Year of the Cow

by Jared Stone

  “Had it for lunch.”

  “Soup? I know of one we could—”

  She cuts me off. “Why don’t we just order a pizza?”

  I shake my head. Then, an idea hits me: something I’ve been reading about. “Hey, do you remember how to make your dad’s pizza sauce?”

  “Sure.”

  “Perfect. I’ll make meatza.”

  She blinks. “Wait, what?”

  * * *

  Forty-five minutes later, a small pot of homemade pizza sauce simmers on the back of the stove as I pull out my cast-iron skillet. I love this thing. It’s my favorite surface to cook on now, bar none. The cast iron heats up slowly and evenly, it’s damn near indestructible, and it’s largely nonstick. High heat? Low heat? Searing? Frying? Oven roasting? Cast iron don’t care. Cast iron can do that and will do that better than anything else in the kitchen. I cook with it all the time now, and it’s gotten shinier and blacker as a result. Cast iron, treated properly, gets better with age as carbon from cooking fats seals to the metal, making the surface slicker and more durable. The more it’s used, the better it gets.

  I drop the skillet on the stove with a thud. “Easy,” my wife admonishes. But I love slamming this thing around. This isn’t some pantywaist casserole dish. This is a hunk of slag iron. This is for making shit hot.

  In a bowl, I whisk an egg, then add a pound of ground beef and some herbs. Once the mixture is thoroughly combined, I transfer it to the cast-iron skillet, pressing it down to line the bottom of the skillet—as thinly and uniformly as I can. If this were pizza, I’d be making a pizza crust. But I’m not making pizza.

  I slip the skillet into the oven to brown. After about twelve minutes, the meat disk has shrunk considerably. I remove it, drain off all the fat that I can, and turn my attention to toppings.

  Also, I mentally note that this dish seems ridiculous. I take a brief moment to cackle maniacally.

  Right. Toppings. Because the “crust” is meat, vegetation is the order of the day. Specifically, red onions, black olives, and a little mozzarella cheese. After a thin layer of tomato sauce, I add the toppings and a little julienned basil for garnish. After a five-minute broil—the meat is already cooked, and this is just to melt and partially caramelize the cheese—dinner is served.

  At the table, Summer’s eyes dart from the meatza to me and back. The disk has been sliced into one-inch squares for easy noshing.

  “So, it’s pizza,” she says.

  “More or less.”

  “But with a meat crust instead of a bread crust.”

  I hesitate. Then, “Yeah.”

  She sighs, not sure what to think. “Okay, let’s do this thing.”

  I serve the three of us tiny cubes of faux pizza. It’s tasty—the cheese and meat picked up nutty flavors from the Maillard reaction, and the veggies are a welcome counterpoint—but it isn’t pizza. Declan picks off the cheese but largely leaves the meat.

  Without warning, Summer laughs. “You made a damn pizza with a meat crust.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I guess I did.”

  She starts laughing harder. “This isn’t a pizza.”

  Now I start laughing. “Not really, no.”

  She brings a hand to her face as guffaws roll out of her in great waves.

  “It’s good, though! It’s not a failure!” I protest.

  She tries to control herself. “No. It’s like a meatball with cheese and tomato sauce on it. And veggies.” The laughter rumbles back. “But it is not, in any sense or fashion, a frigging pizza.”

  Declan starts laughing, too, catching the giggles from his mother. Finally, unable to resist, I join in as well. The three of us dissolve into hilarity, tears streaming down our cheeks, unable to speak or do much of anything for several minutes.

  No. It is not in any way, shape, or form a pizza.

  But I’m okay with that.

  * * *

  For the next couple of weeks, I eat no grains at all. No bread. No wheat whatsoever. No oatmeal. No corn, no corn chips, no tortillas. No sugar or anything containing sugar. I drink heavy cream in my coffee. I eat beef. A lot of eggs. A lot of salads. And a lot of salads with beef and/or eggs. More veggies than a vegan fever dream. For much of this time, I feel terrible. I’m hungry. A little groggy. I feel like something isn’t right. Not ill per se, but out of sorts. I’m not accustomed to eating like this. I’m keeping up with my personal and professional obligations, but barely.

  Then, one Thursday, I drop Declan off at day care and trundle off to the office. I don’t eat much for breakfast today because I’m just not hungry. But I don’t feel ill. I don’t feel anything, really. I feel … fine.

