Photos of recipes from the new book Tender Grassfed Barbecue
Photos of recipes from the cookbook Tender Grassfed Meat
Give the Gift of Real Food
By Stanley A. Fishman, author of Tender Grassfed Meat and Tender Grassfed Barbecue
This delicious holiday meal of grassfed prime rib, pan-roasted potatoes, and sautéed cabbage was a joy to cook and eat.
This holiday season, like all holiday seasons, is a time to give and receive.
Gifts are a wonderful way to express your appreciation of another person, whether it is a relative or a friend. Some people are impressed by expensive, fancy gifts. I prefer gifts that give a real benefit, and the price or status of the gift is not important to me. A gift that shows something of the giver is often the best of all. A gift that gives pleasure, and supports joy, is a gift I cherish, both as a giver and a receiver.
Would you like to give a gift that has the following benefits:
- Gives great pleasure to the person who receives it
- Gives great pleasure to the giver
- Creates a wonderful aroma in the home
- Makes the person who receives it feel wonderful
- Improves the natural functions of the body
- Creates a wonderful feeling of contentment and satisfaction
- Warms the body and soul
For me, this most magic of gifts is real food, skillfully and lovingly prepared.
The Most Traditional of Gifts
Many decisions are being made about gifts at this time of year. In modern times, we often think of commercial products like electronics, jewelry, designer clothing, and a host of other products when we are deciding what to give. Yet in older times, one of the most popular and appreciated gifts was that of food. Not just any food, but special foods that would not only be appreciated for their wonderful taste, but would nourish the body and soul of the receiver. These special foods were not factory candies and cakes, but some of the most nourishing and delicious real foods available.
Not only was the giving of special foods a tradition, but the cooking of those foods by a skilled cook was a much-anticipated blessing of the holiday season, and great efforts were made to have this happen. This was true for almost everybody. For the poor, the holiday season might be one of the few times they actually had grassfed meat or pastured pork to eat, or another special meat such as goose, or duck, or a capon. Grassfed or pastured meat, or wild fish, were the featured highlight of holiday meals. The traditional European holiday feast dishes covered such wonderful dishes as roast prime rib of beef, pork loin roasted with the skin on, rack of lamb, saddle of lamb, roast stuffed goose, roast stuffed turkey, roast duck, and many others.
What made these gifts unique is that they actually nourished the bodies of the lucky people who ate them, improving their natural functions and creating a wonderful feeling of well-being and contentment.
Traditionally, these foods were real food, not factory food, and were exactly the kind of traditional food our bodies welcome and thrive on.
It is true that many holiday foods were special desserts. But these were different than modern desserts. They always contained large amounts of saturated animal fat such as butter, lard, and egg yolks. They were only served at the end of a meal, when the eater’s body was well-nourished with traditional fats and other nutrients that protected the body from the effects of the sugar in the desserts.
GMOs, pesticides, and artificial chemicals had no place in these wonderful, traditional foods.
While you may not find much real food in the supermarket, local farmers and ranchers, and farmers’ markets often have wonderful real food available, including grassfed and pastured meat, and organic or the equivalent vegetables and fruits. There are some wonderful Internet sources of great grassfed and pastured meat. Three of my favorites are U.S. Wellness Meats, Homestead Natural Foods, and NorthStar Bison.
Give the Blessings of Your Cooking
Even the best quality real food needs a skilled cook. A skilled cook can turn the best natural ingredients into a feast that will provide great eating pleasure and nutrients to all who are lucky enough to share in the meal. If you can cook, the time and effort you put into making a holiday feast is a wonderful gift to all who eat it, and to yourself.
If you do not think of yourself as a skilled cook, I have some good news.
Cooking wonderful real food is easy, and simple. There is an old saying, “God gives us good meat, the devil sends us cooks.” The meaning of this saying is that high-quality food should not have its great natural taste overwhelmed by fancy and complicated cooking. The wonderful natural flavors and tastes of the food will do most of the magic for you. All you have to do is bring them out. The recipes I use create wonderful food, yet most of them are very simple and easy to use. Tender Grassfed Meat and Tender Grassfed Barbecue are full of simple recipes for grassfed and pastured meat that result in wonderful food, cooked in an easy and natural way.
