The night before Thanksgiving, I cooked a batch of rolls using a recipe from a paperback Betty Crocker cookbook we’ve had for years but seldom cook out of. It seemed a quick, easy recipe for simple dinner rolls. The bread book I typically use (The Breadbaker’s Apprentice) is more of an artisan bread cookbook. The breads it provides formulas for are yummy, but they tend to be a multi-day pain to actually make. I don’t know what I did wrong, but my rolls would not rise. After much longer than it should have taken (and with all sorts of coaxing), they nearly doubled in size, so I popped them in the oven and crossed my fingers they’d do the rest of their rising in there. They did not. They tasted more or less ok, but they were small and hard and ugly.

Yesterday, hankering for some rolls for turkey sandwiches, I decided to try the fancy cookbook recipe for white bread rolls. I’ve used one of the three very similar formulas for white bread to make loaves, and they didn’t turn out as wonderfully as expected (they were fine sandwhich loaves but not the kind of bread you go out of your way to eat for its own sake, like the brioche). But confronted with the small hard ugly rolls or a perfectly servicable but not outstanding white bread roll, I opted for a do-over. And the results, as you can see from the picture, were rather better.

It’s interesting to be a meat-eater when your children begin to have questions about meat. Especially when in general you’re a pacifist type who tries to gently persuade flies to exit the door you’re holding open (all but wearing a jaunty bellhop cap) rather than swatting them, who will chase a spider or silverfish down with an index card to scoop up and gingerly deposit on a nice comfy looking blade of grass rather than getting a big fluffy ball of toilet paper to sort of anonymously swoop in with and squish with a little quiet gross crunch and then drop into the toilet.

So but then as you begin to think a little more about what you’re eating and to consider the animals themselves, not only for their own sakes but for the sake of your family’s very own health, and you look at pictures of cows being slaughtered with their baleful eyes cast skyward and bled and hung and butchered and cooked and yet you persist in eating meat, well, it makes for something of a conundrum.

One of the funniest hypocrisies I’ve seen parents commit is to spank or swat their children for hitting another person.

To be such a kind of wuss about hurting creatures who don’t have baleful eyes makes it seem all the more hypocritical to not only kill but to tear with your teeth and consume the very flesh of creatures who do have baleful eyes. It occurs to me that this is sort of like the conservative interpretation of the liberal worldview wherein (the interpretation seems to figure) you think it’s ok to murder innocent babies with rusty coat hangers but not ok to tenderly and with great concern for their comfort put hardened criminals to death. And when you look at either case in monochrome, I suppose the respective cases can be made. There’s nuance in both cases, of course.

The modern food industry makes it easy to distance yourself from the murder of meat because what we eat doesn’t in any way resemble the creatures it comes from. (Conservative right-to-life groups do the reverse by showcasing the gruesome physical realities of abortion in brochures, on posters, and I think even on vehicles.)

We have long shielded Lennie from unpleasant or over-complicated things, but I’ve recently tried to shelter her a little less, lest she grow up to be a complete Pollyanna. So I’m more open these days about the fact that the chicken substance we’re eating is an actual chicken that at some point said bock bock and scratched around in the dirt and maybe had what turned out not to be a legitimate concern about the sky falling. And she’s skeptical, saying things, even as I show her the naked pimply little broiler chicken I have seasoned and am about to put into a hot oven, like “we don’t eat a chicken, we eat chicken,” as if removal of so small a thing as the indefinite article somehow separates the food substance from the animal. If you let it remain an abstraction, maybe it’s not real!

Trying to figure out how to talk to your kids about what you’re eating really makes you think about what you’re eating. Trying to resolve the ethical conflict of not liking to kill things and yet being happy enough to kill not only sentient but in some cases beautiful, in some ways thoughtful, personality-endowed creatures, well, let’s just say it’s kind of an uncomfortable place to find yourself in. Trying to resolve this in an internally consistent way for yourself is hard enough, but trying to boil it down to the level of a 4-year-old is an even harder thing, and something I’ll have to continue to work at, both for Lennie’s sake and my own.

