Grassfed Cooking .com

As a rule, I don’t do protests.  I don’t occupy anything, except my home and the farm.  I am a country girl, and the key to living a happy agrarian existence lies in having a certain personality type – I’m a recluse at heart.  I can stay home for weeks on end and never crave to see a soul.  Living in the sticks, that’s a good thing.  It is this personality trait that enables farmers to do what they do.

…Which is not to say that I disagree with protests, political uprisings, or the like.  But rather than join demonstrations and marches, I choose to make my voice heard in a different way.  I live my opposition.  I don’t like the consumer culture, so I live a life that largely excludes it.  I don’t like the rapacious nature of industrial agriculture, so I live and work to steward the land in a way that honors Mother Earth.  Rather than protest for a day, a few weeks or a few months, I protest with my life energy that there is a different and better way.

But I do support protesting.  In fact, I support it wholeheartedly, and I am grateful for those who have the courage to do it.  But my personality type leaves me utterly petrified at the idea of joining a crowd and adding my physical presence to the masses.  I am nervous in cities, skittish in crowds, wary of large organized gatherings.  And that’s the reason I haven’t joined Occupy Wall Street.  I have other excuses, too.  I’ve got little kids at home, food to cook, sausages to make, turkeys to sell, farmers’ markets to attend…I am so busy living my life of protest that I really don’t have time to protest.

I agree with the movement.  I am part of the 99% in two ways:  First, I don’t share ranks with the wealthiest 1%, and second,  I am part of the silent majority that has not made my way down to NYC to show my support for those protesters who are making our voices heard. 

But those organizers have figured out that I’m hiding.  And they’ve figured out my excuses.  They are asking farmers, community gardeners, food activists, and food workers to come down andOccupy Wall Streeton Sunday.   I know it is last minute, but they figured out things are slowing down on the farm right about now. They’re not asking us to camp out or commit our lives, they only want 4 hours of our time, from 2pm to 6pm.  I hear that call not only as a third generation farmer, but also as a mother, a  home cook, and rural citizen who’s life is tied to the flow of seasons, the health of the land, and the vitality and diversity of a locally-sourced food supply.  Mom and Dad are watching the kids, and Bob and I are heading down.  We should be back home in time for bed.

I’m nervous as all hell.  This is a huge step outside my comfort zone.  But I’ll bet that, on Sunday, there will be others there like me.  I must remember that I can live 99.9999% of my life in protest, but every once in a while, maybe just 0.0001% of the time, I must make my voice heard and actually show up to physically protest.  I hope my fellow farmers, foodies, citizens activists and radical homemakers will join us.  You can learn about the details here. 

PS:  Anyone in my geographical zone is welcome to drop me a line at feedback@shannonhayes.info if you’d like to try to carpool.

By Shannon Hayes, GrassfedCooking.com 

Saoirse Hayes Hooper relishes chicken hearts on a stick, one of her favorite primal foods.

I’ve received a fair amount of personal communication from people asking me for my take on Paleo eating.  I’ve stayed relatively quiet about the issue in my online postings because my family has had to endure some grueling health crises in the past year, and it has taken me some time to wrap my head around everything.  Below is my story, and take on the Paleo diet, to-date.

I entered the food writing world back in 2001 as an agrarian environmentalist – hardly a platform for securing a tv deal, much less an opportunity to have my name plastered on Made-in-China designer cookware.  Nevertheless, my work to connect good food with good farming has been warmly received by a steadfast core of farmers and foodies.  My food writing has centered around ecological principles. Rather than writing according to popular food and diet trends, I’ve kept to the subject of grassfed and pastured meat, and I’ve made my ingredient selections based on what I felt was environmentally sustainable.

…..Which is why so many of you who’ve come out to hear me speak over the years have witnessed my nervous doggie dance whenever someone asks me for nutritional information.  I’m not a dietician, and I always prefer to defer to any nutritional experts in the room, rather than claim expertise in that area.

But the truth I am confronting in my career is that, when I share recipes from my kitchen, while I may not be giving dietary advice, I am most certainly putting forward my dietary opinions.  I have always adhered to the basic nutritional tenets advanced by the Weston Price Foundation.  I feel they are sensible, by and large ecological, and extremely tasty. In our family we kept bread and sweet consumption to a minimum, soaked our grains and legumes prior to eating them, steadfastly avoided processed foods, kept our dairy raw, religiously took our fish oil and butter oil, and enjoyed our grassfed meats and organic fruits and veggies.  With the rare special-occasion exception, these dietary guidelines have long been reflected in my recipes, and were the underlining principles as I began writing my most recent cookbook, Long Way on a Little (due out in Sept 2012).