I spend a big part of the holiday season planning and cooking the holiday feasts, as a gift to my loved ones. It is also a gift to me, as I also get to share in the feast!
This post is part of Monday Mania, Fat Tuesday, Real Food Wednesday and Fight Back Friday blog carnivals.
Feast Without Fear — on Real Food
By Stanley A. Fishman, author of Tender Grassfed Meat and Tender Grassfed Barbecue
Santa's Workshop is the newest addition to my wife's Christmas Village collection this year.
The holiday season has come. It should be a time of joy, a time to celebrate. Wonderful, special meals have always been part of the holiday season, but an ugly new element has entered the scene in the last few years—fear. Every holiday season, we are barraged with fear—fear of getting fat, fear of eating fat, fear of indigestion, fear of getting sick, fear of cholesterol, fear of heart disease, fear, fear, fear!
We are told, over and over again, to count calories, eat low fat, substitute dead factory foods for the rich, traditional holiday foods of our ancestors—where is the joy in that?
All of that fear is nonsense, if you eat properly prepared real food. Leave the factory products in the supermarket, and buy grassfed meats, grassfed organ meats, pastured pork, pastured poultry, traditional dairy, wild fish and seafood, organic or the equivalent fruits and vegetables, real pastured butter, traditional fermented foods, and make this the basis of your holiday feasts. You will not only enjoy a magnificent feast, but feel much better after eating these truly nourishing foods.
There is nothing to fear about eating real food. Nothing.
The Joy of Feasting
Almost every culture on Earth has celebrated holidays by enjoying a special meal, or meals. The finest meats, fish, vegetables, and almost every other kind of food were carefully prepared by traditional methods, and served in quantity during the feast. Many of the best recipes were specially designed for the holidays, and served only at that time. The Christmas feast was so important in old England that wages often included a fat goose at the holiday season—so even the middle and poorer classes could enjoy a special holiday feast. Fear of the food was not even an issue for most of our history, and the feasts were cherished, looked forward to, and enjoyed, with great gusto. Feasting is one of the most universal and traditional human joys, and a feast should be an occasion for pleasure, joy, and good fellowship for all.
This joy is often absent in modern times, where carefully designed propaganda has convinced many people to be afraid of food, especially the rich holiday specialties enjoyed by our ancestors. Fear ruins joy.
Real Food Feasts Are Good for Us
Not only is joy great for human health, along with being a great deal of fun, but the traditional foods of the feast are great for the natural functions of our bodies. Often these meals center around special cuts of meat, poultry, and fish, cooked in a traditional manner with rich sauces and side dishes. If real food is used, we are talking about grassfed meat, pastured pork, pastured poultry, wild fish and seafood, and flavorful organic fruits and vegetables. We are also talking about plenty of pastured butter, pastured cheese, and the wonderful saturated animal fat that comes from the pastured animals. These foods are exactly what our bodies crave, and give us the nutrition we need for our natural functions to work at their very best, which leaves us satisfied and feeling wonderful. When we eat a well-balanced meal of real food, we are getting all the nutrition that we need.
Traditional foods that are eaten at this time are often especially rich in the nutrients that our bodies crave.
Even though many traditional holiday desserts come with sugar, the traditional forms of these desserts are loaded with butter, cream , lard, egg yolks, and other sources of saturated animal fat that help protect our bodies from the effects of sugar. And the original forms of the desserts contained far less sugar than modern desserts.
When we are eating real food, our bodies regulate our appetite by what we actually ingest, because there are no phony chemicals or dead foods to con our bodies into overeating.
Many people equate feasting with feeling bloated or stuffed. I used to, until I switched completely to real food. I have never felt bloated or stuffed since.
Our Holiday Feast Plans
We have four feasts during this holiday season: Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day. We start planning the menus right after Thanksgiving, and look for the best real food we can find.