I have bought grassfed meat from three local farms lately. If you’re interested in a pricing breakdown (with Kroger, my usual grocery store, as a — dare I call it a? — touchstone on price), you can see my working copy here. The farms I’ve tried are River Ridge, West Wind, and Laurel Creek. I don’t remember what got me started on this kick, but I’m to the point that I’m considering buying a freezer and paying a bit more for quality meat without the fear of suddenly growing breasts or hulking out and going on a roid rampage thanks to all the hormones and steroids I’m taking in through the animals I eat. Of course, in addition to not wanting to turn into a mutant, there’s the matter of wanting to eat things that don’t taste like cardboard. Of course, you don’t know that what you’ve been eating for 30-plus years tastes like cardboard until you’ve had something that doesn’t taste like cardboard, and it is that taste test that I’m conducting now as I work through how I feel about meat and how I’d like to consume it.

In addition to buying meat, I’ve bought three books about meat. The first and biggest is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Meat Book, which is basically a 500-page text book that I’m a quarter of the way through. From this book I’ve learned fun things like what mechanically separated meat is, and of course it reinforces some of the things that made me shudder and choke back vomit when reading Fast Food Nation a few years ago. The author makes a pretty weak philosophical case for eating meat (one of the things I’ve long struggled a bit with), but the book generally goes along at a nice clip with some charm and is pretty engaging. One of the most influential things the guy has said — and this touches on some of the ethical problems I currently sidestep while chewing on one of our bovine or porcine friends — is that if you’re going to kill a sentient being and eat it, you should do it a sort of honor and make its murder worth it, or as near worth it as you can. I’m beginning to buy the argument he puts forth that to eat factory farmed, maltreated animals (I suppose that’s redundant) is to devalue the lives they give for your consumption. I can’t escape here the recollection of some old probably racist lore about Indians thanking the animals they killed to eat. I also keep going back to an example that I think I made up: If your plane crashed in the mountains and you were forced to indulge in the last taboo and given the choice of eating a dear friend of known provenance (so to speak) and physical quality or eating a drug-ravaged fellow passenger with emaciated limbs and like pus coming out of his eyes, which would you eat? Hard as it would be to eat a friend, I’m thinking I’d go that route. And if you’re going to eat a friend, you’d better darned well make a big spectacle of honoring him for the death that brought you sustenance.

So I suddenly have visions of asking these farmers for the name of the cow or pig I’m eating so that I can honor its sacrifice, and that feels a little dumb.

The second book, which I’ve just scanned a little is The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook. As I considered buying a half a cow to stock the freezer I’m thinking about buying, it occurred to me that I didn’t really know how to cook most of a cow. I’m a ground beef and grilled steaks and occasional crock-potted roast kind of guy, and before I took the plunge, I wanted to understand a little better what I could do with other cuts (and what the cuts even are) and how grassfed animals in particular might best be presented at my supper table.

And finally, I bought The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It seems I had heard something about this book recently, and I thought reading it might be a good exercise for helping me work through some of the ethical issues that have resurfaced as I’ve devoted as much brain as digestive tract to what I’m eating.

But back to the meat.

So far, I’ve eaten the following things:

• Ground beef from River Ridge, as burgers (disclosure: I make a killer burger by finely chopping red pepper, garlic, and onion and mixing that in with the meat; these were the best burgers I’ve ever made, but maybe I just got the veggie additives perfect this time)
• Ground beef from Laurel Creek, in spaghetti (you could actually taste the beef, rather than just having its texture)
• Ribeye from River Ridge
• Ribeye from West Wind
• T-bone from Laurel Creek
• Pork chops from River Ridge (I seasoned these with a mixture of mustard powder, garlic powder, and salt, and they tasted like steak; best pork chops I’ve ever had; the second batch I managed to undercook, and none of us wound up with trichinosis)

As noted, the River Ridge burgers were great. I’ve got queued up for tomorrow burgers made from West Wind beef. West Wind’s prices are through the effing roof. I paid nearly $20 a pound for ribeyes from them, for example, and the ground beef is literally $2 or more dollars per pound more than what I paid for the ground beef from Laurel Creek, which was perfectly adequate for spaghetti (haven’t tried it in burgers yet, though I will next weekend).

