Food Adventures #12: Bad Meat

So this past weekend the Missus celebrated her golden birthday in fine style: she ended up spraining her wrist after tripping on a pet gate. The roomie chucked a bunch of lawn chairs all over the front yard and promptly forgot about them which was all kinds of fun to piece together the next day. Somebody got drunk and just helped themselves to my razor- who does that? Seriously now. And I attempted to grill the worst quality meat I've ever seen in my entire life.

We're not exactly cash happy people, so, when prepping for the party, we just grabbed a cheap roll of ground beef from Wal-Mart and said, 'this'll work just fine.' We got it home, I squeezed out the whole damn tube, made my burgers (being a fan of the Food Network's Restaurant Impossible, I can always hear Chef Robert Irvine admonishing people to 'mould, not pat' their burgers) got them on the grill and then I put the lid on the grill, went back inside to get a clean plate to put the done ones on and headed back out to maybe press 'em a bit and then flip to get 'em going on the other side.

I want that part made clear: I didn't touch these burgers. Not at all. Not even one little bit. I placed them evenly on the grill- didn't cluster them together at all- just put the lid on, went back inside for maybe a minute and came back to the grill, lifted the lid off and was greeted by... THE FLAMES OF HELL.

No seriously. I'm honestly wondering if they seasoned this meat with unleaded fuel- though I have a sneaking suspicion some of that 'pink slime' shit that everyone is talking about might have been involved as well. These mothers were practically poaching themselves in their own grease there was so much of it- try to press down on 'em? Flames. Try to flip 'em? They'd either come apart or get stuck to the grill. Now, I'm not going to claim that I'm a master griller by any stretch of the imagination- my Old Man throw pork chops, ribs, pizzas- damn near everything on his while I merely aim for cooking the food properly and not killing anyone. But this was a little much- even for me.

So anyway- these resulted:

Lessons learned from this debacle- first, I'm inclined to agree with The Quiet Man on this one. In a perfect world, I'd be using natural, grass fed beef all the time. First of all, it's better for you- and you can taste the difference in the quality of the meat and second of all, I think it's just more responsible food consumption in general. Something I try to be in favor of whenever I can. However if your Good Ship Locavore runs aground on the rocks of cold, hard fiscal reality, then I will say this: fat content matters. Whatever this chum actually had in it, it was 73-27 for fat content- and it was that high because it was cheap. I guess 27% fat content is the equivalent of running your burgers down to the local Conaco Station for a spritzing before you throw them on the grill. No more bargain bin meat for THIS guy, that's for sure.

(More agreement with The Quiet Man: in a perfect world, I'd also be a fan of 'glass abbatoirs'- producers should never be afraid to show people how the process works. And the fact that the State Legislature in Des Moines with the full support of Our Glorious Leader, the Moustache passed a bill that would restrict attempts to film industrial farming practices only speaks to the importance of transparency. I forget when it was, but some pompous ass from the Pork Producers Association ran a guest op-ed in the DI saying how awesome the bill was because producers don't need people to take practices they use 'out of context.' To me, animal abuse is animal abuse and if you have to put your practices 'in context' then you're not doing it right.)