M...is for Meat.

Week 5 was all about meat. We started the week with breaking down and frenching chickens, then frenching racks of lamb, after that we moved into pork (breaking down a full Loin which is about 3 feet long and foot across), and then into beef. Some days were spent fabricating (butchering) and some days on cooking techniques for each type of meat. And let me tell you, there's nothing like having a little meat in the morning. One day I had lamb chops and fillet Mignon with Bearnaise sauce for my 9am snack. Nice.

Meat really doesn't gross me out, so I actually thought it was a pretty fun week. I think the lamb chops were the biggest surprise for me. I didn't know how much I would love them. We also made a French lamb stew, Lamb Navarin, that was pretty good. I didn't used to eat anything with a cute face (ie: lamb, rabbit, etc.) but that has quickly gone out the window. But I still hold firm to my no meat on a bone rule. Bone on bone (my teeth on animals bones) is just WRONG!

We did however have to watch 3 videos on butchering meat filmed in slaughterhouses. One from a beef slaughterhouse, a chicken one, and a pork one. They left NO details out. They started out alive and came out the end in little steaks, etc. Not for the faint of heart. Could easily turn a meatlover to a vegetarian. I may never get the image of ripping a cow's skin off it's face from it's body-less head out of my mind. And now you can imagine it too. YUCK.

I talked a little earlier about "Frenching", and it is one of the things I thought was coolest this week. It is basically leaving the bone attached to the meat, and then scraping with your knife blade to remove any meat, sinew, or connective tissue. It is more for presentation purposes, but also helps with flavor. It is the perfect answer to the meat/bone problem I have. Genius! It's pretty simple on a chicken, but a little tougher to do with lamb, but most 8 bone lamb racks are sold pre-frenched, so it saves you a step. (see picture above. It was the clearest picture I could find, but that person is totally butchering up the meat, in a bad way).

Oh and did you know that Pork is not actually "the other white meat"? It's not white meat at all. It is actually classified as a red meat. And raw pork is very red. Apparently, the pork people came up with that a few years ago as a marketing campaign to make pork seem healthy (bacon & ham, the most commonly eaten pork give it a bad wrap.) It does cook up white, much like chicken, but is actually red meat and most closely falls in nutritional value with the red meat family. Who knew?