I wonder if West Wind’s prices aren’t high for good reason, though. This weekend, I cooked a bunch of steaks for visiting family. I had four River Ridge ribeyes and two West Wind ribeyes. The River Ridge ones looked a little weird, and I had noticed this when I first bought them but figured maybe it was just the way local, organic, grassfed beef was butchered. They were sort of formless, as if they’d just been hacked out of the cow rather than cut in the usual fashion, with the customary sort of semi-circular crust of fat. Both sets of steaks had adequate marbling, though upon close inspection, the West Wind steaks were prettier and ultimately better marbled. Neither were the technicolor scarlet color of the steaks you see at the grocery store. The RR steaks were much much darker, tending almost to purplish, while the WW ones were more pinkish brownish. Both of them were yummy steaks, though the WW were far more tender (also generally thinner, and perhaps that made a difference). If I were wealthy beyond my wildest dreams and inclined to eat ribeyes often, I’d go with WW over RR. I’m eager to try Laurel Creek, as their pricing is the best, but they haven’t had any available at the farmer’s market the two times I’ve been.

Sometime this week, I aim to cook a Laurel Creek tenderloin. The loins I bought are smaller than what one can find at Kroger, but they also look a bit less fatty, and I can hardly wait to grill one up.

The pork chops from River Ridge were delicious; if the differential between the beef at WW and RR extends to the pork, I’ll be in for a treat indeed when I try a WW pork product.

West Wind is consistently more expensive (sometimes by six or eight dollars per pound), but they also claim to be the only fully organic local(ish) farm. The farmer’s wife (WW is apparently run just by her and her husband) informed me rather brusquely on Friday that they don’t trust Tennessee slaughter houses and so go just into North Carolina to slaughter their animals at a facility that follows a Temple Grandin design. This no doubt accounts for some of the price differential. And the ribeyes did seem to be of better cut and quality than what I’ve had elsewhere (even though I overcooked them).

What I’m left to consider now is how much price means to me. I’m willing to pay more for ethically killed (hah!) animals, but am I willing to pay three dollars per pound more or eight? Fearnley-Whittingstall suggests that it may be better to eat ethical(ish), high-quality meat in lesser quantities than to gorge simply for the sake of eating meat on cheap, bland meat that requires a sea of barbecue sauce to make it palatable, and for the moment, I’m feeling inclined to agree. Tonight, my family of four (ok, two-and-a-half, as two of them are under five years old) split a leftover T-bone, and it was sufficient if not belt-looseningly abundant. Eating less meat (with less guilt) but appreciating it more seems reasonable enough.

With respect to the considerable price differential among local farms, I have yet to figure out how I feel about requiring the full organic chain of events for the meat I eat. There are guidelines, I believe, about how far an animal has to walk prior to its death, how exactly it is killed, whether the grass it eats can have had any ancestral seeds that weren’t raised by hand and whispered to during germination by hippies reeking of patchouli (perhaps I carry this a bit far), and I’m not sure how important these are to me. Once you’ve resolved to carry an animal off to kill it for food, provided you’re fairly kind about it, I’m not sure how much it matters to me whether you let it walk lackadaisically in a circular queue to its death or whether you nudge it a little along the way. This was one of the things the WW farmer cited as a benefit of organic. I’m very much in favor of kindness to animals on their way to oblivion, but ultimately, dead is dead, and a marginal difference in anxiety level within the animals may not be worth five or six bucks per plate to me. Or this is what I think for the moment, at least.

