Downtime

It's tough to get a good firm grip on the week when the first 4 hours of your day are spent staring at a screen that doesn't do anything. IT migrated our domain over the weekend and in the process broke everything. I even left my laptop at the desk so they could get work done for me ahead of time and I would come in and be efficient right away. This prevented me from watching I Am Legend or coming up with a new post on Friday. Instead, I read up on one of the scores from the Falmouth library book raid M and I conducted over the 4th. We got a huge stash of new reading material, which now includes a few of the Patrick O'Brien series about Jack Aubrey, 3 of which were turned into a file titled Master and Commander: The far side of the world. It turns out Master and Commander and Far Side of the World are two separate books and there are elements of the third in the movie as well. I liked the movie a lot and figured the books would good entertainment. They're mostly written in a 18th century voice with a lot of nautical terminology and period slang, which takes some time to get used to. I'm about ½ way through the first, Master and Commander and so far, so good. Fiction is somewhat of a stretch for me, as most of my favorite books have been true stories, but a few of the all time greats were fictional so there is room for them in the reading repertoire. I'm not expecting the Killer Angels, but it's better than scanning websites on my phone during the commute.

In addition to relieving the public library system of books they don't want, we also joined a community supported agriculture (CSA) meat share program. Without the CSA, the local farmer, if they want to sell all their produce to a distributor, get locked into a certain price. The distributor then sells this to a grocery store at a markup and then you get it from the store at their markup. The farmer doesn't get a great price, you the buyer pay a higher price and the produce you get has been sitting around for a while. With a CSA model, you buy directly from the farmer for a subscription price. There is a tradeoff, namely you only get what the farm happens to produce at any given time and there is a potential for a crop failure. The benefit is you get extremely fresh goods, locally grown and the farmer knows how much income they will have for the year so they can plan accordingly. All in all it seems like a pretty good deal for everyone but the middleman. I don't feel too bad for these guys, I mean we're still going to get bananas and oranges from warm places. But it seems ridiculous to have to get produce from South America or California that can be grown just as well locally. With this list of benefits, of course the lines to join a produce CSA are extremely long and for some reason only for people who live in Boston. M tried to get some delivered to her work, but it's too far away from the source. Out in the hinterlands where we live there are some, but they are all sold out already. Maybe next year. Instead, we joined a meat share, which works sort of the same way, except with meat. All the animals are processed (killed) in an FDA-inspected facility and are packed and frozen so that once a month M picks up a big cooler full of whatever they happen to have around. This time it was some burgers, sausage, chicken breast, ham, steaks and maybe something else? It was about 10lbs and the price per lb total was about what you'd pay for boneless chicken breasts. So far we've eaten the burgers and chicken breasts and they were excellent. The burgers were pre-formed and there weren't any surprises, which is about what you want from ground beef. The chicken was on the bone and not split, so I did some minor trimming and made some curry skewers for the grill. One last note about dinner – never, ever eat a pound of chard, no matter how good it tastes, you will regret it. The meat is raised free range/pasture and grass fed. This is somewhat different from mass-produced meats which can be grassfed but are usually grain-finished in massive feedlots throughout the Midwest. In a feedlot, cows get to eat as much corn as they can handle. Now if a person eats nothing but grain for a few weeks, they're going to swell right up and that's what the cattle do, giving that rich marbled texture we all love. As unhealthy that is for people, it's also not great for cattle. Big deal, they're destined for the grill anyway, right? That's probably right, but I'll give the grass fed stuff a chance just because I would think that suddenly stuffing the cow full of grain isn't how it was meant to be. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not railing against sad living conditions or big agriculture. Rather I'm arguing for better flavor and a healthier meal.

Speaking of steaks, I read an article recently about aging your own beef in your refrigerator. This has got me really excited. These days not many butchers dry age their beef. For one, as it ages, it dries out somewhat and the weight goes down, raising the price. For another, traditional dry aging takes up more space than wet-aging, another reason not to do it. I'd rather have the dry-aged stuff myself and I was always curious about how to do this. Now that I've got a technique, I'd like to try it. Here are some locals hanging out in the parks around town.

wish I had more exciting stuff to write about. It's been a lazy few weekends. I'm looking forward to the new Batman movie. Saw Fool's Gold last night – skip it. That's all for now. Once again I am pledging to make good on more than one post every 10 days. We'll see what happens….