OT cooking? A cheap prime cut vs. an expensive choice cut

[Oscar]

Maybe the Mickster takes ivermectin?

[Ed Pawlowski]

Are you saying the meat in supermarkets involves animals?

See your doctor. Your HUMERus bone is not working properly.

[rbowman]

Not if the libs have anything to do with it... There are some vegan products like the black bean burgers that I like but they're not pretending to be anything else. I really don't see a need for faux meat. That's sort of like the faux turkey bacon for the kosher crowd.

[Ed Pawlowski]

Never tried any of that. Speaking of bacon, I'm just ordered this again. When we lived in CT it was the other side of the state and we'd go out there a couple times a year. Great ham.

[rbowman]

My parents tried a pig one year. Pigs are smart enough to grow on you. He became pork chops but they didn't repeat the experiment. The chickens were different. You're not dealing with one and it's hard to look at a chicken and not see a fricassee. I did have a friend who grew up on a chicken ranch and she wasn't too big on chicken. It wasn't her tender sensibilities; she'd just eaten too much chicken in her life.

[Jim Joyce]

My 67 y/o brother-in-law, so his wife is my sister. Awkward.

Like Ed says, it comes from the store, apparently. LOL

[Rod Speed]

Plenty aren't.

Not all do, most obviously with dairy cattle.

[Jim Joyce]

I respectfully disagree. When I was a kid, my father owned a bar and every Friday evening he'd put out several big platters of "tiger meat", maybe 10 pounds worth, with smaller trays of crackers alongside. It was always a huge hit with the locals, and of course I snuck as much as I could. I was only 6-8 years old but we lived in a very small town, so most things were allowed or at least tolerated, including kids in bars.

Here's a description of tiger meat, along with a recipe. The Aberdeen that they mention in the article is Aberdeen, SD, not far from where I grew up.

[micky]

Good question. I don't have worms coming out of my arms or other places, like I think I saw in a dermatology text. And I think if I had a tape worm, I wouldn't be gaining weight. And I don't have pinworms or it would itch. Unless there is a non-itching kid.

I did get sick from raw meat once, in 1971. I wasn't in the habit then but I was on a low budge in Mexico and I hadn't had any meat in a week and really missed it I guess, so I bought some meet from a vendor, on the street iirc, and I'm sure his other customers cooked it, but I didn't. This was iirc in the afternoon and by the next morning I was sick and kept going to the bathroom, passign right by the front desk of the cheap but adequate hotel I was staying in.

Finally around 5PM I felt good enough to walk out to the front desk and she said, YOu should go to the doctor. He's right around the corner.... but he's closed now.

So I went to the good hotel in town to see if I could find a girl I'd met the previous day. I sat in their living room-like lounge and there was a woman there and I thought she'd have motherly advice since I was still sick. She talked like an Amerrican in her English and said "I don't know but maybe my husband does. He's a doctor." He was right there and he told me to go get penicillin pills and if they didn't have that, syringes.

So I found where a drugstore was and bought the pills, and realized I didn't know how much to take, so I rushed back to the hotel hoping they were still there, and they were. And I took the pills and I think that made me well again.

This was in San Miguel de Allende, a resort town 50 miles from Mexico City, which in 1971 may have had only 2 hotels, one good and one cheap. Now google maps shows there are 45. And many North-Americans own homes there now.

[invalid unparseable]

Unfortunately we did not see you smile while writing it.

[micky]

Steak tartare. I only meant it's not as very good compared to non-ground sirloin or rib-eye.

Sounds fine to me.

mystery.....

This wikipedia link has several references about whether raw egg is included.

the early 20th century, what is now generally known as "steak tartare" was called steak à l'Americaine in Europe...... Health concerns Health concerns have reduced the popularity of this meat dish in some parts of the world because of the danger of contamination by bacteria and parasites[18] such as Toxoplasma gondii and Taenia saginata.

I only told Cindy I didn't have tapeworms or pinworms. No information on these two. Oh, Taenia saginata *is* the beef tapeworm. "An adult worm is normally 4 to 10 m in length, but can become very large; specimens over 22 m long are reported. " I think I would have seen this during my colonoscopy, if I had one.

Toxoplasma gondii is a protozoan, too small to see. "In rodents, T. gondii has been shown to alter behavior in ways that increase the rodents' chances of being preyed upon by felids." Maybe that's why I've been acting strange. "This asymptomatic state of infection is referred to as a latent infection, and it has been associated with numerous subtle behavioral, psychiatric, and personality alterations in humans. Behavioral changes observed between infected and non-infected humans include a decreased aversion to cat urine...." I still hate cat urine, so I'm good.

[invalid unparseable]

Well, I had an Italian friend who hated spaghetti because his mother served it about three times a week.

My hunting buddy also had pigs. His wife worked as a waitress and brought a lot of old food waste from the restaurant to feed them. He also had laying hens and when they aged out would eat them. He invited me up one day to get a couple. He had just killed them and threw all the non-edibles to the pigs and I still recall a pig chomping on a chicken foot.

[Scott Lurndal]

The french term is Tartare. It is not 'ground beef'; it is generally prepared fresh from a steak rather than the lower-quality pre-ground beef found at the supermarket - primarily for food safety reasons.

[rbowman]

I go by their plant almost every day. When they're smoking a batch it's all I can do to not stop and ask for a plant tour.

[Jim Joyce]

Right, but I wasn't talking about that. I was talking about raw ground beef (plain old hamburger) mixed with raw egg, served on crackers. It was/is called tiger meat in the upper Midwest, although it's not as common now as it used to be.

[Scott Lurndal]

Hmm. 20 years in the upper midwest and I had never heard of tiger meat. Even that isn't supposed to use store-bought ground beef. It appears to be a south dakota thing.

[Jim Joyce]

That checks out. SD is my home state.

[micky]

Semanitics at most. It's beef and it's ground. Store-offered ground beef is usually not ground sirloin and not ground porterhouse but IMO they would still be ground beef, and they might well be better raw than the ground chuck I've eaten raw, but IMO it would be a waste since sirloin and porterhouse are delicisious whole, raw or cooked, and the raw ground chuck was disappointing and better cooked.

[Cindy Hamilton]

Chopped, not ground. Ideally. Of course, not everyone observes the niceties.

Anybody who buys random "ground beef" at the grocery store deserves what they get. You should be able to get ground chuck, round, or sirloin labeled as such.

Ground chuck has too much fat to be enjoyable raw.

Ground chuck is 15-20% fat Ground round is 10-15% fat Ground sirloin is 8-10% fat

[rbowman]

There was an excellent restaurant in Buffalo, The Cloister, that occupied Mark Twain's carriage house. The house had been demolished. I ordered the steak tartare, not expecting a table side prep. They wheeled out a table and started from scratch, chopping the meat.

After they served it and departed a woman at a nearby table asked me what it was and I told her. Urrrp. 'I'll have what he's having' wasn't going to happen.