Day 26: I ate goat

Today was truly an awesome day.  Well, it was an awesome day to experience, hopefully its also an awesome day to read about.

For the first time in at least a year, Jenn and I were able to go to the farmer’s market at St. Phillips.  Thats the same farmer’s market that I went to a few weeks ago and left after five minutes because I am boring.  It was a heck of a lot more fun with Jenn.  The market has nearly doubled in size since we first heard about it 3 years ago, I find that awesome.  There are not only a lot more vendors there, but now they are selling more than just lettuce and honey.  There is all kinds of grass-fed beef, mesquite flour, gluten free tasties, even somebody selling sprouted seeds.  Someone flies up to Alaska every fall and catches a ton of salmon, then freezes them and flies home and sells them.  Its great to see so many different kinds of locally raised and organic options available.

Jenn and I got some great lettuce, carrots, purple onions with long green stalks on them, and some mesquite flour.  Mesquite can be used a bunch of ways in the kitchen, is gluten free, and has an almost chocolate coffee sweet taste to it.  Organizations like Desert Harvesters collect what is cast off in our neighborhoods and grind it up.  If you are non-local and want to try some, go to mesquiteflour.com.  They are a southern Arizona company, and they can ship to anywhere.  We put it on some steaks last night as a flavor rub, and it was awesome.

Also at the market, we got to taste grass-fed goat.  I was astonished by how much I liked it.  The nice lady from Van Haren Meat Company was there selling her local product.  Realizing that the best way to draw in customers is to give away samples, she had a slow cooker of goat shoulder roast going that had just been salt, pepper and garlicked.  So very mild seasoning.  Jenn and I were hesitant, at first deciding to split a sample.  Jenn took a taste, and I was immediately told to get my own.  The flavor really is very similar to beef.  It had only a tiny hint of the gaminess that tends to mar non cow animals.  I have tried lamb many times and can barely eat it.  Goat I would eat knowingly and gladly.  I will probably order some in the future, as soon as I work through the ton of meat I got from Dickman’s.  I can already think of a bunch of ways to cook it, and its super healthy for you.  I was so glad I got the chance to taste it.

Breakfast:

2 cups coffee with cream and cane sugar

Lunch:

Round Steak

Grilled Purple Onions

Salad

The round steak we got from Dickman’s was incredibly tender for what cut it is.  We cooked it with mesquite rub and salt and pepper and it was awesome.  We also through the purple onions on the grill just like they do in Spain.  The outer layer chars up nice, and the inside cooks it its juices.  You just peel off the outside, and scarf.

Dinner:

1 small bowl of salt and pepper pistachios

Fruit Smoothie

We made the rest of our strawberries and bananas into smoothies last night.  We made them with more bananas this time, and they were even tastier.  I will have to keep fruit in the house just for that.

Weight: 233

I feel like I am going to start losing again in the next few days.  I can usually tell, so hopefully this takes me to 230.

Day 16: The Unintentional Fast

Today was not a day where I woke up and said, “I would like to experiment on myself to see what happens”.  Yet in the end, thats exactly what I did.  Now I mentioned yesterday that I got cream to put into my coffee instead of the half and half.  I had heard that would keep you full longer because of the animal fats.  Well, it really, really does.

Unfortunately I closed at the store today, which is rare for me.  Well today I got my nose rubbed in why thats rare.  When I open, I go to work all day, then I come home and accomplish what I really want to get done. When I close, I spend all morning being a lazy ass.  When I get home, its super late and I accomplish nothing because I am exhausted.  It would have been an even more interesting experiment if I had been actually active all day.

I got up and made coffee, per my usual morning ritual. I used a healthy pour of cream, and 1 very small table spoon of cane sugar in a cup.  I drank two cups between 8 and 9 am.  Long story short, I will never go back to half and half.  I will only use cream or raw milk from here on out.  Actually, as I write this, I bet with raw milk I won’t even have to use sugar.  Maybe the goat milk.  I wasn’t even remotely hungry until about 5pm.

Now keep in mind, I had eaten nothing since about 6pm the night before.  I went nearly 24 hours without food, and I felt great.  I didn’t end up eating until 9pm tonight.  In all of that time, I really wasn’t that hungry.  I never got shaky.  I never got fatigued.  I never got short tempered.  I just felt fine.  Clearly my body has adapted to the change.

