The meat hunt

It’s a dark morning. Maybe it seems all the darker because of yesterday. Then I got up to a bright blue sky, suffused with pink, setting alight the snow covered garden. I hastily went out to take a few pictures. Then I fed the birds. I did it in that order as I feared my footsteps might spoil the picture. Fat chance! The snow was so frozen my feet didn’t even start to sink into the snow. Today the world is back to normal. The snow has disappeared. It is once more grey & wet feeling.

Hopefully all this will be cheered by the Sweet & Sour Pork I’m making for dinner this evening. We’re trying a new butcher. Since the Farmers’ Markets locally ceased, & our local farmer has ceased direct marketing, we’ve been trying to find a good butcher, with meat that has some flavour.

We’ve got a good place for chicken though, of late, they do seem to have become overly big breasts that leak a white liquid - have they been injected with water in the way so much supermarket meat is? - & in the process leak a bit of flavour sometimes. Unfortunately his other meat seems a bit nondescript.

The hunt has been given extra urgency by the fact we’ve had some very tough & tasteless meat of late from Morrisons, our usually supermarket. We did do better at Booths. Indeed we did have a fabulous piece of pork that I roasted only a week or so ago. However, the nearest Booths of any size is several miles away which is a bit of a nuisance. We’ve tried various butchers around Morecambe, but so far we’ve not found one that sells a quality of meat that we enjoy.

So last week we tried again. We bought some Cumberland sausages which the Fox put into a slow cooked casserole. The sausages did better than most. So today we’re trying some pork fillet in the sweet & sour. Tomorrow we’re going back to the same butcher to collect some diced shoulder of lamb as he was out of diced lamb when we called at his shop last week. Certainly the butcher is charming as a man & takes great pride in his meat. We’re beginning to feel we may have found a winner. I do hope so.

We really would like to find a good source of meat & return to the world of meat with flavour. Ultimately you can’t hope to get a fabulous meal with poor meat to start off with. Admittedly if it’s a casserole it doesn’t matter quite so much in that you then instil flavour with the other casserole ingredients as the meat cooks. A roast, simple grill or fry up really reveals the quality of the meat. I’d sooner pay more & have less but good quality meat, than have plenty but for it to be tough & utterly tasteless.