Seeking to offer guidance for families who wanted to reduce food waste and stretch their meat dollars further, I set about developing recipes for Long Way on a Little that extended grassfed meats with more grains and legumes, such as  bean or whole grain dishes cooked in nourishing broth, accented by bits of meat, or rice pasta casseroles in rich creamy sauces fortified with egg yolks.  It was, beyond a doubt, delicious.

Then I got sick.  A debilitating (and embarrassing) fungal infection began in my foot and spread throughout my body, leaving me bed-ridden for nearly two weeks, and unable to digest little more than meat and vegetables.  I assumed it was owing to the stress of releasing Radical Homemakers, a rather controversial book that attracted more publicity than I was comfortable with.  But then I began to notice my already lean husband growing thinner and thinner every day.  Unsure whether it was stress, cancer, a food allergy or some other horrible condition, we only could figure out we were dealing with a malabsorption issue.  Finely, one month before his 53^rd birthday, we learned he had developed type I (a.k.a. “juvenile”) diabetes. (Those of you who know Bob can attest that it fits right into his ageless character that he should develop a juvenile illness after the age of 50.)  In the same month, my eight-year-old daughter who has never tasted soda and could count the number of lollipops she’s had in a lifetime on one hand, came home in tears from her dental check-up with a mouth full of cavities.

I still feel the Weston Price dietary principles are sound, but when it came to our family’s health, something was dreadfully wrong.  Every flat surface in my home was suddenly piled with a stack of books as I poured over  any information I could find to try to identify what might be causing all these health complications.

I was especially frightened for my husband, the robust man who was suddenly burdened with 7 blood tests and four insulin injections per day, along with a glucagon gun that I was supposed to use in emergency situations if his blood sugar dropped so low that he became unconscious.  We were paying for insulin out-of-pocket, and a one month’s supply was $850.  We needed to figure out how to stretch that insulin as far as possible, how to preserve what functionality remained in his pancreas, how to prevent the blood sugar swings that could put him into a diabetic coma.

According to a book recommended by the endocrinologist, he should be living on a steady diet of vegetables, fruits and whole grains, and if he ever touched a piece of meat, his pancreas would rot and his feet would fall off (admittedly, that was my interpretation of the work).  According to another book by a diabetes expert, he should be living on meat and meat alone, with an occasional spinach salad for a special treat.  If he ever touched a piece of fruit, his pancreas would rot and his feet would fall off (Ed. Note., again).  According to the nutritional counselor we met with at the hospital who advised us based on the American Diabetes Association guidelines, he should be loading up on breads, cereals, all the ice cream he wanted (he was, after all, thin and in need of weight gain!), “and even a little of that good, wholesome grain-fed beef now and then” (yes.  I paid $95 out of pocket for that session. ).GRRR.

If our family switched to diet plan A, I was going to be eaten alive by fungus.  If we switched to diet plan B, Bob would probably divorce me and the kids would likely enroll themselves in foster care.  And clearly, under diet plan C, we’d make the pharmaceutical industry and multinational food corporations very wealthy while we endured chronic illness for the rest of our lives.

And that’s when I learned about the Paleo Diet.  A number of new readers who were using The Grassfed Gourmet and The Farmer and the Grill told me they’d been referred to them by various Paleo Diet websites.  They explained that Paleo folks were keen on the books because many of the recipes suited their dietary needs.  Essentially, the Paleo diet is very consistent with the teachings of WAPF, and in fact, many of its adherents are ardent grassfed meat supporters and members of the Weston Price Foundation.  The primary difference between Paleo and Weston Price is that when going Paleo,  grains and legumes are removed from daily consumption.  Some Paleo writers argue that dairy is also a no-no, but there are many others who agree with Weston Price that raw dairy is a perfectly nourishing food.  The Paleo Diet allows for a wide array of fruit and vegetables and natural sweeteners, but they must be taken in strict moderation in order to reduce a body’s demand for insulin.  We tried it, and discovered that, as grassfed folks and WAPFers, the shift was natural and easy.  We were already most of the way there.  Paleo eating allows for enough variety that Bob and the girls have decided not to abandon me in my kitchen, and we’ve discovered that by adhering to it, we can make a one month supply of insulin last several months while keeping Bob’s blood sugar levels normal and steady.  The glucagon gun is gathering dust on a shelf.  And, for the record, so far my daughter’s cavities have not advanced.