This makes me wonder, when did we start eating 3 meals a day?  You know that in cave man times, they ate when they had food.  When the didn’t, they didn’t eat.  So when did we convert from catch as catch can, to 3 meals?  Its clearly neither normal nor natural.  Even more than that, now they tell you to eat 5 or 6 small meals in a day.  Thats total crap.  Maybe if those meals had what your body really needed in them, you wouldn’t have to eat so much.  We are a nation of doughy, fat grain eaters.  You would think somebody would learn to examine the information and see for themselves whats going on.  We keep trying the same stupid crap, and keep getting the same answer.

Breakfast:

2 cups of coffee, cream, 1 tbsp sugar

Kept me going all day.  I look forward to trying it again tomorrow.  Plus the coffee tasted awesome.  I can’t wait to try it with raw milk.

Dinner: (27 hours after last meal)

20oz steak

1 green pepper

1/2 container of cherry tomatoes

1/2 container strawberries

The steaks from the butcher shop are amazing.  Not quite grassfed, but pretty good.  The tomatoes were awesome.  I am sure my mom will laugh, given how much I hated them as a kid.  This was actually the first time I had just eaten any, outside of a salad or something.

Weight:  As of 9pm.  235.  That puts total loss at 10lbs in 15 days.

Day 4: Grassfed Steak Day

Today was simply awesome on the culinary front.  Unfortunately, to get there I had to wade through an entire day of Easter shoppers.  Actually, shoppers isn’t the right word.  Shopping involves going into a store, and handing them money in exchange for a product or service.  These people simply felt like wandering through a mall the day before the holiest day in the year.  If you have nothing better to do with your life than mosey through a mall with no purpose, then you have failed as a human being.

So after all of that, why was today a good day?  Because of this …

That is a wholly new and awesome culinary experience for me.  That is a grass fed steak.  Compare that to this abomination ..

Setting aside for a moment the fact that I took my picture in my dark kitchen with my cell camera, and the one underneath was probably taken at the steak equivalent of a playboy shoot, what do you see?  Well, mine was purple.  Why is that?  Answer, because mine wasn’t sprayed with red paint to get you to buy it at the grocery store.  Meat is not naturally bright red when it has been shrink wrapped and shipped.  What else do you see?  You notice all that white fat in there?  Thats the product of corn fed beef.  They feed it corn so that it grows that extra fat layer in there. Some how thats supposed to be better for you and for the cow than letting them chomp on natures bounty in the field.  You know, like God intended.

Setting aside for a moment the health and ecological implications, there was a much bigger question involved.  Why the hell do we let ourselves eat this second rate dog food grade beef product when there is something so much tastier out there?  This steak was the single most flavorful piece of meat I have ever had.  I have had grass fed ground beef before, and its awesome.  This was even better.

The texture was much softer and more tender, since you weren’t contending with artificially fattened meat.  It was also much less .. grainy, for lack of a better word.  The meat itself was almost creamy.  The flavor was almost, grassy.  It simply strikes a note inside of you that lets you know, this is what you were meant to eat.  If you have never tried some, its a must on your bucket list.  I cooked mine with a little African seasoning blend, and it was awesome.

Breakfast:

I wasn’t hungry, so I had a cup of coffee with organic half and half and cane sugar, and a cup of apple juice.  Our ancestors ate when they could, and I am sure not every day involved three meals.  I refuse to eat when I am not hungry.

Lunch:

I FINALLY killed the soup.  My soup was super tasty, but after eating it for 4.5 meals in the last 3 days, it was a bit much.  On the other hand.  I made it all for about $9, so its hard to knock the payoff value on that.

Dinner:

THE STEAK FROM HEAVEN.  I think I covered that enough above.  I also covered a yellow onion in olive oil and grilled it with my steak.  It was an organic onion, and surprisingly, that gives it a very sweet flavor.  I also grilled some asparagus.  Best thing I can say about that is that my wife does it much better.  Mine doesn’t cut it, and I miss hers.

That was it for today.  I am almost to bed and still not super munchy.

Tomorrow is Easter, so I will be making some pork loin.  I wish my wife was here to share it with me, so I will just have to re-make it when she gets home.