The Butcher by Debbie Mascot
I can't buy meat. I really don't know how. I'm okay with hamburger and chicken breasts, but if the recipe calls for anything else, I feel like I'm in a dream in a movie. You know, where the meat department suddenly grows to monstrous proportions and I become a tiny little thing trying to find what I need. A bad dream in a bad movie. Very bad.
Once we had a recipe for something really tasty (I can't remember what it was) and it called for "strip steak." We braved the supermarket. Marc is no better than I am in the meat department except that he isn't as married to the recipe as I am and will, after an hour or two of looking for the words "strip steak" on EVERY package, suggest something that doesn't have those words but still might work. I won't do that. I follow recipes. We scrapped that one. And all I remember was that it looked tasty and easy. If it weren't for that darned "strip steak."
At my last visit, my dad took me with him to the grocery store. He was making a delicious pork dish and showed me what kind of pork to buy. I took mental notes as to what it was called ("country style pork") and what it looked like and about how much it cost so that I could duplicate the purchase. I also made sure to find out what else it could be called. Evidently "loin" and "boneless ribs" are common names. However, "boneless ribs" is kind of an oxymoron if you ask me. But who am I to call pork any kind of moron. If you watch the Simpsons, you know: Homer: Are you saying you're never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon? Lisa: No. Homer: Ham? Lisa: No! Homer: Pork chops? Lisa: Dad, those all come from the same animal! Homer: Heh heh heh... ooh... yeah... right, Lisa. A wonderful...magical animal. (Side note: I made the wonderful, magical country style pork and it was excellent.)
Marc and I went grocery shopping last week and decided to make Beef Stroganoff. We found this little package thing that had everything listed on the back that you'd need and we saw the name of some weird meat. We looked at eachother and our eyes agreed that it'd been awhile since we'd had that bad giant meat department dream. We walked to the back of the store.
We searched for about 10 minutes and were just deciding to put the little Beef Stroganoff package and the sour cream back and let the meat department shrink back to his original size.
And then we saw him. Our knight in shining... knives. Wearing a bloody white apron and weilding a butcher's knife, he could either be a maniac loose in the store or... shock of all shocks... a butcher.
We'd not done this before. This thing called "asking for help." Could we? Should we? Shouldn't any normal human being be able to find meat on his or her own? Would he laugh at us? Call us stupid? Tape "kick me" stickers to our backs when we weren't looking?
He did none of those things. Instead he showed us the meat we'd need and then took it in the back and cut it up for us.
Amazing.
The butcher is our new best friend.