Apopheniac

Berries and Beef

Friday and Saturday were the days of berries and beef respectively. Friday morning I opened the front door at 8:30 to find a large box sent from Arkansas. Via the net, Jean had found a company which specialized in all manner of berry bushes. She placed our order just after their stated April 1st deadline, so when they didn't cash our check and nothing came, she just assumed we had missed the boat. She had even gone on to buy a couple of raspberry plants at Home Depot.

Well, here was this box to say we had assumed wrong, and a brief online visit showed that the bank had indeed cleared our check last week. So here were 34 healthy, bare-root blueberries, blackberries and raspberries in need of immediate planting and we had not even started to prepare a bed. Clearly this Friday was not going to be the one I had written out in my day planner.

We called Bernadette who graciously said we could borrow her roto-tiller. While Kirk and I went to pick it up, Jean started to soak the roots. By 2:30 we had dug 100 feet of 3-foot wide bed along the fence and planted 25 of the bushes. We broke for the heat of the day and ran to the garden store. By dark we had planted the rest of the bushes and installed a drip watering system to take care of the whole bed. Here is one of the blueberries:

"So much for the berries, where's the beef?", you ask. Well, that was Saturday's outing. Jean has been orchestrating our journey toward healthier eating, and we have moved away from factory-farm meat and poultry with its force-feeding, hormones and anti-biotics. (For more on why, check out "The Meatrix").

Online, I had found PaiDom meats who's range-fed beef, goats, lamb and chicken are held to standards more stringent than "organic." They sell by mail, selected deliveries and through a few health-food stores. We had tried their hamburger from Well Body health foods and it had been good, so I placed an order. Yesterday I drove to the bank parking lot to meet their May Lubbock delivery and pick up our 30 pound order. Jean and I tried a couple of the eggs as soon as I got home. The large, dark yolks stood tall and they fried up to taste like I remember eggs tasting as a child. Last night I grilled a sirloin steak for us. Because this beef is much leaner than grain-fed beef, you cook it less to not dry it out. I did and it was so flavorful and delicious. As we had noticed with the hamburger, it seems to be more filling. I don't know if that is nutrients, lack of fat, our imagination or some other factor but it seemed to take less meat before we felt comfortably full.

Posted by apopheniac at May 9, 2004 07:59 AM