This year, we will have grassfed prime rib for Christmas Eve, redolent with the unique, mouthwatering flavor that only grassfed prime rib has, along with a plethora of delicious side dishes.
For Christmas, we will have a pastured goose, stuffed with a traditional apple stuffing roasted inside the bird, with crisp goose skin—one of the most delicious things on earth, gravy from the drippings, and other wonderful side dishes.
New Year’s Eve will bring a pastured pork loin roast, with a magnificent fat cap, marinated with Polish seasonings, roasted on a bed of apples, surrounded by roasting potatoes crisped to perfection by the melting pork fat, and many other wonderful side dishes.
New Year’s Day itself will bring another prime rib. Why two prime ribs? Since we eat only grassfed beef, we could not decide whether to get a prime rib from U.S. Wellness Meats or Homestead Natural Foods. Both have wonderful meat, yet the flavor is quite different because the plants the cattle graze on are quite different. We solved the problem by getting both, and having them on different holidays. Besides, a major holiday is a perfect excuse for the expense of prime rib, a cut we all love.
How much will we eat? As much as we want, no more, no less. And we will feel wonderful.
This post is part of Monday Mania, Fat Tuesday, Real Food Wednesday and Fight Back Friday blog carnivals.
A Class Worth Taking
By Stanley A. Fishman, author of Tender Grassfed Meat
I am doing something I have never done before. I am recommending an online cooking course. Why? Because it is not enough to know WHAT to eat. It is just as important to know HOW to cook it. If you are going to eat real food, you will have to learn how to cook it, because you can’t get it in a package, or a fast food joint, or 99% of restaurants.
The only practical way to get real food is from a skilled home cook, and that cook might as well be you. Less than a third of the people in the United States know how to cook anything from scratch, and very few of those people know how to cook grassfed meat, wild seafood, and grassfed organ meats. This course is a rare and wonderful chance to learn a lot of the basics of how to cook grassfed meat, wild seafood, and grassfed organ meats, knowledge that everybody should have.
The course is entitled Surf & Turf, and is being given by Ann Marie Michaels of the Cheeseslave blog. Here is a link that provides a description of the course and place to sign up: Surf & Turf.
I am not an affiliate of this program, and I will not get a penny from the fees you pay for the course.
The Teacher
Ann Marie Michaels is better known as Cheeseslave, and has been blogging about real food for some time now. Like me, she is a devoted follower of the teachings of Dr. Weston A. Price, and cooks and eats according to those principles. She is a meticulous researcher. She does not just advocate the benefits of real food, she eats it. And she knows a lot about cooking it. The many delicious recipes on her website are clear, well organized, and they work. Her recipes are faithful to the nutritional principles taught by Dr. Price, and provide wonderful nutrition. She cooks from scratch several times a day for her family, almost every day. I have communicated with Ann Marie a number of times, by telephone and email, and I have learned a lot from her.
The Course
In addition to her own vast experience and knowledge, Ann Marie has consulted with a number of experts in developing Surf & Turf. The class will include podcasts with some of these experts, including a podcast with me covering the cooking of grassfed meat.
The course concentrates on how to cook grassfed meat, poultry, and wild seafood. It has a definite low-carb emphasis and is faithful to the teachings of Dr. Price.
The class will also include a number of videos, and printable recipes. There will be 13 lessons in the class, for an average cost of approximately $9.00 a lesson. A number of these lessons will include podcasts with experts. A short summary of what is included in the lessons is as follows:
Lesson 1
Covers the need for high quality protein, health benefits of proteins and fats, why grassfed is better, and the need for healthy fats.
Lesson 2
Covers smart shopping for quality meat and seafood, the health benefits of grassfed meat and wild fish, the equipment you will need for the course, and how to really make the purchase of grassfed meat affordable.
Lesson 3
Covers safe and healthy grilling of grassfed meat and wild fish, with information on grilling equipment, fuel, and a number of video and printable recipes, including better grilling methods.
Lesson 4
Covers the preparation of raw seafood, the health benefits of raw seafood, and safety issues. Raw seafood was one of the most valued foods of the healthy peoples studied by Dr. Price, and is full of vital nutrients. A number of video and printable recipes are included.
