I’ve got two weeks off until I start at Mass Relevance, and it just so happened that Andrew is in Austin for the first of those weeks, so it seemed like a good time to have Meatcation III! Here are some highlights with the rest being here. Meatcation.com will get you to past Meatcations. =)
On Sunday, we had sliders:
…and bone marrow from Salt & Time:
On Monday, we made some crazy cryoseared duck:
On Tuesday, we made (way too much) pot au feu with veal shank, beef shank, garlic sausage, beef bone marrows, and an assortment of spices, veggies, and potatoes. This is a picture of one pot. We amateurily bought enough to fill three (a pot next to this one as well as a large crock pot, elsewhere). I’ve been having this for lunch the past few days…
Wednesday was quail enchiladas:
Then on Thursday, we went to the opening of Qui and were the first ones in the door!
Yay! Another Meatcation movie! This time, starring Sam Ni!
Like a few other iMovie templated movies, I just stuck with the default text for the most part. =)
Unfortunately, I took far less video than I should have this time around. I will commit to being more vigilant next time. Fortunately, I did a little better on the photo front which you can see on my Meatcation 2 flickr set. Enjoy!
Okay, I finally uploaded the rest of my Meatcation 2 photos. Go to the flickr set for them all, but here are some highlights.
Disclaimer: I use the term “meat” loosely. Meatcation is really all about eating some kind of animal each day, preferably new in some way (we haven’t made/had before or cooked in a unique way, etc.). Seafood, poultry, etc. all qualify.
This time around, we didn’t have the luxury of taking off an entire week of work, so we just did dinner for seven days (with a two day break in between). We started off the week with duck so that we could have plenty of duck fat for the later days. =)
George pointed out that the following could be grossly misinterpreted… haha…
Next up was beef ribs:
After that, burgers and sweet potato fries (using the duck fat, of course - I think we put some bacon fat in there too… =).
Wednesday was FISH FEAST day. We made three different types of fish.
I think next up is antelope and boudin.
Getting better… bison steaks and lamb. Mmmm, that lamb was good, although slightly overcooked. I feel like the bison steak could have used more salt and pepper, but not bad. We also had the glorious duck fat drenched potatoes today.
Finale. LOTS OF PORK BELLY IN MAH BELLY.
Meatcation 2 done. Success. Animals beware, next year is coming!
Our Meatcation finale was smoking a whole suckling pig which we purchased from Whole Foods. It weighed about 26 pounds. We started by sticking it in the smoker around 4AM and I also started slow cooking some more oatmeal to be ready later in the day. We took shifts attending to the smoker’s temperature and smoke levels with Andrew going first and me taking over at around 7:30. In an attempt to keep the smoker hot, we got bricks which we wrapped in foil to place inside the smoker and we ghetto rigged it with some insulation.
When it was my turn, the temps had seemingly dropped to an abysmal 120F, which was far from our goal of about 200F-220F (I think that’s right). On top of that, our utility lighter ran out of juice, so I had to run to Walgreens to get a replacement. I eventually got new charcoal going and heated the smoker back up. When it was Mark’s turn to take over, he discovered that our thermometer was placed in the wrong area and was reading inaccurate temps… turns out it was about 50-80F hotter than it was reporting, so we probably accidentally went over our desired temperatures thinking we were far under.
Mark and I ate some oatmeal, and then we all went to our customary ultimate frisbee game at 1PM. We returned and Andrew and Mark prepared the sides/sauces, watched Florida lose to Alabama, and then finally broke into the pig at around 6:30PM.
Al, Ochs, Weishan and her family, Chad, Sam, Ryan and Angell came over (or were just around) to help us conquer the mass amounts of meat we had. Success!
Now for some pics…
Our pig, brand new out of the box… his name is Wilbur.
We stuffed Wilbur with various types of apples (and I think an onion as well).
Ryan fell asleep.
Customary apple in the mouth and the pig wrapped in banana leaves:
Checking up on the pig temps:
Almost ready to take out!
Preparing the table for Wilbur:
Wilbur’s head was one of the first things to fall off:
It’s go time!
And thus concludes Meatcation. =)
As a bonus, here’s a video of Andrew gouging out Wilbur’s eyeballs. Enjoy!
And here’s one of stuffing an apple in Wilbur’s mouth:
Day six was a bit of a day off… we decided to do something a bit exotic and got some sweetbread which we grilled.
Then, we chilled a bit until Ryan and I went to III Forks for our Bazaarvoice Technical Services team goal celebration. I continued the meat eating and got a filet mignon which was acceptably good although I wouldn’t say amazing.
After II Forks, we went to Chancy’s to celebrate the Nancy/Ochs bdays and hung out for a while. Now, it’s suckling pig smoking time for our finale! Stay tuned…
Meatcation day five consisted of chili and steaks. (some shots taken by Sam)
We made corn bread with the chili and sweet potatoes with the steaks. We also picked up our suckling pig. Woo! Tomorrow, we’ll start smoking it… and hopefully finish for Saturday. =)
Yes, day four of Meatcation. Today is the day of the elemental bacon. Bacon = bacon of the earth, scallops = bacon of the sea, and duck = bacon of the sky.
The day started with preparing the duck for smoking:
After it was cleaned, we started on a whole black drum fish for lunch, which we baked in a cast of kosher salt.
We also made plantains:
The fish is done!
Back to the duck…
The fish is gone.
It’s smoking time:
Andrew made dessert - a lemon almond tart.
As an aside, I also received my tauntaun sleeping bag! Woo!
It’s bacon + scallops time:
Elyse, Heather, and Steph joined us as we neared completion:
Woo! That was awesome. More pics in the flickr Meatcation set.
Mark and I started the day off by eating bacon with oatmeal we slow cooked the entire night (we got oats from Whole Foods, not that instant stuff =).
Then, we smoked salmon for lunch:
And had some mangoes with that:
Then, we (by we, I mean mostly Mark and Andrew) went totally awesome on ribs, despite the rain causing a lot of havoc on maintaining the appropriate temperature in the smoker. Despite that, they turned out pretty great:
And… we wrapped up the meal with peas:
Tomorrow, bacon of the elements (bacon, scallops, duck) for dinner and some undetermined whole fish for lunch.
For day two of Meatcation, as planned, we started smoking a large chunk of brisket and made our own sausages from scratch. Here’s a video of the sausage stuffing craziness:
I will say that our sausages were a great success despite there being doubt we could actually stuff them properly (we did not have the specific tools to make the job easy). Andrew and I got creative (as you can see from the video above) and made it work. For dinner, we also made our own BBQ sauce and cream corn.
Meatcation has begun! We kicked off the week with some tasty lamb chops with asparagus. We also built a questionable structure to guard our flame against the water from the heavens.
I also somehow managed to watch Star Trek three times last week (four if you count once with the commentary). Although, to be fair, I did fall asleep half of the last time through it (food coma). Here are some photos of my crazy sisters from Thanksgiving:
We plan on starting the smoker at ~3AM to cook brisket for Monday night. On to day 2!
