Food Inc. especially really got to me, and made me think about what we are eating, and what the real costs of our food are. Rates of diet related illnesses keep going up, which is turn pushes up the cost of health care for everyone. The way the food we eat is grown or raised should really be considered. Is it sustainable? Can we continue to live the way we do and take care of the earth like we have been commanded to?
Back in December I started looking around for local sources for sustainably raised meats. At the time, the only things I could find were beef (which we don't need, because we get our "beef" from hunting), and pork. My family went in on a pig, and we picked it up on saturday.
Sunday for dinner, we cooked some pork chops (sprinkled with garlic salt and lemon pepper), made gravy from the drippings in the pan, ate the last of our indoor-salad-garden, made mashed potatoes, and steamed some carrots and broccoli with a little lemon pepper. It was the best dinner I've eaten in awhile. Here's a couple of the pork chops pre cooking...
And here are some while they're cooking (we experimented with the cast iron pan and the regular pan- the cast iron seemed to brown the outsides nicer than the regular frying pan, but the regular frying pan was better for making gravy out of the drippings)...
The last time we had pork chops was several years ago when they were on sale at costco, I don't remember them being anywhere near as flavorful.
We ordered a whole pig from Christiansen Family Farm, and recently placed an order for some chickens as well. The neatest thing is that they've added a CSA option, where you can pay, and then receive enough meat for your family for the whole year (I think you can break up the deliveries so you don't have to store everything in your freezer). They offer grass fed beef, pork, chicken and turkey. The CSA's come in 3 different sizes depending on how big your family is or how much meat you eat.
They also have a blog, and it's fun to read through about their experiences living on a farm, and including their small children in the farm chores.
1 comment:
Neat! Your pork chops look yummy. My father-in-law Curtis raised two pigs at his house this past year. They were butchered a couple of months ago and we were the lucky recipients of several chops, a couple roasts, some bacon, and some different flavors of sausages. It is nice to know where your food is coming from.
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