Lesson 5
Covers the cooking of wild seafood, also valued by the healthy peoples studied by Dr. Price, including video and printable recipes.
Lesson 6
Covers the making of real bone broth, one of the basic foods of the healthy peoples studied by Dr. Price. I really like the emphasis on using filtered water, and why only filtered water should be used. More recipes are provided.
Lesson 7
Covers the cooking of healthy soups and stews, using grassfed meat and wild seafood. Even more recipes, video and printable.
Lesson 8
Covers the roasting and braising of grassfed meat and poultry, with attention given to making delicious meals out of economy cuts. Will include a podcast with me on cooking grassfed meat. More recipes, both video and printable.
Lesson 9
Covers pan frying and deep frying with the healthy fats used by our ancestors, including grassfed beef tallow. You guessed it, even more delicious video and printable recipes.
Lesson 10
Covers the making of healthy salads and sandwiches, with a number of recipes.
Lesson 11
Covers the health benefits of organ meats, and many methods of making them palatable, even delicious. All the healthy peoples studied by Dr. Price valued organ meats. Modern science has confirmed that organ meats are one of the most nutrient-dense foods available, and this lesson provides badly needed knowledge of how to prepare and cook them. More recipes, both video and printable.
Lesson 12
Even more recipes for healthy organ meats, with an emphasis on wonderful, nutrient-dense pâtés.
Lesson 13
Covers the making of healthy snacks, side dishes, and appetizers, with recipes.
Registration for the class ends on August 14, so it would be best to check it out in the immediate future. Surf & Turf is one of the few good resources available for learning how to cook grassfed meat, wild seafood, and other nutrient-dense food that nourished the healthy peoples discovered by Dr. Price. I highly recommend it.
I should disclose that while I am not an affiliate and will not receive any share of the money paid by anybody for the class, the podcast I appear in will be publicity for my book that could result in sales, which would result in my receiving some financial compensation.
This Free Ingredient Makes Everything Taste Better
By Stanley A. Fishman, author of Tender Grassfed Meat
My wife made this appetizer in the shape of a heart for me.
There is an ingredient that makes all food taste better. It is not MSG. This ingredient also makes your food healthier. It is not a vitamin or mineral. This ingredient also makes it easier to cook the food, and makes the cooking more enjoyable. It is not a cooking gadget. Where can you buy this ingredient? You can’t. But you can create it. And it is free.
This secret ingredient is to maintain a cheerful, happy, loving, thankful attitude while you cook.
I know this kind of attitude is totally opposite from the competitive frenzy shown on so many cooking shows. These shows imply that good food is created through stress, conflict, complex cooking techniques, time pressure, and competition. I consider this modern attitude to be the psychic equivalent of factory food. But I know the ancient secret.
I came across this ancient secret while I was researching my cookbook, Tender Grassfed Meat. I read a number of old cookbooks, from every corner of Europe, America, and other parts of the world. Time and time again I came across this advice, in dozens of old cookbooks, from many different countries, expressed in many ways—never, ever cook when you are angry or upset. Be cheerful, happy, and grateful while you cook.
I also remembered the story of Marya Palma. Marya Palma was the family cook for my grandparents. My grandfather, an eater of mythic proportions, ate a meal at her tiny restaurant in Poland. The meal was so good that he paid her a small fortune to travel to his home in Manchuria and cook for him. Marya Palma was a huge, combative, formidable woman who had known great tragedy in her life, and was afraid of nothing and nobody. But when Marya Palma cooked, she was happy and cheerful. Marya Palma was such a magnificent cook that it was common for the guests to carry all 300 pounds of her around the dining room after a dinner, the ultimate tribute they could give to a cook.
Since I kept reading this advice, over and over again, I decided to take it. That was a very good decision indeed.
First, I plan the cooking so as to minimize any chance of being angry or upset. I select a recipe I have time for. I prepare and organize all the ingredients so they are pre-measured and ready to be added when the time comes. I do not start cooking until everything is in its place.
