beef: it's what's for dinner

Yeah, I know. The title has bad grammar but that's what the ad agency came up with for The Beef Council so I decided to use it too.

At left is a picture from the ad for this week from the grocery store that I usually go to. As you can see, the round section is on sale for half price and I'll probably pick up a eye of round roast tonight, after work, if any look good.

The "Round" sections come from the back end of a cow and are one of the tougher cuts since that's the working part of a cow. It's the equivalent of our buttocks and hamstring muscles, I think. These muscles are best used for pot roasts or if brasied. You can also cut the roast up into steaks but again, you'd want to braise them since there's not a great deal of fat in this section of meat and the muscle fiber is tougher than that in other areas of the cow.

My intention is to cut the roast into steaks and then freeze down most of the cuts. Eventually I'll braise them, probably on my stovetop, though if I do more than one at a time I'd go inside the oven since I'd need more room.

I'll probably stock up a bit on boneless chicken breast also. They're on sale at half price quite a bit--but never when you want it--so I try to always have a few pounds frozen in my freezer. It's such a versatile meat, you can do almost anything with it. With so much muscle there, you'd think the damn birds would be able to fly.

Getting back to cow butts, here's a picture I grabbed online of what this section of muscle looks like.

It's a long tubular muscle that runs down the center of the rear leg. It's yummy too but you have to cook it slow in the presence of moisture. Crockpots work well for this method but I prefer to do it in a pan on my stove (with a tight fitting lid) since it's a lot faster. One hour versus around 4.

Near the end of the braising it's nice to add some diced onions and bell pepper, maybe a little garlic.




Here's a little guide to this cow part that I copied from the Hormel Meat site. It's very informative!

One of the Christmas presents I got was a book on baking. It's quite impressive and soon I'll be trying out a few recipes. Baking is more of a challenge to me than cooking so it might be interesting...