A Meathenge Meat Platter Contest

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Entries starting January 27th, 2005

Submission: Deb from In My Kitchen food blog

The picture is of sausages frying for dinner, mmm how we love sausages here at MurrayHill5. Sausages make us happy, sausages make us sing; we love to eat them prepared any way, but this particular batch of lovelies was made into sausage and pepper sandwiches. Sausages were fried until slightly charred and crisp on the outside then set aside to rest while I pan fried some red and green bell peppers, a yellow one too. I cut up lots of onions and let them cook until they were dark brown and carmelized then took them off the flame and let them rest with all the other fixin's. A couple of loaves of fresh, crusty Italian bread straight from our local bakery were cut into sandwich size hunks then some of the soft insides taken out to make room for the fillings. I piled on a few sausages, some peppers and onions, a little salt and pepper and closed the lid and smooshed everything down to make it easier to bite into. We ate them while enjoying a few ice cold beers and letting the juices from the sausages run down our arms. Bliss!

Best regards,

Deb

Submission: Kitchen Monkey from Kitchen Monkey food blog

Pork Tonkatsu

Behold my humble entry to Meathenge's Meat Platter Contest.

  • Beef Tataki
  • Beef Negimaki
  • Chicken Yakitori
  • Bacon-Wrapped Shitaki & Enoki Mushrooms
  • Pork Tonkatsu

You'll also notice that the platter was served with edamame (steamed soy beans, which go great with beer) and a couple of saketinis: these ones with vodka, sake, and fresh squeezed OJ.

Japanese cuisine is, obviously, best known for its preoccupation with seafood. And for good reason: there are few things more sublime than a great piece of toro, a dollop of fresh uni, or a quail egg resting on a glistening bed of salmon roe. Yet the popularity of sushi often obscures (for Americans at least, the rising popularity of tempura and of ramen restaurants nothwithstanding) the many delicious Japanese dishes made of beef, chicken, and pork.

All of these dishes share an underlying simplicity of preparation and presentation, and all can be made with a small number of core ingredients that can be found at most Asian markets and even many supermarkets these days: sake, rice vinegar, shoyu (japanese soy sauce, typically lower in sodium content than Chinese soy sauce), mirin (a sweetened rice wine used for cooking), castor sugar (confectioner's sugar will also work), panko crumbs, and garlic. Apart from these, it's all about finding top notch cuts of meat--and we're fortunate enough to have a Whole Foods in Sarasota, so while this meal wasn't done on the cheap (the organic filet mignon was $26 a pound) it was well worth the time and effort.

-KM

Absolutely go see Kitchen Monkey's entire post: Niku-Oozara! (Japanese Meat Platter)

 

Submission: Nic from Baking Sheet food blog

Proudly presenting my entry for the meat platter contest.

Meatloaf was the first meat dish that I learned to cook. Chicken and other actual whole and "cuts" of meat seemed far too intimidating to me working alone in the kitchen (you have to admit that raw chicken is not the most appetising thing). Ground beef seemed easy and it was not wholly recognisable as part of any particular animal. Yada, yada, yada... it was easy and it was delicious.
Friends talk about it.
Meatloaf! Unbelieveable? Not when you've had this one.
I don't know if I want to be known for my meatloaf, but I'll take what I can get.

Absolutely go see Nic's entire post: My Favorite Meat ... loaf

Submission: Meg from IheartBacon food blog

The Best Pork. Ever. Ever since our trip to Vancouver last week, I haven’t been able to get the Su Dong Wild Boar dish we ate at Wild Rice out of my mind. I did some research and found a recipe at Times Online in the U.K. Apparently Su Dong Po was considered one of the greatest Chinese poets and was a bit of an epicure. It is said that he invented this recipe because of his love of pork—something that we both share.

Absolutely go see Meg's entire post: Best Pork Ever!

Submission: Sam from Becks & Posh food blog

Dr Biggles, over at Meathenge declared, recently, yet another online challenge aimed at foodbloggers and meat lovers. He even has three prizes to give away. This is a serious competition. In fact, some of the entries already in are so seriously good, I have half a mind not to enter. I wasn't very prepared and neither was I overjoyed with my photograph. But I live in such fear of reprehension from the Dr in the comments sections of my posts, I feel I must oblige. May I present to you, therefore, Meat and Art.

Mark Ryden is one of my favourite artists. He happens to have used meat as a feature in several of his paintings. He even has an artist's statement about why he likes to paint meat. (Read it under the heading "Meat" - Oct 2001.) I wish I could afford a Mark Ryden original, but alas, I have to make do with the limited edition print that you can see above posing with my platter of mild copa, prosciutto and gherkins. Along with some toast, this is a simple and favourite weekday dinner meal for myself and Fred. I wish I could tell you where to buy a picture just like this one, they were only $20 or so each, but they are now, sadly, sold out. If you are feeling flush, I found something similar for sale on ebay.