I tried making a brioche again this weekend, but this time I dispensed with the fancy pan and just made regular loaves that would be better suited to sandwiches. One of my loaf pans is a little smaller than the other, but I let the dough for both rise the same length of time. So the smaller one rose a bit too much and has a big air pocket in the top. It’s kind of neat, actually, but it makes (correction: made) it difficult to cut the bread without smooshing it down. The extra rising also made the bread less densely structured all around, so it’s not as firm a previously. I’d like it a little firmer than the small loaf came out, though there’s something to be said for having it a bit less firm than before. I suspect the second loaf will be a near-perfect denseness. There are a few spots in the bread where I didn’t get the butter fully integrated, and around these, yummy gooey buttery air holes formed. We ate the small loaf within a day. I’m hoping the larger loaf will last a few days, at least, as I’ve got a pile of salami and turkey for sandwiches.

Brioche is thought to be the bread Marie Antoinette was referencing when she (the story goes) said “let them eat cake.” My bread book has recipes for three grades of brioche, broken down into the classes “rich man’s,” “middle-class,” and “poor man’s” brioche. The primary difference among them is the quantity of butter, which was harder to come by (and keep) a few hundred years ago. Antoinette’s plea, then, was basically an attempt to swap a little butter for her own dear neck. I’ve made the middle class version so far, with its two sticks of butter and five eggs (the rich version has double the butter!). I’m not sure I have the nerve to make the rich man’s version. You can probably see why this bread translates into cake. And come to think of it, the bread actually looks a bit like pound cake.

The Casatiello bread I made a week or so ago turned out wonderfully. It had a great texture, a nice yellow color inside, a crisp crust, and a very nice flavor. It was yummy on its own and also made great sandwiches. This weekend, I moved on to a brioche, which is very similar to the Casatiello but is often made in weird shapes, as depicted below. I bought a pan for the occasion. Basically, you get this special pan and stick a big ball of dough in it; then you stack a second ball on top of it. I think I made the top ball too large, and I must have distributed its mass unequally, as it shifted substantially during baking. The next time I make it, I may do one ball in the fluted pan but skip the snowman look and use a regular bread pan for the remaining dough. The color of this bread is lovely, and it tastes great. I ate a bunch of it by itself today, but it also made a tasty roast beef sandwich of some leftovers from last night. Pictorial following.

This is the initial batch of flour, milk, and yeast, which ferment for less than an hour to start pulling flavor out of the flour.

Here I’ve added the rest of the ingredients (including a stick of butter, which accounts for the yellow color) and stuck in the fridge overnight.

This is the view from above after forming the shape of the bread. Looks kind of like a flower.

This is a better view of what the bread is likely to look like post-bake if all goes well.

And here’s the final product. The top ball slipped over to the side, so it looks kind of weird. The ball in the picture in my book has slipped a little bit, but not nearly this much. The ball in the book is also much smaller, and I think the weight of the risen dough had something to do with the slipping. The bread is tasty, in any case!

A few weeks ago, I decided I wanted to try making some sourdough bread. I found a starter online and enthusiastically mixed it up. It immediately started bubbling as it was supposed to, and I was excited at the prospect of having some yummy bread in a few days. The starter I selected required 5 days to ferment before you could make any bread with it. Our weather was frigid at the time, and our house often gets down in the 60s at night; this isn’t exactly optimal for cultivating a yeast colony, and by the second day of my experiment, my starter had clearly died. By the third day, its solids and liquids had separated entirely. Mleeka had the smart idea of putting a starter in our half bath, which stays very warm with the door closed at night, and her starter (a different recipe that actually had no yeast added) flourished. The bread she made with it didn’t turn out so great (it tasted good enough, but it was shaped like a discus). She gave up on making bread altogether, and I decided to give up until warmer weather would prove beneficial to my starter.

But then she got me a nifty bread book for my birthday. Entitled The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, it has some introductory matter, followed by a comfortably detailed tutorial on how bread making works. The author lays out a 12-step process whereby the baker’s mission — “to evoke the fullness of flavor from the wheat” — is best accomplished. And then he offers recipes (he calls them formulas) for a few dozen breads. It’s a very pretty book, with photography of much lovely bread and a pleasant writing style. He gives plenty of details about the fermenting and baking processes (e.g. did you know that crust is actually caramelized sugar?) without being tiresome or over-detailed about it. Once I read the first hundred pages, I was ready to pick a bread formula and get to it.

