Happy Mutants food and drink topic (Part 1)

That’s rich!

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Fee Fi Pho Fun!

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It really is! Sow’s milk is fattier than cow’s milk :wink:
I assumed your question was the set up for a joke, but actually we don’t drink it because sows are very hard to milk, have 14 teats (vs 4 for a cow), have a way shorter “drop time” where milk is flowing, and though the milk is fattier than cow’s milk, it’s also kind of watery and gamy.

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Not usually.

They’re sold or shipped to a slaughterhouse. Though I don’t believe there are any in the US that will process horses. So we’re usually sending them down Mexico or up into Canada over here.

Pet horses tend not to get sold into that system. So it’s not like you’re neighbors riding horse is ending up in Ikea meatballs.

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Yeah, this was in a country with lax-to-nonexistent food laws. After I asked about the provenance of the meat, the owner and cook fessed up. The very old animal had been happily mowing their lawn just a few days prior, when it dropped dead.

Slaughtering horses for food is illegal in the US. It’s also illegal to transport horses for the purpose of slaughter (Carter-Fitzpatrick Amendment to HR 3684), which included a ban on exporting them for slaughter.

And even so, the Food and Drug Administration will not inspect horse meat, making it impossible to put into the market, even if it was legal.

Andrew

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Hadn’t caught that. Enacted in 2021.

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Perhaps said as a joke. :pig2::milk_glass:
But look at the cool facts you found.
My wife had a pet goat and grew up with goat milk as part of her early diet.
Both sheep and goat cheese are way up on my list.
I grew up with a best friend from South America, and they served grilled goat often.
Luckily we can find goat locally. Sad it’s not more available as far as I know.
Also Jamaican jerked goat is very good.

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Our horse meat was in the late 1950s.
Not sure if it was illegal then?
It was our local butcher meat locker from here in NorCal.

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Go to a Greek or Middle Eastern grocery store or restaurant and ask them where they get their goat meat. There will be a wholesaler somewhere in the region.

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We’re lucky here because, even though I’m up in Maine, which is pretty homogenous overall, our local community has been outgoing about accepting refugees for decades now so we have a burgeoning African population, mostly Somali, and more recently some middle easterners.
Aside from kick starting the farmers market scene, they’ve opened shops and now goat meat is pretty easy to find.
Much smaller but some Caribbean population as well, as a spill over from the apple harvest. Generally Jamaicans come over for the harvest and over the years some stay and open bodegas and such. It’s nice progress compared to when I grew up around here!

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Also, pigs can be just plain nasty. A cow might hurt you if it sees you hurting her calf, but is otherwise mostly mellow. A pig will eat you if piss her off. And won’t care if you aren’t dead when she starts.
We’ve basically domesticated the animals that were domesticate-able, as it were. Maybe they were the tastier, easier to capture ones.

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Oh, yeah. I worked on the hog farm in college and have some stories. :grimacing:

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Not now, please, people are eating!

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image

(Guy Ritchie Language Warning)

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rereading this recipe i was reminded of another instance when my father decided he wanted to do something “old school”. i was in my mid-20s and taking one of my occasional breaks from college to earn enough money to go back to college. that time i was raising a half acre or so of tomatoes. about 400 plants, and two and a half acres of field peas. mostly purple hull and cream peas but with a significant smattering of brown crowders and red rippers.

anyway, my dad got a hankering for chicken and not just any chicken but some honest-to-texas “yardbird”. he happened to have a friend who was a retired farm hand/feed store hand, i’ll call him joe. whose late wife had once had a large chicken shed with a fenced in yard. dad talked to him and suggested that if he would go in halves on the feed as well as doing the feeding and tending, dad would buy 120 young chickens and when the time came we would all take care of the processing and split the chickens between us.

