Year of the Cow (28 page)

Then, midtoast, I hear more loud beeping from the kitchen, accompanied by wisps of smoke. “Olive oil can sure be a tricky fat to cook with,” I think to myself. I stand and peek into the kitchen—

The kitchen is on fire.

The smoke detector, for once, went off when it was supposed to. The kitchen is a flurry of activity and smoke and fat yellow licks of flame. For a second, I don't know what's happening.

Summer does. She's hitting something. It's right in front of her; a tea towel is on fire. She's beating it mercilessly with the biggest spatula we have.

The smoke alarm, meanwhile, is shrieking to wake the dead.

“Put a lid on it!” I shout. “Not water. Smother it.” I still don't know if there is oil involved—water on flaming oil would only spread the fire. I don't enter the tiny kitchen, because the two people inside are already pushing it beyond capacity. Roo deftly reaches for a lid while Summer continues to beat the flames as though they stole from her.

A blur of motion, and Ben pops into the kitchen from a door on the far side, holding a broom. He hoists it over his head and stabs the off button on the smoke alarm.

The shrieking ceases. The fire goes out.

For a moment, all is still. Finally, someone laughs. The rest of us join in.

Summer looks to me, lurking in the doorway. “Don't say it,” she warns.

But I can't help myself—when Summer cooks, it's an opaque process. An observer can't deduce how well or poorly the endeavor is going by peeking in. Like the famous paradox of quantum mechanics, the meal is both sublime and catastrophic simultaneously until the process is complete. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Schrödinger's Kitchen.”

She swats me with a towel as I move to set the table.

The smoke cleared and the table set, we build tacos from the results of our day's labor. Fresh, homemade corn tortilla. A sprinkling of braised tongue. A streak of homemade salsa verde. A slice of avocado and a sprig of cilantro. I take a trepidatious bite.

Silence around the table.

“Damn,” quoth Ben.

“Wow,” Roo says. “These are awesome.” The meat is aromatic and earthy and rich, and just a little bit spicy. The salsa verde complements it beautifully, adding a touch of acid to the pungency of the meat. A little fat from the avocado. Perfection.

The four of us start to laugh and joke, giddy from how ridiculously good these tacos are. I shouldn't be able to cook something this delicious—I'm basically a chimp in a human suit. The four of us devour the entire two-and-a-half-pound tongue. There are no leftovers.

Ben and Roo stay well into the night. We chat about all the substance and miscellanea of life in the City of Angels—the tremendous joys of biking in the heart of car culture, how sensitive to cold we've become since our Kansas days. The ludicrous productivity of California gardens—Ben and Roo have installed a backyard garden that should be the envy of the county. That time we blew up a car during film school. That time we set the kitchen on fire.

I've been delirious from food before, but always in high-end restaurants. Beautiful plates from career professionals at the top of their game. Never from something I've done myself.

I'm giggly, motor-mouth, grinning-ear-to-ear happy.

I would never have bought a tongue if it didn't come with the cow. I would never have gambled with this meal in front of friends, and in all likelihood, I wouldn't have had the skill to pull this off. It's one thing to understand a process, like a braise—it's quite another to do it over and over, braising countless roasts and stews and obscure, unloved bits of beef that become something wonderful when treated with the respect they deserve, until the process is second nature. Almost a part of you. And then to share that with friends.

This meal—this one night alone—was worth it.

*   *   *

I'm sitting on the couch, leafing through
You Can Farm,
Joel Salatin's treatise on small-scale farming. The steady supply of vegetables from my backyard has me wondering just how much that land could produce. “So I was thinking I'd make dinner tonight. Cool?”

“Ah,
bueno,
” Summer replies. She's decided to learn Spanish. And French. At the same time. And she's pretty good and okay at each, respectively. I speak French pretty well, thanks to seven years of schooling. But today, Spanish is nearer the tip of her tongue.
“¿Qué estás cocinando?”

“Absolutely,” I reply, completely devoid of comprehension.

“What are you cooking?” she repeats.