And I did just that last weekend, starting off with a simple Italian bread recipe (page 172). It has just a few ingredients and an easy pre-ferment (this is basically a simple dough you make in advance to start pulling flavor out of the wheat; you let it ferment overnight and then add it to the rest of your dough ingredients when you’re ready to bake), and it seemed like a familiar enough type of bread that I’d know if I got it more or less right (compared to, say, a marbled rye). The pre-ferment (this bread calls for one called a biga; it’s basically a doughy one rather than a more liquidy one) behaved beautifully, and I was thrilled at how my loaves (batards — basically oblong loaves, but not so thin as a baguette) turned out. Everything rose as it should have, and the dough had a consistency that I think was close to what the formula called for. One thing went a bit wrong, though. This recipe is really a hearth baking recipe, and though the author provides guidelines as to how to emulate hearth baking in a standard oven, I’m not sure his instructions are best suited to a gas oven, which heats intensely from the bottom. I cooked the bread on the back side of a sheet pan and spread corn meal underneath as recommended (presumably to help keep the bread from sticking), but the corn meal began to burn, and the smell was disappointing to say the least. The bread was far enough along by this time that I was able to shift it to another pan sans cornmeal, and that improved matters. The bread came out looking pretty nice, with a pretty even distribution and sizing of holes in the cross section. I don’t know that the loaves’ shapes would have won a blue ribbon at a baking competition, but they looked like real bread, and they tasted more or less like bread as well. Mleeka characterized the outcome aptly enough when she said that she’d be perfectly happy having purchased one of these loaves from the Kroger bakery, if perhaps a little less happy having purchased one from a more respected bakery. The bread was great for little sandwiches because it was soft but not gummy or so soft that it couldn’t bear its meaty freight. As a dinner bread, I’m not sure it would stand up on its own without more practice on my part. One key thing I should note is that for my first effort, I was in a hurry and so didn’t let my pre-ferment go overnight as the author suggests (he admits that you don’t have to but insists that it’s better to). If I try this bread again, I’ll try to be more patient, and I’ll find a way to work around the corn meal incident. We ate the first of two loaves in a couple of days and have another one to unfreeze at our convenience.

Today, I tried my second bread from the book. It’s a Casatiello, and the author describes it as “a rich, dreamy Italian elaboration of brioche, loaded with flavor bursts in the form of cheese and bits of meat.” He also suggests that the bread can be thought of as a Panettone (a particular seasonal bread with things like dried fruit in it) with savory meat and cheese substituted for the sweet bits therein. The dough is an entirely different beast than what I made for the Italian bread, and as it was cooking, it gave off the delectable smell that I expected of the Italian loaves and that pretty much everybody who’s not a baker associates with the baking of bread. This smell I think I can say pretty confidently comes from butter in the dough. This recipe had 1.5 sticks of butter (the Italian had none), along with a cup of whole milk, a tablespoon of sugar, some salt, flour, and the savory and cheesy bits. It was a one-day recipe because it required no lengthy pre-ferment, and though I dirtied a lot of dishes making it, it was really pretty simple to throw together. It has made my house smell as good for the last hour as it’s smelled since I’ve owned the house, and the loaves came out a lovely orangey brown. I’m letting them cool now, but they feel as if they have a very firm, thick crust, and they look just beautiful. If you sniff them from up close, you can smell the salami (which I sauteed to crisp before adding to the dough), and they have little pocks of browned meat and cheese here and there. I think they’re going to be a hit.

I’m not sure what bread I’ll try next (there’s a potato rosemary loaf that looks appealing and would be a great use for our expanding rosemary plants), but I know I won’t stop after the two I’ve done so far. If you’re a novice bread maker, I’d definitely encourage you to try this book out.