Cheap, Delicious Meat

As a low carb paleo homemake on a budget, I've come to find the cheapest pieces of meat you can buy in the store.  Things like chicken thighs and hamburger have become staples in our house because they're both cheap and easy.  But sometimes you want a break from those cuts of meat.  So this weekend, I bought another cheap piece of meat I knew was delicious.

I bought....  a really massive pork shoulder.

In case you can't tell, that's not a small crock-pot.  It's a pretty big one, or at least a pretty decent sized one.  And thank goodness it just barely fit in there, because it's been 80+ degrees in our area and I didn't want to have the oven on all day long. 

The pork roast ended up weighing almost 8 pounds, but it only cost me about $10.  At our local Wegmans store, you can buy meat in club packs that have a lower per-pound price, which is almost always how I buy my meat.  Strangely enough, the pork shoulder only comes in club packs, so even if I wanted a smaller shoulder, this is all I'd be able to get.

Not that I'm complaining.  After 6 hours on high, and then an additional three hours on low, the pork was finally done.  And it was beautiful.  Pork shoulder, when properly cooked, is what they make pulled pork out of.  After you cook it, you can do so much with it.  We've had it with low carb bbq sauce, with sauerkraut, in wraps, cold, in soups.  It's delicious.

This is before pulling it.

And the best part is, it freezes really well.  So if you're feeding just one or two people, you can cook it all up at once, and then repackage it into small freezer bags so you can pull out one serving at a time.  A large pork shoulder like this one should give you 5-8 meals for two people.

And it's easy, too!  Just stick the whole roast in a slow cooker, salt and pepper, and add a little (1/2 to 1 cup) broth around the sides.  Depending on the size and the power of your crockpot, it should take anywhere from 4 to 8 hours.  You know it's done when the meat pulls away in delicious strands.

We bought a cow!

Chad and I are very orderly people.  Or I guess the truth is that I'm a very orderly person and Chad is easy to persuade.  We have a monthly budget and we divide our money up into nice little groups.  Bills, savings, groceries, and we even give ourselves a set allowance so we don't spend more money than we have.  Up until very recently, we didn't have a single dime of debt (but we also found out that having no debt means you have no credit should you ever need it, so we decided to bite the bullet and get a car loan instead of buying it outright).  It's a very neat little system and it makes me feel very secure about our money.  The last thing I ever want to do is spend more than we have.  The motto in our house is "Use it up, wear it out; make it do, or do without," and we truly live by that. 

But then once in a while, we go mildly crazy and buy something big that we weren't planning on and hadn't saved up for.  It's like feel the need to sneak out and be totally bad once in a while.  This time, we bought.... wait for it....  a CHEST FREEZER!  *gasp*

I had actually been eyeballing a Ninja blender/food processor in Sam's Club (which I've been wanting forever but can't find the justification to actually buy), when Chad happened to spot this beauty behind us.  It's a 7 cubic foot GE freezer with a really snazzy lock.  I guess the lock is to keep neighbors from coming over and stealing your ice cream.

Once we managed to get id into the car and then down our steep, narrow old basement stairs, turned it on and saw that it works, Chad asked, "now what are we going to put in it?"  Lol.

I have big dreams of one day owning a mini-farm, with orchards, a large garden, some laying chickens, and a couple small cows or goats.  Unfortunately, we're currently living on 0.1 acre in a town that doesn't let you have livestock on your land.  I have a decent sized garden out back, but I'd have to be pretty full of myself to think I could fill that cooler with all my produce.

So I looked around the tubes to see what it had to offer.  Local Harvest is a pretty cool website, and offered me up a lot more farms than I knew we even had around here.  It's funny how you can live so close to something and not even know it's there.  But we're city folk; how would we ever get in contact with farmers without the internet?  And I don't want to hear anyone saying, "Oh gee, I don't know...  maybe talking to people?"

I did managed to find a handful of local farms selling pastured chickens, organic pork, and grass-fed cows.  We decided against ordering pastured chickens for now.  Our local Wegmans store sells organic, pastured chickens raised on kind of local Amish farms for an awesome $3.50 a pound.  We may order some local birds from a farmer next year, but for now, we decided just to go for something that's harder to get in the store.

Wegmans grass-fed beef is outrageous.  It starts at $6 a pound or so for ground, and goes up to $14 a pound for sirloin, and don't even think about the $24 a pound tenderloin steak.  We try really hard to buy good quality food, but organic grass-fed/pastured meats are just too much for us.  We can't afford that.  So my goal was to find some beef we could buy, hopefully cheaper than the store would sell it to us for.

And I did!  The first farm I found had so much demand, that they already sold all of their 2013 cows and had most of their 2014 cows sold!  Their beef was the cheapest at $3.50 a pound for a half cow, but it was only grass finished and not grass-fed.  Fortunately, I found an even closer farm selling completely grass-fed cows, who pasture on certified organic pastures, for $4.50 a pound for a half cow, and that includes the butcher fee!