I still feel I am not enough of a nutritional expert to say that Paleo eating is the only way to go.  I’ve met too many people in my lifetime with widely disparate diets through which they claim to enjoy radiant health.   Thus, I am loathe to draw universal conclusions.   – Heck, I’ve even met healthy vegetarians….whatdya know??  However, what I’ve learned is that by adopting these basic principles and folding them in with the advice from Weston Price Foundation, such as the importance of fat soluble vitamins, bones and the organ meats, my family seems to be on the mend.

What does this mean for that new book I was telling you about?  Well, I had to go back and re-write it with the basic question:  How does one have a sustainable meat-based diet that is free of grains and legumes and easy on the pocketbook?  I hate to give away the ending before the book is released, but I can tell you this:  it is possible.  And our life is more delicious now than it ever was.

Shannon Hayes works with her family on Sap Bush Hollow Farm raising grassfed meat in Upstate New York.  She is the author of The Grassfed Gourmet, The Farmer and the Grill, and Radical Homemakers.  Her newest book, Long Way on a Little:  An Earth Lovers’ Companion for Enjoying Meat, Pinching Pennies and Living Deliciously, is due out in September 2012.  To be notified of the book’s release, or to receive her Grassfed Cooking articles, sign up for the Grassfed Cooking Newsletter, a free service for grassfed farmers and meat lovers.  Copies of her books can be purchased through grassfedcooking.com at both retail and wholesale prices.

Dear friends;

We have a glorious beef hanging in our cooler, fattened on the fall grasses, ready to offer up some of the tastiest steaks of the season.  Knowing many of you are facing similar abundance, I thought I’d send along a little piece about how to avoid the most common errors when cooking grassfed steaks….

Selling grassfed meat at a farmers’ market is great work, if you can get it.  Folks who are inclined to buy your product are also very likely to make terrific friends.  The double bonus is that these folks have a habit of buying your meat and then inviting you to their house to eat it with them…amazing!  I mind my P’s and Q’s as best I can on these off-farm excursions, but admittedly, I have a teeny control streak that takes over whenever I learn that steaks are on the menu.  I offer to cook them for my guests.  

I hope the piece proves helpful, and that you have a wonderful, peaceful autumn.  

All best,

Shannon Hayes

ps – Don’t forget: Thanksgiving (turkey roasting time)

Grassfed steaks, cooked indoors or out, can taste as good as they look

and the holiday season are rapidly approaching…now is a great time to stock up on grassfed cookbooks through grassfedcooking.com!

Top 5 Steak Misteaks

By Shannon Hayes

Selling grassfed meat at a farmers’ market is great work, if you can get it.  Folks who are inclined to buy your product are also very likely to make terrific friends.  The double bonus is that these folks have a habit of buying your meat and then inviting you to their house to eat it with them…amazing!  I mind my P’s and Q’s as best I can on these off-farm excursions, but admittedly, I have a teeny control streak that takes over whenever I learn that steaks are on the menu.  I offer to cook them for my guests. 

Is that rude?  I don’t mean to be rude.  It’s just that, well, I have a deep fondness for our grassfed steaks, and it wreaks havoc with my inner peace (and my stomach) to see them treated with anything other than complete reverence in the kitchen.  None of my customers ever buys a steak without getting a complete lecture on how to cook them indoors and out on the grill (you can get those instructions here), but I’ve learned that, in spite of my careful lectures, mistakes are sometimes made.  Here are the top 5 steak mistakes I’ve observed, even if folks follow my recipes precisely:

