fatten up cattle before slaughter to increase your yields and therefore profit. We’ve engineered out the “bovine” flavor in favor of a more bland one imparted by cheap and arguably unhealthy feed. If you could feed a modern conventional corn-fed feedlot beef steak to your great grandparents, they would probably tell you that it had a pretty bland flavor compared to what they are used to.

People also have the same reaction to pastured pork which has a much more distinct “swine” flavor which has all but disappeared on the western palate since the advent of cheap corn and the practice of pasturing swine fell out of use. Just about all the non-religious reasons people cite for not eating pork stem from a confinement type grain based diet rather than allowing the animals to forage freely on their natural diet (roots, grubs, insects, berries, other small animals).

It may take a little while for your palate to adjust to the taste of milk/grass fed beef, but when once you get a taste for it you will definitely come to appreciate it more than the bland overly sweet flavor of corn fed feedlot beef.

There’s no need to adjust.

It’s awesome.

It’s mostly something on the nose. When you smell the raw meat, you do notice the difference. But the flavor? Frankly if we didn’t tell you, you wouldn’t know.

All you would know is how damn good it tastes.

I grilled some t-bones. And yes, t-bones, not T-bones… because they are little. 🙂

They are fantastic.

The meat is certainly fatty, but so buttery… it’s not the same as aged adult cow meat. It has a “young” flavor to it, not that really complex flavor that aging gives you. Much fat too. In this case, the grill was too hot and so things cooked to about a medium-well. Not what I wanted, but it’s how things went. You would have expected some sort of dryness or toughness. Not even in the slightest. It was so tender, juicy. The texture is a little different, because it’s again a smaller animal, younger animal. There’s a difference.

Folks… I don’t know if I could get not-calf in the future. This is just fantastic stuff.

But then, there’s also the raw milk, and the lamb….

Smell.

It’s one of our more influential senses.

Something might look awesome, but if it smells weird, that trumps what our eyes tell us.

So when I first smelled the beef we got from Sand Creek Farm, I didn’t know what to make of it.

Let me back up.

All their cows are grass fed. Truly grass-fed. Not that they’re out in a pasture for a bit, then are brought into a feed lot for the last some months of their life to eat corn and grain and by-product and hay and whatever else to fatten them up. No no, these cows are truly grass-fed. Plus, we didn’t buy a cow, we bought a calf. From Sand Creek Farm’s website:

We prefer to process the fatted calf that is about 500-600 lbs, still nursing on the grass fed only Momma cow.  Instead of weaning them to grow them out for beef, we process them on weaning day.  This is what many call Rose Beef, others call it the fatted calf, it is simply “the best”!

I’ve never had calf. Alysha Godfrey (“the farmer’s wife”) told me that things are a little different, such as the flesh is more pink than red. Sure enough that is the case… it’s not that deep red you’re familiar with. And of course, cuts are smaller — no monster t-bone hanging off the ends of your plate.

But again, smell trumps. When we got home, we took a couple pounds of the ground — after a 2 hour drive and despite extensive use of coolers and such, some of the ground did defrost tho was still cool — and cooked it up. We wanted to see how it compared to typical store-bought beef. We did nothing to it: just portion it into 6 oz patties and cook them on the stove. No seasonings (tho I added a pinch of salt), no smoke, no nothing. Just taste the meat and see what it’s like.

As I was making the patties, it looked good. Again, slightly more pink than red, good fat content (they cooked down to about 4 oz… that’s some fat), but I stuck my nose in the raw meat to smell it.

It smelled weird.

Different.

And frankly… the thought that triggered in my head was, “is this rotten??”

Wife smelled it too, and had a similar thought. She said that it smelled like poo.

Keep reading. 🙂

She was right, but she was wrong. No, it doesn’t smell like shit. It wasn’t a rotten smell. But it was a smell similar to the “dairy air” we had just smelled while at the farm.  And when you think about it, it’s more a grassy smell.

We also bought some raw milk. I’ll write on that another time, but the raw milk had the same sort of overtones.

It’s simple.

It’s not rotten, it’s not bad. It’s just different (and unfamiliar). It’s the cow’s diet. They eat grass, they poop digested grass; if you are what you eat, then the grass gets into the meat, it gets into their milk, it’s just how it all goes. And so all of it makes sense.

It’s not a bad smell, but you just have to know what it is. And it’s not the dominant smell, but just a fair overtone to everything. Everything ultimately tastes as you’d expect (the beef tastes like beef, natch), but you might pick up the grassy overtones in your nose or on your tongue.

But do realize, it does not smell the same as your store-bought beef and milk.

So it was a little weird. It’s different. It’s a change. It’s unfamiliar.

But those simple patties? They were so juicy. It was quite delicious. Wife reported it went well with the cab-syrah she was drinking. I took the unkosher route and had some of the raw milk with my meat. Like I said, I’ll write more on the raw milk another time.

I’m looking forward to trying a steak. That will be simple too: maybe a little salt and pepper, grill over fire, done. Taste the meat.

For over a year now we’ve been a member of Johnson’s Backyard Garden, getting our weekly CSA boxes of locally grown veggies. It appealed to us for numerous reasons: locally grown, seasonal, variety of diet, fresher and better tasting, more nutritious, less time at the grocery store, less processing and preservatives, closer to how it came from the Earth, and many other reasons. But one of the biggest was being able to know where your food came from.

So much of the problem with modern food is we don’t know where it came from, and then we’re shocked when we find out what’s really behind it. Consider the meat you eat. On second thought, maybe you shouldn’t because you’d probably be appalled and swear off meat.

For the past couple years we have bought sides of beef from our local butcher. We knew where the meat was coming from, and we could get it processed just like we wanted it. Aged as we wanted it, cut as thick as we wanted, whatever. Yes, once you try it this way you really don’t want to go back to buying cuts as needed at the grocery store. Alas, I found out our butcher doesn’t do sides any more. Lamenting my loss, schnookiemuffin told me about her friends at Sand Creek Farm. After a little discussion, a calf was bought (and a lamb too), and away we went.

I just returned from picking it up.

The freezer is full.

Ben and Alysha Godfrey, the farmers, run a neat operation. Consider how they run their operation. They care and manage everything from the ground up, literally. That sort of care and concern goes a long way. Plus there’s a great deal they do to strive for and maintain high standards of quality. I’m most impressed. Plus they’re some of the nicest folks I’ve met. It’s a shame we couldn’t stay longer, but we had to get our meat and hustle back home to tend to prior engagements. But we will be back!

Anyways, I’ll write more about the meat… and the milk…. because I’ve already tried some, and, it’s an experience.

It’s nice to know where your food came from, and to know you’re feeding your body and the bodies of your family with truly good food.