In an effort to cut back on factory beef and start buying only grass-fed beef from a local farm, I discovered www.eatwild.com. The Eat Wild site provides information on the benefits of grass feeding for animals, farmers, the environment, and your health. You can link to safe, healthy, natural and nutritious grass-fed meats, dairy, and other wild edibles. You can click your state on the map and find farms. I know of a couple farms that were not on the site, but this site is out of Washington. The results are in alphabetical order so scroll through. I found three farms within about 20 miles from our house that sell beef by the package instead of by the side. We have a regular refrigerator/freezer, so there isn’t room to freeze extra food like a side of beef. We don’t have time to go out to the farm often, but it will be nice occasionally.
Our first farm meat purchase was when the kids were still home, and it was a lovely family outing. The farm was less than a half hour from our house. After exiting the highway we drove along the Monocacy River for a couple miles, so close to the river that my daughter said, “They should put up a fence along here.” We got into a small town, where there was one business on the corner – a bakery/deli. The farm store was beautiful, there was a large fire in the fireplace, and the farmer was fun and knowledgeable (and he refused to even discuss chicken)! The farm focuses on the development of strategies to help make the region’s smaller beef operations more viable, and stewardship of the soil and water resources are especially important to them.
The ground beef at the farm is 90% lean and they were having a sale where if you buy 20 1-pound packages, the special price was $3.99/pound. I was able to fit 17 of the 1-lb packages into one drawer in our freezer. The rest of the meat we bought almost filled one additional shelf.
We brought a cooler along to carry our beef home and we selected:
- Two 1-lb packages of stew meat @ $5.95/pound (two meals)
- One 2.6-lb Mock Tender Roast @ $7.95/pound (two meals)
- Two .5-lb Flat Iron Steak @ $11.95/pound (one meal)
- Three 1-lb Sirloin Steaks @ $9.95/pound (to divide in half – three meals)
- One 1-lb package of sandwich steaks @ $5.95/pound
- 20 1-lb packages of 90% lean ground beef @ $3.99/pound (20 meals)
- Two packages of six all beef franks $11.60
Using half the ground beef to make hamburgers or meatloaf (adding pork to the meatloaf), that covers ten meals (1 lb per meal), and the other half of the ground beef for sauces, stuffed cabbage, or whatever else uses ground beef for another ten meals. I double the other ingredients in these recipes so we had an easy second meal of leftovers.
The beef franks gave the kids four meals mixed with the four meals of steak for the parents, with some hot dogs left in the freezer for an emergency. We do not throw pearls at swine if you know what I mean – the kids are perfectly content eating hot dogs, especially since they only have them a handful of times a year. I usually don’t like hot dogs unless I’m at a baseball game or someone else grills them, then they’re one of my favorite foods – weird.
That makes at least 25 meals with beef, and sticking to having red meat once a week, we bought six months of beef for $176.73. That’s just counting dinners. The sandwich steaks were thinly sliced and individually separated, so if Tony is craving a meat sandwich, he can have identifiable beef instead of carcinogenic sodium nitrite-treated cold cuts from the deli counter at the local grocery store.
There are more farm stores now and, as you can see even though they charge more than the grocery store, you know where your meat is coming from and you can plan out meals to make it more economical.