  I also forgot to make a lunch. So around midday, I swing by a local joint with a decent salad bar. I sidle up and fill my to-go box with an assortment of brightly colored veggies. Then, on a whim, I add a few cherry tomatoes. I don’t usually eat tomatoes, but what the hell. Today I’m feeling frisky. Man cannot live on red peppers alone.

  Back at my office, I sit down to lunch. I’m eating at my desk because the time that I would have spent in an idyllic workday picnic had to be used for acquiring a salad instead. This will be a working lunch, as I try to put my day back into some semblance of order. Eyes on my computer screen, I spear a tomato with my fork and take a bite.

  Dear God.

  This tomato is the most spectacular, heart-stoppingly delicious piece of plant matter I’ve ever placed in my mouth. It is the platonic ideal of yum. I had no idea that tomatoes—nay, plants at all—could taste so good. This tomato could stop wars or start them. It is Turkish delight, Soma, and the spice of Arrakis all rolled into one. I freeze and look down at my salad. What alchemy, what esoteric dark arts did the nice people at the Ralph’s employ to make this tomato so transcendent? So divine?

  I think. I haven’t eaten any processed sugar, or anything sweet at all, really, for a couple of weeks now. What seems to have happened—what must have happened—is that I’m very sensitive to sweetness now. It’s something rare and special. Something to be savored. Further, there are subtleties in the flavor of this tomato that aren’t readily apparent to taste buds numbed by a deluge of sugar and sugar substitutes. It’s richer and fuller than any tomato I’ve ever had. Or, more accurately, I’m more aware of its richness and fullness. It’s like I’ve never quite tasted a tomato until this moment.

  I poke through my salad. I only have six tomatoes. Why on God’s green earth did I not get more tomatoes? Why didn’t I fill my chintzy plastic tub to the brim with tomatoes? What was I thinking? From now on, it’s all tomatoes, all the time.

  Or, you know. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get a few more tomatoes in my salad.

  Wow.

  * * *

  The next morning, I open my eyes on a new world.

  I’m alert, focused, and not sluggish at all. What’s more, rather than experiencing merely the absence of the malaise I’ve encountered for a week or two—I feel actively fantastic. I get Dec ready for day care in record time, and I’m out the door in a flash. I drop off Declan and head into the office feeling like a million bucks.

  Once I’ve settled into my routine, it dawns on me: I completely forgot breakfast. Ordinarily, this would be a problem. Ordinarily, this would make me a little shaky and cause my mood to plummet as my hypoglycemic tendencies took hold. Ordinarily, I’d grumpily search for a bagel.

  Evidently, that is no longer ordinary.

  I attack my day from a cloud. Extra couple of scripts? No problem. Deliverables changed? No biggie. I feel light and quick. I have energy and enthusiasm to spare. I find myself tackling random self-imposed physical challenges for no real reason at all. Can I jump over that? Let’s find out. How many steps can I take running on the wall before I crash back to earth? Three, barely. How many pull-ups can I do? Not enough.

  Lunch is another enormous salad—a salad of the gods. Extra tomatoes.

  After lunch, I go on a walk. I have my phone, so I’m reachable, but the office won
’t collapse if I’m gone for twenty minutes.

  I walk a little farther than I anticipated.

  Then, I run.

  I am exuberant.

  Meatza

  Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

  Serves 6

  Just because you give up grains doesn’t mean you have to give up pizza.

  Well, okay. It kind of does.

  James Beard made a version of this, which he called “hamburger pizza.” This isn’t quite a pizza, but it is a respectable meal in its own right—and filling: A little meatza goes a very long way.

  1 large egg

  1 pound grass-fed ground beef

  1 clove garlic, minced

  1 teaspoon kosher salt

  1 teaspoon dried oregano

  1 teaspoon dried thyme

  ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

  About ¼ cup Tomato Sauce, or to taste (recipe follows)

  4 ounces mozzarella, shredded

  ½ red onion, sliced

  4 ounces pitted black olives, sliced

  5 fresh basil leaves, thinly sliced

  1. Move one rack of the oven to the topmost position and the other to the middle. Preheat the oven to 450°F.

  2. In a large bowl, whisk the egg until smooth. Add the beef, garlic, salt, oregano, thyme, and pepper, and knead thoroughly to combine.

  3. Press the beef mixture into the bottom of a cold 10-inch cast-iron skillet, pressing it all the way to the edges in a uniform thickness. In general, thinner is better. It helps to gently work the meat mixture up the side of the cast-iron pan, to give the eventual “crust” a concave shape. The disk will shrink during cooking.

  4. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until the meat has browned and shrunk in from the edges of the skillet.