1. Wet steak.  Thawed steak is going to be moist.  In order to sear it properly, it must be dry before you put it on the grill or in the frying pan.  If the steak is not blotted dry with a towel before you apply salt and pepper, it will not sear, it will steam. 
2. Wrong pan size.  If you are cooking your steaks indoors, be sure to choose a skillet that allows ample room to sear them.  When the steaks are too crowded, even if they have been blotted dry, the excess moisture will cause them to steam rather than brown, leaving them with an unpleasant gray pallor.  Make sure your steaks have at least 1 inch of space around them in the skillet to prevent this from happening.
3. Wrong direct-heat temperature.   Often in our hunger for a great steak, we fail to wait for our grills our skillets to heat up properly.  If the grill or skillet is not hot enough, the meat will start to roast, but it will not achieve that glorious sear that adds flavor.  If grilling, hold your hands about 4 inches above the grate.  When you can hold it there for no more than 4 seconds, the grill is hot enough for you to sear your meat.  When cooking indoors, place the skillet over a hot flame.  When you see steam rising off the skillet, you are ready to grease it with a little fat and begin frying it.
4. Failure to allow indirect cooking time.  High heat is critical only when we begin cooking steaks to achieve the sear.  A steak should be exposed to high direct heat for no more than 2 minutes per side.  After that, in order to guarantee tender and juicy meat, it should be removed from the flames and allowed to finish in indirect or low heat.  If you are cooking the steak on the grill, simply move it off the flames and put it on the side of the grill that is not lit, set the cover in place, and allow it to cook for about 5-7 minutes per pound.  If you are cooking it indoors, once the steak has seared, transfer the skillet to a 350 degree oven for about 5-7 minutes per pound (or to a 200 degree oven for about 10 minutes per pound).  During that indirect time, the internal muscle fibers will come up to temperature slowly without contracting too tightly and toughening.  Also, the proteins and sugars will have time to caramelize over the surface of the meat, giving the steak that characteristic glossy look and rich taste.
5. Wrong doneness temperature.  USDA temperature guidelines suggest that beef should be cooked to a minimum temperature of 145 degrees.  Yuck.  When you are using reliably-sourced grassfed meat, you don’t run the same risks of consuming food borne pathogens.  Thus, cook the steak to an internal temperature of 120 degrees for rare,, 140 degrees for well-done. 
6. Marinating the wrong meat.  Did I say there were only 5 commonly-made mistakes?  Oops.  I just thought of another one.  So there are actually six.  At my market booth, folks have a tendency to purchase the rib eyes, top loins, porterhouse, t-bones and sirloin steaks when they are planning a steak dinner.  Those are terrific if you are planning to season them only with a little salt and pepper.  However, if you are planning to marinate your meat, these are the wrong steaks to bring home.  These tender cuts of meat have the most delicate flavors, and their beefiness is easily upstaged by most marinades.  Furthermore, if marinated too long, the acid in marinades pre-cooks the meat, turning it gray and leaving an otherwise tender steak mushy.  If you have a marinade you plan to use, select the lower-priced cuts, such as the sirloin tip or London broil.  Those cuts have enough extra flavor and connective tissue to stand up to the marinade.  Their more pronounced beefy flavor won’t be over-powered by the stronger seasonings, and the acid in the marinade will help break down some of the connective tissue.  In my opinion, a marinade should only be applied for a few hours prior to cooking.  Excess exposure to the acids in the liquids (such as wine, vinegar or lemon juice) will turn your meat gray, and too much time in the liquid will cause the juices to leak out of the meat.

Okay, I’ve said my piece.  If you want to invite me over to dinner now, I promise I won’t start bossing you around your kitchen…honestly.  But I might bring over a little pop quiz to check first, just to be sure…Would that be too controlling??

Shannon Hayes works with her family on Sap Bush Hollow Farm raising grassfed meat in Upstate New York.  She is the author of The Grassfed Gourmet, The Farmer and the Grill, and Radical Homemakers.  Her newest book, Long Way on a Little:  An Earth Lovers’ Companion for Enjoying Meat, Pinching Pennies and Living Deliciously, is due out in September 2012.  To be notified of the book’s release, or to receive her Grassfed Cooking articles, sign up for the Grassfed Cooking Newsletter, a free service for grassfed farmers and meat lovers.  Copies of her books can be purchased through grassfedcooking.com at both retail and wholesale prices.

Goodnight, Irene….

It was busy in town Friday and Saturday.  Stores and restaurants were filled with New Yorkers and Long Islanders seeking refuge from hurricane Irene, slated to pummel downstate on Sunday.

We were safely outside the storm zone, but we figured we’d lose power, so we ground extra coffee, filled the bathtub and several jars with water, and made sure the yard was picked up of debris in the event of high winds.  Down at the farm, the chickens and turkeys were brought in off pasture.  We scattered wood shavings on the barn floor, tied up panels for temporary pens, then secured tarps along the open front to protect them from the rain.  Dad and mom herded the sheep a mile up Heathen Creek road to the other farm we rent, which is on higher ground.  We assumed we were over-prepared.  We hoped we were.

We weren’t.  We are too cut-off from the world right now to know what, exactly, came through Schoharie County on Sunday.  Maybe it was just the fringe of the storm.  Maybe Irene herself was checking out life in the Catskills.  All I know was that at 9:30 Sunday morning, we lost power, as predicted.  At 10 am, our phone rang with an automated message from our county’s emergency response system.  Earlier storm predictions had been greatly underestimated for our area.  If we were in an area prone to flooding, the message told us to evacuate immediately.  As best as I can figure, only those of us high and safe on the mountain tops got the call.  Most folks down below had already lost service.  But even high up here, we heard the evacuation sirens. 

