Bone Broth Sundays

My youngest son and I just figured out a great weekly meal plan that I've been using for several weeks. One of the best things about it is that I can use parts of meals to produce new meals later in the week. The week starts on Sunday for us and I use it as an excuse to cook with bone broth to get in some extra nutrition as we face the week ahead. Also, due to my restricted diet, it's a good way to have a meal that we can all enjoy together--most of the other days I have to adjust the main meal for me.

So Sunday dinners are a roast of some kind: usually beef or pork, sometimes lamb. We get our meat from our local farmers, all of it pastured, grass-fed, humanely raised. I say it's a roast, but I actually braise the meat in a couple cups of beef bone broth and a couple cups of water. I make slits in the meat and insert garlic cloves, throw in a few bay leaves, and salt the meat generously with sea salt. Depending on how much time I have I'll either cook it at 250 degrees F for 3-4 hours or 325 degrees F for 2 hours. Either way the meat falls apart and is juicy.

Veggies are also slow-cooked. Our favorite is green beans. I cook those in equal parts bone broth and water, toss in a quartered onion, and sea salt. Once that comes to a boil, I turn down the heat to a reasonable simmer and cook for at least an hour. We like them pretty soggy. Whatever broth doesn't get eaten with the veggies I drink with another meal. It is so very delicious!

I am avoiding nightshades, so our mashed potatoes are really Japanese sweet potatoes (white flesh and less sweet than regular sweet potatoes). I suppose I could add a little bone broth as the liquid at mashing time to add a little extra, but I usually just leave a little of the water the potatoes were boiled in behind in the pot. Add a little salt and ghee and whip 'em up.

Sometimes I'll make a little gravy from the juices or pour a little au jus over the meat. But I like to save the liquid to make a nutrient-dense red sauce for a pasta meal later in the week (another post). I throw the bones and some of the meat in the sauce too; the meat just keeps getting more tender and flavorful! My oldest son loves bbq, so later in the week for school lunch, I'll send along bbq pork sandwiches. This amount of food gives us a lunch for each of us and another entire meal. When you figure out how to stretch meals, it might be easier to justify the cost of a pastured roast. We buy in bulk when we can, which lowers the cost significantly. The nutritional value of the meat alone makes it worth it for us; it's a once a week treat that nourishes us deeply.

Find pasture-raised meats:

Weston A Price Foundation has local chapters that know the local farmers; they are a great resource
US Wellness Meats ships nationally

Liverwurst is the Best

Mystery Meat: The phrase that conjures up images of cafeteria tray muck and Lisa Simpson's imaginings of what might be contained in hotdogs. Not many people actually know what goes into those tube-shaped meat spreads or pates. Most people would likely rather be happily unaware that they are eating and enjoying organ meats. Offal does have an unfortunate homonym cousin in the English language that gives instant justification for most people to avoid it. Coming from Middle Dutch, offal translates literally as "to fall off," the refuse from a process. The English language picked it up as a way to describe that which falls off the butcher's block. They ate it anyway, long before its 14th century English roots.

One of the simple foods I have missed most from childhood is liverwurst made from beef liver. We seemed to always have that or braunschweiger (another post) in our fridge to have on bread with pickles. Now that I live in the South, it's uncommon to find anyone who knows what it is, unless they've also come from the Midwest or Slavic heritage.

So, I found an excellent Liverwurst recipe and made my first batch last week. It is gone. Today I did a chest freezer deep dive and dug up all the organ meat I had been saving for just such a recipe. This time though, I am going to add beef tongue to the beef liver. The tongue is cooking right now, and my kitchen smells pretty hearty. It is my first time cooking a tongue, although I really started liking its flavor through a local Mexican restaurant dish: taco de lengua. No other taco compares after that.

I have to tell you, it's a good thing I already like it. I'm used to the smell and the texture. But I have to admit, I was not fully prepared for preparing it. I've spared you photos of the process, but suffice it to say that it helps to get into a detached mindset. I have prepared food in a commercial kitchen, so I'm pretty used to having to 'get the job done.' Pulling the outer layer off the tongue and removing the accompanying salivary glands (no one warned me about those!) was not pleasant. In the least. If Julia Child said holding a cooked manicotti was like holding a hot cock, I can't imagine what she'd have to say about holding a just-out-of-its-own-broth beef tongue. *Blush.*

Momentary horrors aside, the rest of the recipe process is very easy, smells Old World aromatic, and is incredibly satisfying. I added cubed tongue so it was about 1/3 of the total amount of meat combined with the liver. If you can, be sure the organs are from pasture-raised cattle. Also, I use beef bone broth in place of the sherry. Liverwurst is an excellent source of iron and Vit B12 ; if you're anemic, make sure you eat this a few times each week. It goes wonderfully well with sweet pickles. We always ate it with an assortment of pickled salads and celery and carrot sticks. I like to garnish the liverwurst with fresh dill and set it out for unsuspecting visitors. I'm happy to tell them what's in it if they ask. For those who don't, I willingly let it remain a mystery.

Tap the Cream Line

from Modern Mechanix, Sept. 1935

Welcome to the cream line observer. What is the cream line? Your grandparents knew this term and most likely judged the milk they bought by this. Now with homogenization, the cream line is all but gone in grocery store milk (unless you're lucky like we are to have a local dairy that provides pasteurized milk to a few grocery stores around town). The cream line is the line in a container of milk that separates where the cream that rises to the top settles on the milk. Once upon a time, that used to be between 4.8% and 5.2% of the volume of the milk; now it is standardized at 3.5 - 4% (that's whole milk). Thanks to my herdshare family farmer and her pasture-raised cows, the milk my family drinks sees a cream line at about 1/4-1/3 from the top of the 1/2 gallon container (even in winter!).

So visit me here to find articles about traditional recipes, nutrient dense foods, real milk, food rights, local/small farm practices and issues,Weston A Price Foundation principles, and resources to help you find more information about these topics.