he agreed so dad ordered the chickens through the local feed store and we took them out to joe’s place and set them out in the pen. we would periodically bring the feed out there and dad and joe woul divvy up the costs. i want to say around 15-20 of the chickens did not survive to maturity. a little over two months later dad and joe decided the chickens were at the right size so we set a date for the following weekend. dad and i loaded up a 50 gallon cast iron pot we had along with 20-30 pounds of ice in a couple of large ice chests and took them all out to joe’s where we set the pot up on a fire joe had built and filled it with water. once the water started boiling we commenced to wringing necks and then scalding and plucking them.

that was one of the more singularly unpleasant mornings i believe i may ever have spent. it compares in many ways to the cold evening i spent assisting a friend of mine in skinning and field dressing a gut-shot deer. joe was perhaps the smartest of us in that he had a pair of playtex gloves which helped protect his hands from the boiling water and the occasionally sharp quills. the sights, the sounds, the smells, and the tactile sensations of the day are forever embedded in my memory. allow me to emphasize that it was, indeed, a spectacularly unpleasant day.

i am the type of person for whom the killing of a living thing does not come easily and i will only do so to provide food for my family’s table or to put a creature out of its misery if it is obvious that it is suffering. it does not prevent me from hunting or fishing but i give serious consideration to the responsibility which i take into my hands when i do this and when i am hunting or fishing i customarily thank the creature whose life i am taking for their sacrifice. i did quite a bit of thanking that morning. joe later told my father that he considered that action of mine to be unchristian bordering on pagan.

regardless, as we got six to eight chickens plucked we put half into an ice chest and covered them with ice while joe carried his into his house, wrapped them in plastic, and put them into his deep freeze. by the time we were done dad and i had packed up around 45 chickens in ice and joe had put about the same number into his freezer. we used the ice we had left to cool the water in the pot, emptied the water onto the coals of the fire, cooled the pot further with a hose, and then loaded it up. we spent an hour or so raking up and bagging the feathers and rounding up all of the chicken heads which joe said he would take out to the county landfill. we all shook hands over a good day’s work and dad and i went back to the house where we wrapped the chickens in plastic and put them in mom and dad’s deep freeze. all except two which dad insisted on cutting up and frying for dinner that evening.

once again, we decided that the finished product was good but really it was not so good as to make us be in any hurry to replicate the experience.

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I suspect it was the volume of labor all at once that made it too much work. One or two birds at a time is a bit intensive on an afternoon, but not that bad. Doing 90? That’s just industrial processing.

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except it was done under “artisanal” conditions :rofl:

edited to add that it wasn’t just the volume of the work, i’ve done harder work for longer hours at various points. it was the whole sensory package. otoh, i’ve worked for a couple of weeks at an industrial-scale chicken packing plant in east texas. the open-air environment of that long morning with my father and his friend, plus the wood-smoke smell of the fire under the kettle did make it at least marginally better than that. still, i got paid at the chicken plant, speaking of which, the reason i only worked two weeks was not because i couldn’t take the conditions it was because management decided to layoff the most recently hired part of the work force there and replace us with a group of undocumented immigrants from mexico who were willing to work off the books for less than $3.35/hour.i found out a little later that those workers and their families were being housed in some really cheaply built shacks they were renting which coincidentally had the same owner as the packing plant…

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More improvisation in the kitchen today.

I had planned on fish tacos. I had two really nice rockfish fillets. I didn’t want to do the full deep fry thing and I didn’t feel like grilling them. So I made a coating from potato starch, cornmeal, and seasonings. The first coat looked too thin. The fish chunks looked like Turkish delight. So I whipped up an egg and dredged them in that, then the coating. Much better. You can see the two styles here:

Into the wok/oil for a shallow fry:

And the two styles at the end once they were fried:

These got approval from my son, the picky eater, so that was good. Definitely would go with the double-dredged ones. The coating wasn’t as thick as breading or beer batter, but substantial enough to carry the seasoning. The thinner coating didn’t really bring any seasoning along for the ride.

Next time I would skip the cornmeal. It wasn’t necessary. I would also pre-salt the fish. It needed salt. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Gordon Ramsay: pre-salt your fried fish.

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