“Oh.” I steal a glance out the window. Dec is drawing a maze on the pavement with sidewalk chalk. It's a maze with no exit. “Um…” I search the recesses of my brain for scraps of Spanish. “
Corazón,
” I stammer, hopeful that she'll think I'm being romantic. “Just for you and me.”

“
¿Corazón?
” she asks, looking for clarification.

“
Sí,
” I reply.
“Te ama
.
”
I love you.

Spanish falls away like a veil. “You are not going to cook me another beef heart.”

The game is up. “
¿Sí?
” I offer. The other half of the heart is still in the freezer. The time we did it previously, marinated on Valentine's Day, wasn't enough. We need to do it again, give it our best shot, and if we still don't like it—then we gave it the old college try. I am not ready to give up. I won't yet say that I don't like beef heart.

Horror creeps across her features. “No…,” she says.
“No quiero…”

I scramble for more Spanish but get nothing. “We can't let it go like this. We have another half a beef heart in that freezer. What are we going to do, throw it out?”

Her answer is a glare. Same in English and Spanish.

“The recipe I found looks fantastic. Lots of garlic, peppers, herbs.
Alla puttanesca
.” That's Italian for “of the whores.” Sounds bad—tastes great. According to legend, practitioners of the oldest profession would lure men into their boudoirs with the heady aromas of tomato, garlic, olives, and capers. Summer knows exactly what
puttanesca
is, and it's one of her favorite flavor profiles. Optimistic, I hold up my phone. “Look at the recipe.”

She does—and I am immediately regretful. “
Tartare?
” she asks, incredulous. I forgot to mention that part. A French culinary term, now come to signify “raw,” perhaps mixed with raw egg. “You want me to eat
raw beef heart
?”

“You don't have to eat it if you don't want to.” It's a gastronomic stretch, even for me. “However, I've researched preparations. And this looks the most like something we'd enjoy.”

“It's raw beef! It isn't safe!”

I consider for a moment as I wait for Summer's words to cease echoing from the living room rafters. “That isn't really how food-borne illness works,” I counter. “The bugs that make you sick live on the surface of the meat—in beef, at least—because it has to be deposited there.”

She looks at me sideways but doesn't speak. I continue. “With a beef heart, I'm cutting off all that surface. The rest should be perfectly safe. It's never been exposed to air before. No chance of contamination.”

“Raw,” she counters.

“But this isn't supermarket beef,” says I. “This is our beef. I brought this home.”

She considers. But finally, “I'm sorry. I just don't think I can.”

“As a compromise, I'll make you anything you want tomorrow. You name it—cut and preparation. I'll tell you what we have, you tell me what to do.”

A smile flickers across the corner of her mouth. “I like steaks.”

“I've heard.”

“I like expensive steaks. Prepared the way I like them. And I don't care if you had another preparation in mind.”

“Sky's the limit,” I reply.

A long moment passes. Then, “Okay,” she says. “Make your raw beef heart.”

*   *   *

For a dish that doesn't require cooking, there's an awful lot of prep.

First, I trim the heart. As before, there's an awful (offal?) lot of material that isn't edible or delicious. Unlike last time, however, I'm much quicker with the knife and much more aware of what I'm looking for. A scant ten minutes after tearing open the package, I have three slim, if irregular, steaks laid out on my cutting board.

Also, I use a stainless-steel bowl to catch my trimmings. Opaque. Lesson learned.

Right about now would be a lovely time to have a meat grinder. I don't. What I do have is a good knife and a strong arm. I painstakingly slice the heart steaks into quarter-inch slices. Then into quarter-inch strips. Then, finally, into quarter-inch cubes, which I stash in a glass bowl on the far edge of my counter.

“It looks different,” my wife comments as she swings through the kitchen. “Just like beef rather than a crime scene.”

I laugh. “I diced it fine, like we did with the tongue. I have a feeling it may quell any texture issues we had.”

“It'll still be raw.”

“Yes. It'll still be raw.”

She glances from the bowl to me, still wary, but I can tell she's warming to the idea. I turn back to my work space. I jettison my cutting board, clean my knife, and wipe down the counter.

