Other mouth-watering options of protein for your holiday feast
I can still hear the sweet old lady in the 1980’s Wendy’s commercial saying, “Where’s the beef?” and such a simple line still speaks volumes today. Where has the hearty portions of quality goodness gone? We are so quick with fast food that we care more about quantity than quality.
Beef industries are feeding their animals indescribable concoctions consisting of their own feces and innards. Are the stories true that meat from a certain taco chain is delivered in liquid form before it’s cooked and served to its consumers?
As my dad was a longtime meat cutter for a grocery store, I can recall a childhood filled with prime cuts and never a meatless meal. As I went to college in the wild and wonderful West Virginia, I experienced frog giggin’ and deer hunting but I was still lacking on sampling out of the ordinary meats like bison, emu or squirrel. Now as a person who wants to support local, I am realizing there is more to life than white or dark meat.
Down The Rabbit, Whole
Lauren Lefever, of Ada’s Heritage Farm in Wildwood, Georgia, started raising her own food in 2016 because her youngest son Ada had the idea to grow their own. The property the farm sits on now was previously Lauren’s parents’ hobby farm. Her parents moved there when she was seven and they raised everything from pigs, cattle, rabbits, ducks and endless produce.
She felt it only proper that her seven-year-old know the hard work of living on a farm while simultaneously enjoying the humanely raised, fresh food. “Since it was his idea to start growing our food, we opened an egg stand at the end of our driveway,” she says, “Y’know instead of a lemonade stand, he made his money from farm fresh eggs.”
Besides having experience on her family farm, Lauren was familiar with small livestock as she raised and showed Holland Lops and Dutch rabbits for years as an adolescent. In her years following, she became a surgical veterinary technician before becoming a fulltime farmer so Lauren was no stranger to working with animals. Besides growing chicken, cultivating veggies and herbs, and making jellies and soaps, they specialize in organic rabbit.
Ada’s Heritage grows organic hay and feeds that, along with garden scraps and fodder (sprouted seeds), to their fluffy flock of bunnies. Although China, Italy and France are the top three countries who consume more rabbit than any other, the U.S. is starting to pick up on the trend.
Referred to by some as the “new white meat,” rabbit can be prepared just as any bone-in chicken recipe and has the highest percentage of protein, lowest percentage of fats, and is richer in Omega 3s than chicken.
“We’re southern so of course frying it is lovely,” Lauren chuckles, “there’s like a thousand million different ways to prepare it.” Braising it (setting it in a small amount of liquid in a covered pan in the oven), roasting it whole or placing in the crockpot are all applicable ideas. She sells it whole, cut up, as stock or stir fry. You can choose either fryers (young) or roasters (mature) depending on what you want to do with it.
A mature rabbit, just like an older chicken, can be a bit tough so its recommended to brine or simmer in some sort of juices to tenderize it. Lauren has hers already pieced up and says it makes a terrific stir fry. A friend of mine grinds it and makes what he affectionately calls ‘Bunny Burgers.’
Her rabbits are not on any local menus yet but as she just started the farm in 2016, she is working up to have enough stock to supply whole rabbits for wholesale. Until then, you can hop over to her booth at the Main St. Farmers Market off Chestnut St., Wednesdays starting at 4 p.m. all year long. For all inquiries, email AHFarm@yahoo.com or message their facebook.
You Got Game?
It is against the law to sell wildlife for human consumption therefore venison, which is another name for deer, is not going to be on any menu nor is wild turkey, bear or feral hog. If you decide that you would like to first-hand experience the thrill of catching and killing your own food, you must get a license through the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) or Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA).
It’s easier than I thought it would be. You take a hunter’s education class, which can be taken online or in-person and it will provide insight about hunting and trapping including safety procedures. I recommend whether you want to hunt or not, to take the course because, well it’s free and it would add insight to anyone who wants to conquer the life outdoors. “The basic Hunter Education Course provides firearms safety training and introduces students to their responsibilities in the fields of hunter ethics and wildlife management.” Then you take a 100-question test then go get your license.