I learned to create this cheerful attitude by focusing on the food and thinking about its benefits. I look at the good ingredients, think of where they came from, of how much work and effort and wisdom it took to raise this good food, which will nourish and sustain the lives of me and my family. I think of how the real, healthy food I cook will nourish my family and friends. I think of how this good food will make them stronger and healthier. I think of how much they will enjoy the tasty food. And, to be honest, I think of how much I will enjoy the food. After a few minutes of this, I am quite cheerful and happy. I maintain this attitude by paying attention to the food as it cooks. I watch the changing colors of the browning meat, the deep green color of perfectly cooked vegetables. I listen to the sounds the food makes as it cooks. I smell the enticing smells of cooking meat, as my mouth waters. Good food appeals to all our senses. All we have to do is pay attention.
I became a much better cook when I added this free ingredient.
I know this may sound mystical, and there is no way to prove this through science, but I truly believe that the happy, cheerful feelings I cook with somehow improve the food, making it healthier, more digestible, and certainly tastier. Traditional wisdom supports my belief.
If you add this free ingredient to your food, I predict that your food will taste better. Everything you cook will taste better, and you will enjoy cooking so much more.
Related Post
Cooking Real Food—The Most Important Task
The Cooking Advantages of Grassfed Meat
By Stanley A. Fishman, author of Tender Grassfed Meat
Grassfed meat has many cooking advantages over other meat. Grassfed meat is tender and tastes much better than other meat. Grassfed meat is often easier to cook that other meat. Surprised? All of these statements are absolutely true, if you know how to cook grassfed meat.
Grassfed Meat Is Different
Grassfed meat, coming from animals that have been fed the diet they were designed to eat, is quite different from other meat. It is denser, with considerably less water in it, and leaner. It has much more flavor, right in the meat. These differences mean that grassfed meat can be cooked at lower temperatures, shrinks much less in cooking, does not release water into the pan, cooks much faster, needs little or no seasoning, and is much more satisfying, so you are satisfied with a smaller amount.
No More Smoke in the Kitchen
Conventional steaks are almost always cooked over very high heat, creating much smoke in the process. The high heat is necessary to deal with the large amount of water in the meat. Grassfed meat browns beautifully over medium heat, whether on the grill or in the pan or under the broiler.
No More Water in the Pan
Conventional meat will often release a fair amount of water into the pan when it is heated. This water can really interfere with the cooking process, and can ruin the taste and texture of the meat, while diluting the flavor of any sauce or gravy. The only way to prevent this is to use really high heat. Grassfed meat does not have this excess water, and will almost never have this problem.
Shrinks Much Less in Cooking
Grassfed meat retains most of its volume when properly cooked with a dry heat method. A conventional roast will shrink in size dramatically when roasted. Grassfed meat will shrink much less, because it is denser, with much less water.
Grassfed Meat Cooks Much Faster
Grassfed meat cooks much faster than conventional meat. You can cook a delicious roast with a roasting time of 30 minutes. Steaks, stews, and pot roasts also cook much faster. This gives you considerable saving, in time and energy costs, and is much more convenient.
Grassfed Meat Needs Less Seasoning
Grassfed meat, properly cooked, has great natural flavor right in the meat and fat. This flavor is so good that it does not need much in the way of seasoning to be outstanding. The recipes in Tender Grassfed Meat are designed to bring out the great natural flavor of the meat by using just a few traditional ingredients and flavor combinations. This tastes so good that I am getting very hungry as I type this, and I just had a big breakfast! Conventional meat has a bland, uniform taste that needs all kinds of seasoning and sauce to provide flavor.
Grassfed Meat Is Much More Satisfying
Grassfed meat and fat are full of nutrients, and have much less water in the meat. This makes grassfed meat very satisfying. When your body gets the nutrients it needs, hunger stops and you lose the desire to keep eating. Now that I eat grassfed meat, I eat half the amount of meat I used to. I did not make a decision to eat less meat, it just happened because grassfed meat is so satisfying. When I am satisfied, my desire to eat ends, and I stop eating.