Absolutely go see Sam's entire post: Best Pork Ever!

Submission: Charlotte from Love & Cooking food blog

This is a picture of an Italian-style meatball soup I made with homemade chicken broth. When I heard of the contest, I immediately thought of some serious wintry meaty wonderfulness, like steak, or pot roast, or hamburgers with red wine pan sauce that reminds me of the sauce Bordelaise that my mom would occasionally make when I was a kid. (My mom is an excellent gravy maker and that was a real treat.)

But my freezer was full to bursting, and I needed to clear out some room so I could get the door shut, and create some room for the lemon curd I was planning to make (also one of my mom's specialties).

One of the reasons my freezer was full is that I have been trying to teach myself how to cut up a chicken properly. Ever since I discovered some good sources of free-range chickens at good prices, I have been eating more chicken. My favorite way to cook it is the way described in "How to Cook without a Book": preheat oven to 450 F, cut the back out and the wings off, drizzle some olive oil in your pan, lay flat, season under the skin, cook for 35-45 minutes (time depends on bird size and how hot your oven really was).

But I wasn't happy with the way I was hacking through the chicken, so one of my New Year's food resolutions was to learn to do it better.

So at least once a week for the last month, I have purchased one or two chickens and played Freddy Kruger with my knives. I roasted the de-backed and de-winged bird(s) and put the parts in the freezer for Later.

I had a LOT of chicken backs in my freezer. "Later" had arrived.

So I made broth, instead of getting some beef (which I was a bit hungry for after all that chicken).

I pulled some of the bags out, poured filtered water over the parts, brought it to a boil and skimmed the scum off. Then I let it bubble away for a few hours, checking occasionally to stir, skim, and replenish the water level.

I strained it into my quart Pyrex cups and put those in the fridge, pronto.

Next day I had beautiful jellied broth, with a layer of fat at the top (which I removed).

So the wonderful roast chickens I have had have lived on after themselves, giving up their meaty goodness once again for a comforting soup. (As the young man
at the Berkeley Bowl butcher counter said when I described my chicken roasting procedure, "Waste not, want not".)

The soup is a variant on what I call "Italian Wedding on a Weeknight" ... carrots, celery, and chard boiled in the broth, with the meatballs simmered along. You can add parmesan, or onion/garlic, or make an egg drop to make it more like proper Italian Wedding soup, but it was pretty good as chicken-veggie with meatballs. And since I had Trader Joe's Italian style meatballs in my freezer, the whole thing was ready in under half an hour.

I also got enough broth out of it to take some chicken soup to an ill friend, who appreciated it mightily. That felt as good as eating my soup.

Absolutely go see Charlotte's entire post: Recherche des Poulets Perdus

Submission: Debra from Culiblog food blog

 

That's was one of the more memorable lines in Michael Moore's, 'Bowling for Columbine'. Moore is speaking to a TV producer, asking him to explain why there are so many fear evoking images on the US nightly news. The TV producer replies self-evidently, 'If it bleeds, it leads'.

I thought the line was a fitting title to the next few entries of Culiblog in which I will document a workshop that I followed at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht this last February. Onno Faller led a workshop titled, 'Cooking as Genre' the last two days of which were devoted to a little dead wild boar. Above you see Natasha and a handsome bald bloke, BOTH VEGETARIANS, skinning the poor dead beast.

Although I have killed hundreds of animals for food and skinned them and prepared them, I never find this an easy task. I find myself gritting my teeth as I remove their jackets. I am not repulsed, but I feel sad for the animal, I feel the extreme tension of the killing and of a death that I initiated by wanting to eat the animal. Every animal, even a lobster, fights for its life as we would do. And it never ceases to amaze me that once the animal is skinned, it becomes just a piece of meat to me and my mind switches to the matter of the marinade.

Absolutely go see Debra's two postst: If it Bleeds, it Leads and No Rest for the Rugged

Submission: Karen from Let's Play Restaurant food blog

I am submitting this photo to your contest. It is a photo of the Blanquinegro pork stew that I made and the recipe for which I posted on my blog.
This stew is special to me because it is very tasty, is versatile in that it can be served plain or with lots of "accessories," and is a recipe that I made up entirely on my own. I cooked the stew myself and I took the photo myself.
Stew, perhaps, does not show off the meat like some other dishes, but meat is integral to this dish. This is my first try at photographing food like this, and my first try at a photography contest. I'm thrilled just to be entering!
Thanks,
Karen