Readings....Year of the Cow

The other day I was getting some work done on my driveway. The guy running the excavator was waiting for a load of stone and we got to talking about food. He recently bought the machinery from a small butcher shop in Hudson NY and now he and his family cut and process all of their own meat. He buys beef from a local grower and breaks it all down into meal size parts. Many people today are considering this type of purchase which goes back to a much earlier time of subsistance farming. Most are buying locally raised meat and having a small processor break it all down and package it for the freezer. Meiler's in Pine Plains does this and so do some other small local plants.
 Back in the early summer I was contacted by a publisher about a book that was just coming out, Year of the Cow by Jared Stone. Its a story of a TV producer in LA that buys a large chest freezer and then finds a farm thats producing some quality beef and buys a full steer. Its a great story of nose to tail cooking presented not by a chef but by a quality home cook. Jared loves cooking and is willing to take the time to slow down from his very hectic life and actually cook! Jared slowly cooks his way through the beef for a whole year, preparing all sorts of delicious braises, steaks, jerky and some unique offal dishes. The book is also about how his family changes the way they eat and what the effect is on their health and energy level. It as much about eating whole foods as it is about eating local. He describes his lifestyle changes and how his energy levels go up when he changes what he eats.
 I hear and read about people who want to eat local and how its the right thing to do. Many race out to their high end market or stop by a booth at the farmers market to buy some local meat. They will ask "do you have any striploin or rib eye steaks?" and then balk at the pricetag. Most people don't realize that the precentage of beef that is the recognizable high quality steaks (striploin, tenderloin, rib eye) make up only a very small fraction of the full carcass. The lrgest parts are the huge solid roast sections of the round and the complicated muscle layers of the chuck, both of which don't make the same quality level steaks as the previously mentioned. But they can be made into steaks if tenderized or used as braising slow cook steaks, which have tons of flavor but require cooking knowledge. This book gives some great ideas.
 Year of the Cow is published by Flatiron Books NY NY and can be found on Amazon for about $16. Its a quick summer read and will make you hungry.