You then buy a license at any retailer that sells hunting or fishing licenses like sporting goods stores and hardware stores. There are so many different kinds of licenses for small to big game, birds and fish so make sure you get the right one. Small game refers to little critters like chipmunks, mice, and moles while medium game are rabbits, raccoon, squirrels, opossum, beaver and skunk.
As my husband was a pretty active hunter in the past, he said he’s never heard of “medium game” but it’s what I found in my DNR research. Large, or big game, are animals the size of deer or bigger like coyotes, moose or bear.
Common game specie are squirrel, beaver, skunk, raccoon, to name a few, and those are permitted to be hunted all year. According to TWRA, hunting and fishing licenses go on sale February 18th every year and are valid until the next February however that does not mean that you are allowed to hunt a certain animal so double check what the hunting season correlates to versus when and what you think you are ready to hunt.
GoOutdoorsTennessee.com has all the information needed to choose the proper license so you can be legal in your journey to see if everything really does taste like chicken. My husband has eaten raccoon, squirrel, bison and turtle. In my research, raccoon and opossum are too greasy, but beaver is good ground up in a burger or as a roast and yes, frog legs taste like chicken.
Hold Your Tongue
As I said, I grew up eating prime cuts of meat because I had a father who was a grade-A meat cutter and would bring home bacon wrapped filets and the likes. As a child I learned about all the different cuts of meat however we never delved into the other parts including tongue, heart or brain.
Selectively eating only the muscle of animal is such a western way of thinking and is extremely wasteful. As I am an avid supporter of ‘snout to tail’ dining in which you utilize every aspect of the animal, I am kind of surprised (and a little ashamed) at myself for not resourcing more parts of the animal before now.
For instance, I am about to harvest about one hundred of my older chickens and I am going to set aside their feet for stock which I have never made before, as well as their undeveloped eggs to make custard which I am told is the creamiest and which I have also never made before. I figured with the week off for Thanksgiving, now is the time to really experiment and get messy in the kitchen.
Tacos de lengua, beef tongue tacos, were the most common thing people were telling me to use with my recently purchased beef tongue from Sequatchie Cove Farm. I mean, as soon as I uttered “beef tongue,” “tacos” was the next word out of their mouth. I am usually hesitant to make any purchase when only one recipe stands out (kind of like how people say radishes are great in salads) but I bit the bullet and am going to attempt to tame the tongue.
Bay leaves and onions seemed to be the consistent complementary ingredients in all the recipes I found online. They say to simmer the tongue in water with seasonings for about 2-3 hours then peel. Peeling beef tongue may leave me speechless this holiday.
After researching recipes, I can see why people opt for beef tongue tacos more than any other recipe. It’s because it is the most eye pleasing as well as palate pleasing. Pictures of big slabs of tongue with a few glazed mushrooms atop is not as appetizing for us beef tongue beginners. Having it sliced up and covered with a mountain of toppings is kind of a nice way to acclimate the taste buds.
Some comments were “if a taco place didn’t have lengua then it wasn’t a real taco place.” If you want to experiment with it but not in your kitchen, stop by Taconooga or Taquiera Jalisco to try how they serve it. If you do want to make the culinary leap, pick up your beautifully raised bovine bits from Main St. Meats.
As I recently tasted fish eyeballs and cheeks, next on my list to try is beef cheek meat, tripe (brains), suet (fat from kidney area), or sweet breads (testicles). And now I can’t shake the image of Chevy Chase in Funny Farm where he is attempting to break the record of eating the most “lamb fries” which he finds out are actually sheep balls. “Now there’s a man who knows when he’s got something good in his mouth…Most folks don’t seem to have a taste for testicles no more.”
You don’t know what will become your favorite new dish until you try it. I may be spitting some of it out but at least I made the effort.