I’ve never been inside a proper slaughterhouse, and I don’t have a burning desire to start taking tours. But the most arresting moment of the trip Sir Loin and I took to Morocco last fall was watching men in Marrakesh shop for chickens.
To see it for yourself, this is what you have to do. Go […]

Okay, I promise that I will stop writing about hot dogs after this post, but I just have to tell you about this thing that Sir Loin and I do in the summer. It’s called Hot Dog Party! Now, the first rule about Hot Dog Party! is how you talk about Hot Dog Party! You […]

Saturday started out bad and got worse. I woke up indisposed, due to the inadvertent consumption of immoderate amounts of wine the night before. Thus impaired, I had a ham and cheese croissant for breakfast. Yummy, maybe, but full of white flour and industrial ham. Blech. Then a package arrived from a friend of my […]

It was a slow day here at Chez Beef. Sir Loin was up late last night trying to attach my old laptop to his stereo set-up (this was unsuccessful, and apparently will require large capital expenditures to remedy). I went to bed early but slept in anyway, still tired from some minor surgery a few […]

It was going to be the quintessential blog posting.
Sir Loin and I were set to spend the whole weekend up at the house of Madame La Vache (otherwise known as the grandmother of Miss Steak). This other blog entry I was going to write fell through, so I thought, well, Madame La Vache has […]

Scott Bice shows us the tank of that day’s goatmilk. It’s lower in fat than cow milk, which is why there’s less cream on top. (Sir Loin photo)

This is the final installment of a three-part tale chronicling our adventures at Redwood Hill Farm, a goat dairy. (Read Part One or Part Two. Can’t get […]

Saying hello to the first batch of kids. (Sir Loin photo)

I’ve always loved goats. My grandmother kept sheep for a long time, but they were unsatisfactory and herdish. Scattering in all directions when I barged into their pen to pet their mouldering fleeces. Nearby were two goats, a lady and a gent, but they […]

I’m not usually intimidated by food packaging. It’s there, it contains the food, sometimes it has pretty pictures or useful words printed on it. But the last time Sir Loin and I were at the Ferry Building, I had to hustle him past the Saint Benoît yogurt stand. The stacks of empty ceramic yogurt containers […]

So Sir Loin and I are on vacation in Mexico, near Tulum. It’s about two hours outside of Cancun, and they’ve developed it to be a sort of anti-Girls-Gone-Wild environment. Spring Break for grown-ups. Everything is eco this and eco that. (We stayed in an eco-hut with no electricity and brackish water, but lest anyone […]

I was distressed to learn, a few months back, that Rosie, my darling guilt-free Rosie was just a withered up old hag of a hen. Well, maybe not a hag, but at least a harpie of some kind, definitely a shrewish bird, living as she does in giant sheds that don’t REALLY get her out […]

Frank Bruni’s piece in today’s NYT captures the schizophrenia and confusion surrounding meat consumption in the current dietgeist (as Dairy Queen calls it). Free-range isn’t really free any more, lobsters suffer in their holding tanks and will no longer be offered for sale and slaughter at Whole Foods, foie gras is under attack, wild caught […]

Do you have room in your freezer for 60, 160, or (egads!) 320 pounds of steer? I don’t, but I wish I did so that I could order half and whole cows from Morris Grassfed Beef. Works out to about $6 a pound, which is a pretty good deal once you splash out for that […]

It’s not the first time I’ve heard of this stuff, but it’s the first time I’ve heard anyone get really excited about it. William Saletan can’t wait for us to start eating fake meat. Well, fake, not fake exactly, more like semi-real, or mostly unreal, or entirely disgusting. Agriscientists would stick some muscle cells on […]

The Atlantic’s Corby Kummer has a nice essay on Honest Tea and the small victories it has seen in the past few years. Kummer starts with the standard screed against high fructose corn syrup (unlike sugar, it doesn’t suppress the hormone that controls appetite, and it is more readily converted to fat by the liver, […]

In an effort to chow down on more local produce, we signed up for Planet Organics last weekend and the first box arrived today. We got the requisite seasonal veggies, and they were delicious. Started dinner with a Deep Flame Lettuce salad with local tiny tomatoes and Pt. Reyes blue cheese. The lettuce was more […]