So I hopped on it.  We most certainly weren't planning on buying a cow right away, but I know this will save us money in the long run.  We ended up buying a quarter of a devon cow, which is a small breed, and the farmer said that after processing, we'll have between 100 and 130 pounds of meat.  I figured it out that that means we'll be spending around $5-6 a pound, and that doesn't include any of the bones or the fat which I plan on asking for.

Now I'm all freaking out because I have no idea what to say to the butcher when he calls in July to ask how we want our quarter cut up.  I was a vegetarian for most of my life!  All I know about cows is that you get hamburger and steaks from them.  "Yeah...  um....  can you cut it into...  steaks?  Oh and can I have the liver?  I think cows have livers." 

I'll let you know how it goes in July!  I kind of wish we could go out and meet our cow, but something tells me I'd feel really terrible if I did.  I need more time to adjust to being a meat eater still. 

The view from the other side

Not long ago, I was a vegetarian.  Not just a vegetarian, but someone who chose that lifestyle as a young teen and who stuck with it, through old fashioned family gatherings and getting married to a meat eater, for almost 14 years.  I wasn't a zealot about it, and I believed that it was everyone's choice to eat what they felt was best.  But to me, being a vegetarian seemed like the only choice that made sense, for my health and for the planet.

After a while, it started becoming a central part of my identity.  Hello, I'm Julie, a Vegetarian.  Everyone knew, because I had to be treated differently.  I'd ask at parties if there was meat in the dip.  I'd have to find out how the soup was prepared.  And for God's sake, don't put bacon bits on my salad!  I thought that being a vegetarian made me interesting and maybe even mysterious.  I know it made me feel like a better person.  Simply by avoiding meat, I gained a halo of earth-friendly, animal-activist, kind-hearted, without having to actually do that much.

It wasn't all sunshine and cupcakes, though.  About a year after becoming a vegetarian (right before my 15th birthday), I started having severe gallstone attacks.  I remember them getting so bad and so sudden that, while swimming at a creek near my home town, I got stranded on the opposite side because I couldn't move without getting physically ill.  To this day, I can't remember how I got back across the creek, but I do know that it wasn't long afterwards that they removed my gallbladder in an emergency operation. 

I my hair started to thin out, and my nails became incredibly thin and brittle.  And then, I began to balloon out.  By the time I reached my 17th birthday, I carried an outrageous 275 pounds on my 5'7 frame.  I was depressed, had little energy, and I had no idea why I was so addicted to eating.

Fast forward ten years.  In the summer of 2012, my hubby and I decided, hey, maybe we should try going low-carb.  We'd done the research, and it all sounded so logical.  I felt better right away, but I'll admit that being a low-carb vegetarian is incredibly hard.  I ended up eating tofu or seitan (a meat substitute made from, of all things, wheat gluten) every single day, and part of me knew that it wasn't good for me to be doing that.  So even though I had a lot of doubts, I decided to start eating meat again.

That was in August of 2012.  I look back at that, and it makes me wonder... how did I ever manage before then?  What on earth did I eat before I started eating meat again?  This way of eating is so natural and it feels so right.  I don't think anyone could ever convince me to go back to being a vegetarian, and especially eating tofu or seitan daily. 

It did take a few months, but my body has changed dramatically since becoming a low-carb meat eater.  The first thing I really noticed was my mood.  I used to be depressed all the time pretty much, and I had a lot of trouble getting up the energy to take care of  my responsibilities, but after changing my diet, my mood brightened way up.  The next surprising little find was that my fingernails, for the first time I can remember, are strong and long.  In the winters when I was a vegetarian, I couldn't keep them very long.  I looked like a nail biter because they would break off close to the skin, and even more disturbing, they would PEEL down where they were attached to the finger.  My hair is starting to come in thicker, too, and it's getting longer.  I used to only be able to grow it to a certain length, but my hair is certainly growing fast and long now.

The most amazing change I've seen, though, has to be my body composition.  Since I started eating this way, I've only lost a little bit of weight.  I'm still quite round and I would like to lose maybe another 20 pounds.  But even though I haven't moved the scale much, my body looks and feels different.  People ask me all the time if I've lost weight.  My pants aren't as tight as they used to be.  I see muscle now that I never used to have, and I haven't been lighting weights or anything!  It's just happened because of my diet shift! 

There are times when I'm eating a piece of bacon or whatever, and I catch myself thinking, "OMG what am I doing?!", before realizing that, oh yeah, this is how I eat now!  I still feel a little weird eating animals, and I have some trouble handling raw meat or eating any piece of animal that looks like an animal.  I would like to be eating more organic, free-range, humanely treated meats, but unfortunately my budget can't afford much of that at the moment.  I feel that animals are special, sacred creations of God, and they should be treated as such, but I do wholeheartedly believe that humans were meant to eat them, just as other predators were meant to eat prey.  It's just the natural cycle of life.

Of course, I'm not trying to bash the vegetarian lifestyle.  I know some people eat that way for religious reasons, and it can be done if you're very careful and you know what you're doing.  However, I don't feel that it's the natural state for humans, and I certainly know it wasn't healthy for me.