Cooking tips for Uncle Pete

clearly this guy has Dr. Dirt in mind . . . he even uses the word, "flaccid."



Enjoy your bacon.

Easily the funniest book of the year

Every now and then I run across a book review on amazon that I wish I had written. Meat lovers among you should appreciate this one. The following was someone's review for Carol Adams's book, The Pornography of Meat. Enjoy!

easily the funniest book i've read all year,

May 31, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Pornography of Meat (Hardcover)

if christopher guest ever set out to do - in a book about intellectuals - what he has done on film to rock bands and dog shows, The Pornography of Meat would be the result. here is a book that is so bizzarely and feverishly "leftist" that it seems to defy all reason. the book is a carnival of anti-meat, anti-porn, and anti-man rhetoric that may or may not be true. but, honestly, i can't tell you whether or not it is, because i can't wade through this text seriously. it looks SO MUCH like it was written to act as a parody, that i have a difficult time approaching it as actual scholarship. the basic idea seems to be something like this: there is a distinct and provable relationship between the consumption of meat (or at least media depictions thereof) and the consumption of pornographic movies/magazines, etc.. this all presumably builds from the logic of her first book The Sexual Politics of Meat, which i do not own.

the unquestionable highlight of the book are the many pictures that are offered up as evidence of this sordid relationship between porn and meat: the adult video cover where the female character is "hunted" by lustful men, the 30 year old ad for turkey where the bird carcass is layed out in what we are assured is a purposefully lurid pose. the whole thing is really sort of - excuse the pun - undigestable from the point of view of the skeptic. of course, if you're already a zealous, fervid, wild eyed supporter of these sorts of ideas, then this book will be very gratifying. girls with hairy armpits at liberal-arts colleges in vermont are going to be carrying this around like it was the Bible. the only thing that's missing (though perhaps it's there and i just missed it) was a way to tie all of this in with good old fashioned socialism. you know, the oppression of the masses by the ruling elite? the great future that is bound to come when the terror of property is destroyed and we all live on a big hug-a-bear commune and make arts and crafts and uncomfortable itchy hemp shirts? well, other than that, this book is an angry liberals wet dream.

look, let me speak honestly: i'm a man. i don't think of myself as a part of a patriarchy, or as an oppressor or rapist, or even as a good speller. and i do eat meat. plus, i'm a libertarian, which means that everyone regards me as a "conservative". so, you know, this book obviously wasn't written for me. i appreciate and identify with feminists, but books like this give them a bad name. maybe a book like this is supposed to be so "revolutionary" that it shocks everyone out of their dogmatic slumbers, but it just comes of as fanatical and - worse - flaky. so, take my ill-informed phallocentric egodriven opinion for what it's worth. read this book. if i'm wrong, WHICH EVEN AS A QUASI-CONSERVATIVE I CAN ADMIT THAT I MIGHT BE, then this book will be very informative. if i'm right, then you're bound to find this as entertaining as i did.

Cast Iron Skillet Goose with Horseradish for Carol and Gordon

Per boneless goose breast: marinate ~ 24-36 hours in equal parts veg or olive oil and red wine (not red wine vinegar), to nearly cover breast; 1TBL soy, 1/2 TBL worchester, rough cut garlic, dash marjorum, dash summer savory. Turn often to keep moist. Take your big ol' cast iron skillet, sautee more rough cut garlic in mixof butter, cooking oil, bacon grease (whatever your pleasure--we used mostly bacon grease). Bring it up to absolutely smoking hot. Yes, it will be a pain to get that blackened garlic off the pan. That worry is for later. Sear whole goose breast about 2 mins per side until blackened. Pour in enough of the marinade to create a broth. DO NOT REDUCE HEAT--this means the marinade better be pre-heated or you may crack your skillet wide open. Cover skillet and cook breast about 3-4 more mins per side or until desired doneness (you can cheat and bisect the breast cross-ways to see what it looks like--for my $.02, the very outer should be seared black, fading to a good deep red in the middle [not the flaccid pink of the Black Lake DuckI ncident, of Which we Shall Not Speak]). When desired level of over-cookedness is achieved (deliberate swipe at the heathens among us who refuse to eat waterfowl until the livin bejeepers is cooked out of it), slice as thin as you can manage (across the breast), and serve on baguette slices with horseradish and a twist or two of fresh pepper.

Serious.