Grassfed Meat Is Tender and Easy to Cook
I ruined the first grassfed meat I cooked, because I tried to cook it like conventional meat. After much research, I learned how to adapt the knowledge of our ancestors and developed several methods of making grassfed meat tender and delicious. I have found that cooking grassfed meat with these methods is easy. These methods are described in Tender Grassfed Meat, and they have worked for many people who knew nothing about cooking grassfed meat.
This post is part of Fight Back Friday, March 19th at Food Renegade.
A Plea for Naturally Fed Pork
By Stanley A. Fishman, author of Tender Grassfed Meat
This became a delicious pork roast.
Why didn’t you include pork in your book? That is the most frequent question I get about Tender Grassfed Meat. The answer is simple. It is very hard to find pork that has enough fat. And it is even harder to find pork that is not fed a substantial amount of soy. Lean pork needs a lot of help or it invariably turns out dry and tasteless. Even with a lot of help, it is hard to do better than mediocre, which is not good enough. Soy fed meat is something I try to avoid. The problems are interrelated, because feeding soy to pigs makes their meat leaner. That said, naturally fed, fat pork is one of the most delicious meats you will ever eat.
The Popularity of Pork
Pork has historically been one of the most popular and widely eaten meats. The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Chinese had one thing in common. They all loved pork, which was their favorite meat. Pork was also the favorite and most widely available meat in Europe, and Polynesia. The Georgians of the Caucasus, a people famed for their longevity, love to eat pork, the fatter the better. Pork was without doubt the favorite meat in America, until the 20th century.
The Natural Diet of Pigs
Pigs are omnivores, who will eat anything. Pigs are forest animals, and their natural diet was based largely on nuts, fruits, and seeds that fell to the forest floor, as well as insects. Pigs used to be raised around forests, which allowed them to feed on the nuts of various trees, such as acorns and beechnuts, (also known as mast). When the forest wasn’t available, pigs were often fed surplus crops, table scraps, and nut crops such as peanuts. Both of these diets made it easy for the pigs to get fat, which gave their meat succulence and kept it from drying out. Pigs fed on mast had a particularly fine flavor, often varying depending on the predominant tree in the area. For example, acorn fed pork had a different flavor from beechnut fed pork. However, pigs fed crops, such as peanuts and apples, also had plenty of fat, and a wonderful flavor based on the crops they were eating. Smithfield hams, which were made from peanut fed pork, were renowned for their fine flavor all over the world. The taste of the pork was heavily influenced by the diet of the pigs.
Soy Rears Its Ugly Head
The wonderful quality of American pork was destroyed by an event and a new kind of feed. The event was the advent of the so-called lipid hypothesis, which claimed that heart disease was caused by eating saturated animal fat. This hypothesis was never proven, but was accepted as fact, first by the manufacturers of vegetable oils and artificial fats, then by the marketing influenced medical profession, then by the government, then by the media, and then by almost everybody else. Since the pork of the time had a good amount of fat, (which is one of the main reasons it tasted so good), pork sales plummeted. The pork industry decided to greatly reduce the fat in pork. They learned that feeding soy to pigs would make the meat much leaner. Soy feed was very cheap. They also bred pigs for leanness. The pork industry succeeded in developing much leaner pork—pork that was so lean that they compared it to chicken breasts. This “success” is the reason that most American pork is lean, dry, tough, and tasteless. It takes a great deal of work to make this pork even mildly tender and tasty.
The Difference
On a very few occasions, I have been lucky enough to eat pork that had the traditional amount of fat, and was not fed soy. This meat was so tender and delicious that it is hard to believe it is even remotely related to soy fed lean pork. I truly believe that soy feeding ruins the taste of pork.
A Request to Farmers
I ask you to make good, fat, naturally fed, soy-free pork available again. I think you will find that there is a great market for this product. There are so many of us that want to get soy out of our diet. If you will make quality pork available, I will recreate recipes for this pork that will do it justice. That’s a promise.
This post is part of Real Food Wednesday Blog Carnival at Kelly the Kitchen Kop.