My last Think Local column in the Philadelphia Weekly came out today. Budget cuts led to the elimination of the second page of food coverage. For this final piece, I explored a local fruit cannery. Click here for the full story.

Top Row (from left): One World Coffee, raw milk, lardo, bacon. Bottom Row: beef cubes, Pub Cheddar, Cow Pie, Parmesan, Orange Cardamom Sausage

Today’s trip to Hendricks Farm yielded an impressive (and wallet-busting) array of treats), as well as an opportunity to chat at length with Bob del Grosso, who prepared both the sausage and the lardo.

I first read about lardo in Bill Buford’s Heat, and I remember salivating at his description of cured pig’s fat seasoned with rosemary and other spices. Bob’s version did not disappoint. Upon his suggestion, I tried it thinly sliced on some fresh bread, heated for a few minutes under the broiler. Fat lovers: hunt this stuff down!

The Parmesan and Pub Cheddar are old favorites, which I wrote about on an earlier visit to the farm. This was my first encounter with the cow pie, though. This bloomy rind cheese was surprisingly acidic. Had I known better, I would have thought it was chevre. Regardless, it was outstanding.

The beef cubes are for tomorrow’s stew. I was kicking myself on the drive home, when I realized that the one pound I picked up was far to little: forget about even the possibility of leftovers.

Finally, the coffee is from local roaster One Village Coffee. Evidently, they roast right down the road from the farm. This is a blend roasted especially for Hendrick’s Farm. I hope it lives up to the standards I have for the rest of their products.

If anyone remains faithfully checking this blog, all two of you will be excited to see my latest article. I saved some gas this month and took the EL up to scenic Kensington to visit Greensgrow Farms.  I was pleased to be able to stroll over to the Memphis Taproom for the beginning of Mystery Beer Weekend. Turns out I guessed wrong on all three beers. Anyway, here’s the story.

You’ll have to stay tuned for a future post about how I’m making use of the remaining half dozen quail eggs in my refrigerator. In the meantime, here’s a link to my latest story, on Griggstown Quail Farm, outside of Princeton, NJ.

Welcome to the world of biodynamic yogurt. My latest column in the Philadelphia Weekly is on Seven Stars Farm in Phoenixville, PA.

Hopefully people aren’t getting tired about local cheesemakers. Here’s a link to my latest article. This one is about Shellbark Hollow Dairy, outside of West Chester, PA. Click here to read the article.

I’m hoping they just screwed up the title on the online version. I haven’t seen the printed copy yet, but I’m pretty certain that I didn’t write anything about the role of oats in milk production.

One of these days I’m going to have enough free time to resume putting up original content up here. Until then, I’m going to have to resort to providing links to relevant articles. Are they always going to come from the New York Times? Let’s just say it’s my first resource when it comes to squandering my time online. Today’s example:

Amid the tightly packed row houses of North Philadelphia, a pioneering urban farm is providing fresh local food for a community that often lacks it, and making money in the process.

Greensgrow, a one-acre plot of raised beds and greenhouses on the site of a former steel-galvanizing factory, is turning a profit by selling its own vegetables and herbs as well as a range of produce from local growers, and by running a nursery selling plants and seedlings.

They also do honey. This is the type of shit I’ll be writing about in my monthly column in the Philadelphia Weekly, starting tomorrow. But it looks like I got scooped on this one.

Get the cardiologist on the line

This cut of beef, pictured above as an integral part of Sunday’s breakfast, is a bit of a mystery. Procured from a Pennsylvania purveyor at the Clark Park Farmer’s Market on Saturday, the “Ranch Steak” is the ideal size for the “steak” half of the classic “steak and eggs” combination. Grass-fed and dry-aged, the steak had a nice degree of marbling. I seasoned it with salt and pepper, cooked it for about five minutes in a pan over medium-high heat, then put it under the broiler to cook the other side, until the steak reached medium rare.

I think this was the optimal method for preparing the steak, and I was certainly pleased with the results. But I wasn’t certain, because the cut of meat is a bit of a mystery. My two most reliable cookbooks for general information, Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything and the 1985 edition of The Joy of Cooking, both provide clear diagrams of a cow and a side of beef, respectively, illustrating the provenance of each individual cut of beef, as well as the preferred method for cooking each cut. But neither book acknowledges the ranch steak. Did I eat some sort of phantom cut of meat? Or does the ranch steak go by a different name?

Luckily, the internet is functioning properly, and Wikipedia also has a nice diagram of a cow. Apparently, I was suckered:

The Ranch steak comes from the chuck cut of a cow, namely the shoulder. Technically it is called a “boneless chuck shoulder center cut steak”, but supermarkets, in an effort to get the patron a better sounding as well as an easier to remember name, dubbed it the “Ranch steak”.

The demands of the market influence small-scale producers too. My local farm evidently followed the lead of the big supermarkets, labeling my “boneless chuck shoulder center cut steak” something more commercially viable.

This labeling also disguised the fact that, at least by the book, the chuck steaks are tough, and best cooked by moist-heat procedures. But my steak, while no filet mignon, was tender enough, both to the knife and my teeth. Maybe this is where the grass-fed beef makes a difference. According to Michael Pollan, grass-fed beef does have less saturated fat and more omega-3 fatty acids than corn-fed beef. And maybe the overall nature of production matters. These cattle were not raised on a massive industrial cattle ranch, but instead on a small farm, where they were presumably pumped less full of drugs and lived a generally more satisfying existence before heading to the abattoir.

All speculation aside, with this particular steak, I will happily flout the advice of the cookbooks and prepare over dry-heat, along with eggs and potatoes, for a lazy weekend breakfast.

Lest my readership assume that I’ve lost every bit of my social conscience, and embraced a lifestyle of decadence, I should reemphasize that not everyone in the world gets to consume in quite the same way that we Americans do.

The NY Times recognized this point bluntly today, in a cogent editorial:

Most Americans take food for granted. Even the poorest fifth of households in the United States spend only 16 percent of their budget on food. In many other countries, it is less of a given. Nigerian families spend 73 percent of their budgets to eat, Vietnamese 65 percent, Indonesians half. They are in trouble.

So, it’s one thing for me to prattle along about the fancy shit I just ate, but a little global perspective provides a sobering reminder. Just to save a little face, I didn’t stumble on to the Times piece until after I wrote the previous post.

Continuing on yesterday’s farm theme, cows aren’t the only animals running around Hendricks Farm. Either the sow pictured above or her companion, who were both about a week away from producing a litter, is now a mother.

That is indeed a streak of blood across pig’s nose, sustained while battling with her friend for a heaping bucket of beet scraps.

These pigs are evidently at the foreground of Hendricks Farm’s nascent charcuterie operation, something I’m looking forward to following up on.