SchoharieCountyresidents make their lives in three different habitats.  On top of the mountains, in the mountains, and down in the valleys.  Bob and I live on top of a mountain.  We watched the rains with interest and played with our daughters.  My family’s farm, Sap Bush Hollow, is in the mountains, flanked on two sides by ordinarily pristine, calm mountain streams.  Mom and dad sat in their house and watched them rage over the creek banks, come frighteningly close to the house, and cause the roads boil and rip.  They were so fast and furious, one lane of the road on either side of the farm completely fell away, leaving a ten foot drop to the raging water.  Two days after the storm, portions of the County Route 4 continue to fall away.  It is no longer passable on the East side.  The west side is not far behind.  The bridge toHeathen Creek Roadwas completely washed away, separating us from our sheep. 

We were the lucky ones.  Last I heard, we still couldn’t get to the Middleburgh orSchoharieValleys, where most of the vegetable farmers and many of our friends had their homes.  I presume everyone got out safely, but I don’t think they had anything more than the shirts on their backs.  We don’t know where folks are at this point. 

The best soil for vegetable crops is generally located along the flood plains.  But flooding around here is usually a winter-thaw phenomenon.  It isn’t supposed to happen in the height of the harvest season.  Vegetable producers around here make most of their annual income from July through October.  In addition to the incredible damage to their homes, they’ve also just lost half the year’s income, and an unfathomable amount of topsoil and accumulated fertility.

There is a peculiar tendency in the face of devastation to fixate on what we do have, what wasn’t lost.  The demolished road at the end of our farm’s driveway has become a local tourist attraction and gathering spot.  Folks stand around and stare at it and snap pictures, then recite to each other a current inventory of their blessings.  It is easier to concentrate on that than to wrap our heads around the tragedy that will unfold as we learn more about the valleys below.

Life could be worse than it is.  Heathen Creek neighbors on the far side of the bridge gathered together yesterday and worked with their hands to forge a dirt and rock passage across the water, just wide enough to allow a four wheeler to traverse.  One resident strapped a can of gas and a milk crate to his ATV and drove off seven miles to Cobleskill to re-stock his beer supply.  Another neighbor came down to let us know it was safe to go up and bring the sheep home. 

The moving of our flock was the first parade seen inWest Fultonin many decades as people, unsure what else to do in the face of the wreckage, came out to stand along the road and help herd the ewes back to the farm.  Saoirse and Ula rode behind in the mule, waving to all the neighbors, self-appointed princesses of the parade. 

We are all unharmed.  Our only casualty was a chicken that died of a heart attack.  The gardens weathered the storm, leaving us ample vegetables.  We picked one and a half bushels of tomatoes in the valley before Irene hit, and we gathered pears from my Aunt’s tree.  This week we’ll press the pears for juice, and can the tomatoes on my propane cooktop.  Preservation of the harvest will continue without electricity.  Because our fields are in pasture, not a speck of our top soil was lost.  Our farm’s fertility remains in tact. 

We have a generator on the farm, but we only run it for a few hours each day, just enough to re-charge the freezers that hold our season’s harvest of meat, and to refill our water supply.  We dare not run it longer.  Because the road is crumbling away, we’ve learned the delivery trucks bearing fuel and animal feed cannot safely get to us.  The cows and sheep need only the grass in our fields.  The pigs and chickens require grain, and if the road goes unrepaired, we will begin processing them, keeping just those that we can sustain on our own food waste.   We understand that the resources justifiably need to go to the folks in the low-lying areas, so we are working out our plans to make-do for the long haul.

In the meantime, we will continue farming, and continue offering prayers out to the universe for our valley friends.  We will  draw comfort and joy from the food on the table and the company of our loved ones.  Meanwhile, I find myself incessantly mindlessly singing the refrain from an old song we often sing at parties around here, the words leaving a new, nightmarish taste in my mouth: Good night, Irene, Good night, Irene.  I’ll see you in my dreams.

Shannon Hayes works with her family on Sap Bush Hollow Farm and is the author of Radical Homemakers, Farmer and the Grill and The Grassfed Gourmet.  She hosts grassfedcooking.com and radicalhomemakers.com and blogs for Yes! Magazine.