Onward to vegetation. I dice some red onion to the same size cubes as the beef and do likewise with some kalamata olives. I slice a couple of serrano chiles into the thinnest little intimations of heat that my knife skills will allow and quarter some cherry tomatoes. All this goes into the bowl with the cubed heart. Then I wander into our backyard, pick a lemon, and zest that into the bowl as well—along with a couple splashes of good olive oil and red wine vinegar, fresh mint and basil sliced into ribbons, some big flakes of sea salt, and a few grinds of pepper. I mix the mass with my own clean hands, turning it slowly without squeezing, letting the meat and the tomatoes and the ribbons of herbs fall gently back into the bowl from my fingers. The bowl will rest in the fridge until dinner.

Finally, I slice a few cloves of garlic into nanometer-thin slices and sauté them in olive oil for ten or so seconds, or until they just begin to color. After they cool, they're crisp and gloriously fragrant.

Two hours later, my wife sits across the table from me. Between us, a red mound of raw beef heart, piled in the center of a large white plate and all the more colorful for the contrast. Crispy garlic flakes strewn atop like fallen leaves. The air between Summer and me is heavy with the smell of good things.

“You sure you aren't interested?” I ask.

“Positive,” she replies. “Though it smells wonderful. I'm sure it's delicious.”

I gingerly spoon a bit of the mixture onto a slim oval of grain-free almond flour crackers that I made from scratch. I examine the morsel I hold in my hand—it really is a gorgeous dish. Red cubes of meat, the occasional olive or bright green ribbon of herb. A golden shard of garlic.

I take a bite.

“Well?” Summer asks.

I pause a moment. On the one hand, I'm eating a raw beef heart. It's by far the most adventurous thing I've ever cooked—using that term loosely here—and one of the most adventurous things I've ever eaten. On the other hand—

“It's good.” And it is. Without a doubt, this is the way to prepare it. When diced small and eaten raw, texture isn't an issue as it was on my previous attempt. Without that textural distraction, the focus is on the taste of the meat—deep and intense. Incredibly robust and heightened by the equally strong flavors surrounding it—garlic and olives, hot pepper and mint, and vinegar. “It's really good.”

“Well, great. I'm glad it worked out,” she says, eyes darting from me to the bowl between us.

“You'd like this, Summer.”

“No, I can't eat it. I'll get sick.”

“I don't think you will. That texture issue we had last time? Gone.”

“Really?” she asks, still wary.

“Look,” I say, placing another dollop. “I'm not trying to guilt you into eating this. If it's too much of a psychological barrier, I get that. But I know you. And I would not tell you this if I didn't believe it was true: You would like this dish.”

Looking down at the bowl, she scrunches her mouth up in the way she always does when she's thinking. Then, slowly, she piles a spoonful onto a cracker and takes a bite.

“Okay, yeah,” she says. “That is good.” She reaches for a second cracker.

I grin. I'm glad we didn't give up on this one. I'm glad we didn't resign this cut to the list of things we don't like, won't eat, can't eat, won't touch. Making use of every bit of the animal is a sacred act, as well as a practical one. I don't like killing animals—or, in this case, having one killed on my behalf. But it's a very efficient way—if grass-fed—to turn plants into protein without extensive fossil fuel use. Every ecosystem that grows plants has animal participants—and if they don't, the animal's contributions are mimicked: tilling the soil with petroleum-powered tractors and simulating manure with nitrogen fertilizer. Not only do pastured animals not require fossil fuel—they're edible. And what's more, they're good for you. There's a reason why there's never been a fully vegetarian society, outside certain religious communities. It's hard to maintain. It's difficult to get optimal nutrition from a solely vegetarian diet (though I won't say it's impossible), and it would have been even more difficult to be a vegetarian before the development of modern agriculture.

We've evolved to eat animals (and just about anything else that we could get our hands on), but along the way we've also developed a conscience and a sense of regret that we have to take a life to sustain our own. And eating every bit of this animal seems like the right thing to do.