We Bought A Cow
We bought a cow. Well, part of a cow. We split half a cow with some friends so we ended up with one-sixth of a cow. Well, one-sixth of a cow post-chopping up, so it’s not like I have a whole bunch of hooves in my downstairs freezer (although we did send my friend Erin home with a rather large bag of bones). The cow came from a very nice small family farm in rural Pennsylvania where she ate grass and wandered around fields and lived as happy of a cow life as she possibly could have until she came to live in my stomach instead.
I have very high hopes for my cow, although I’m sort of nervous to DO anything with the meat. Is it a crime to put stuff on it? Should I just barely cook the steaks and eat them straight up? Also, I’m going to need some ground beef recipes besides taco salad and spaghetti with meat sauce (although I’m pretty sure E would be fine with 30 nights of taco salad).
Since my freezer is huge, this doesn’t look like an overwhelming amount of food but it is…a lot of meat. Really, I could use ANY recipe for beef, since I’ve never cooked/heard of some of these cuts before. It turns out when you’re getting a large part of a cow you get stuff like “farmer’s steak” which Google isn’t really helping me with although it looks sort of like a london broil? I’m just scared to ruin what should be REALLY GOOD FOOD.
I’ll let you know in 6 months when we eat it all if I think this was a good $400 investment, but I’m pretty sure the answer is already YES.
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Tags: food, friends, friends applies to everything, moooooo, paleo, Pennsylvania, what's for dinner
Also, I got a large bag of fat. :)
lol!! When this post started I thought you were going to say for milk or something … but nope. :-/
So was it a good investment?
I really want to do this…it’s so nice to know where your meat is coming from!
That is a LOT of meat – ground beef = chili? lasagna? stroganoff?
Any post that includes a Friends reference (quadruple points for it being a Phoebe song!!!!) is a WIN in my book.
My parents once ended up with half a cow in their freezer … not their choice, not on purpose. Long story. I’m still reaping the benefits, and googling “how to cook X” at least once a month. That being said, pretty delicious, and not once have I felt bad about seasoning or mixing the meat with other things. Moral of this rambling story? No1curr. You feel like drowning it in delicious sauce? HAVE AT IT. The cow is long past the point of having an opinion, and no one will be the wiser ;) Also, it’s delicious.
This will ruin you for steaks that you get at the store :) The meat is SOOO much better tasting.
We’ve been talking about doing this for years. How many pounds of meet did you end up with?
It’s like 110+ pounds of meat and it was $3.75/pound. Which is INSANELY cheap when you consider regular ground beef at my grocery store starts at $2.99/pound and the cuts just get more expensive from there. We might have gotten a one-time deal though, this farm is just getting started.
Even in that large freezer, it still looks like a cow’s worth of food….
On top of Sarah’s suggestions, you could also make meatballs, hamburgers or homemade hamburger helper. I’m not at all a meatloaf person but there is that.
Oh the cow in the meadow goes moo…..
SOOOO jealous. I’ve been wanting to do this for years but we have no freezer and no room for a freezer. Growing up, my grandparents were dairy farmers in PA so all of my meat was grass-fed. We just didn’t call it that. It was just “cow.” Now that I live in Florida, far away from my parents’ freezer full of meat, meat from the store is a paltry substitute.
One of my favorite ground beef recipes is piccadillo. So good.
Good luck.
That ground beef looks SO delicious, nothing like that grocery store slime! MEATBALLS, you can make a ton in advance and refreeze them! Also, go crazy with sauces, just not on the tenderloin, those deserve to be eaten almost raw with just some salt and pepper! I’m so jealous, we were reallllly close to getting half a pig last year but it fell through and I was so sad, and I don’t even really like pork…
We do this for all our beef now. We end up paying $4.5 a pound after it’s butchered, which is still really cheap for grass fed beef. Even though it’s really good beef, i just use it how I would any beef. We do a lot of crock pot roasts and stews. We recently did a BBQ type thing in the crock pot with some mystery cuts that we didn’t know what to do with. We cooked it all day on low covered in root beer, then smothered it with BBQ sauce and ate it on rolls. It was really good and easy.
We used our “Ranch steak” to make beef stir fry. I just sliced it really thin. I’m assuming that farmer steak is similar and also equals “poor quality steak that will taste great covered in some kind of stir fry sauce”. That was true for the ranch steak anyway. Good luck!
http://elizabethbryant.blogspot.com/2010/05/korean-beef.html
This is my FAVORITE ground beef recipe. It is SO GOOD.