  5. Preheat the broiler to high.

  6. Pour off any excess fat that has accumulated in the pan, and blot the top of the meat with a paper towel until mostly dry.

  7. Spread a thin layer of Tomato Sauce over the surface of the meat, then add the mozzarella, onion, and olives, in the amount desired, and top with the basil.

  8. Broil for 5 to 10 minutes, until the mozzarella is lightly browned and bubbly.

  9. Remove to a cutting board and slice into pieces a little smaller than you think is appropriate. Remember: This stuff is filling.

  Substitutions in toppings can be made as one would with any ordinary pizza. Roasted red peppers especially shine here. Stick to a topping or two, at most, for best results. And you’ll probably want to stick to veggie toppings. Trust me on this one.

  TOMATO SAUCE

  Makes about 2 cups

  4 cloves garlic, diced

  2 tablespoons olive oil

  1 (15-ounce) can tomato sauce, plus ½ can water

  1 (6-ounce) can tomato paste

  1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

  1 tablespoon dried oregano

  1 tablespoon dried basil

  1 bay leaf

  1. In a medium stockpot over medium heat, sauté the garlic in the oil until just fragrant, about 3 minutes.

  2. Add the tomato sauce and water, tomato paste, pepper, basil, and oregano, and stir gently to combine. Add the bay leaf.

  3. Simmer, covered, for 1 hour. Remove the bay leaf before using. Leftovers can be frozen for future use.

  9

  Heart

  The thing about having an entire cow disassembled and packed tightly into a freezer in the backyard is that one discovers a tremendous variety of beef cuts one wouldn’t ordinarily encounter. There’s an awful lot of crazy stuff in that box. Among the familiar steaks and roasts, there are culinary emissaries from the great unknown. Tongue. Heart. Miscellaneous wiggly bits. Offal.

  Foremost among the cuts I’d otherwise likely never encounter are cuts that most people don’t think of as edible at all—bones. I have bags and bags of them. It turns out that a full-grown adult steer has a lot of skeleton rattling around inside it.

  Today I’m using some of these bones in a braise. Specifically, shank. I’m braising a cross section of the leg of the animal, like a beef osso buco. However, osso buco is generally braised veal shank, not beef, so I’m calling this a fauxxo buco.

  As the shank bubbles and gurgles on the back burner of my stove, I find myself in what’s become a glorious by-product of the cooking process—spare time. Moments like this have become more common as I’ve been cooking more, but I’m still not used to them. I’m like a kid at a middle school dance. I’m standing there in my kitchen, glancing awkwardly around, unsure what to do with my hands. The dish is cooking, so I’m technically “working,” but I can relax, secure in the knowledge that I’m being productive. I have a few minutes to do something else. A rare, unscripted moment.

  I can do anything I want.

  I head back out into the backyard and sort through the packages of beef. I pull out a bag of bones.

  Beef marrow bones are the leg bones of the steer; mine are sliced into about three-inch sections. They aren’t especially common in American restaurants, let alone home kitchens, as a dish unto themselves. They are, however, one of the foundational elements used in making stock, as well as a key piece of equipment for keeping dogs occupied for long periods of time.

  Fergus Henderson is the chef at the groundbreaking London restaurant St. John. He is justifiably famous for creating a nose-to-tail menu at his establishment, offering a culinary wonderland of dishes that diners would be hard-pressed to find almost anywhere else. Pig tails, duck hearts, lamb kidneys—and, yes, beef marrow bones—a cavalcade of weird and wonderful dishes, many uniquely British, all of them prepared with the utmost respect for the animal that gave its life for that meal.

  In his excellent book The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating, he offers a preparation of Roast Bone Marrow and Parsley Salad that I’ve been desperate to try. Now is my chance.

  The dish is dead simple. Marrow bones, roasted until the fatty, unctuous marrow is wobbly but not rendered. Parsley, roughly chopped. Shallots, sliced thin. A small handful of capers. A vinaigrette of lemon juice and oil. And toasted baguette, sliced thin on the bias and smeared with the bone marrow, to hold it all. Toasted baguette is something I don’t really do anymore, but I’m willing to briefly suspend my grain abstinence for the sake of making this dish properly. This baguette isn’t some extruded puffed-rice, flavor-dusted concoction. This is made by a baker I trust, toasted at home, and piled high with greenery and fresh bone marrow that I prepared myself. This is a treat—and a rare one.

  “Hey. What are you making?” My wife peeks in the door of the kitchen as I’m running a knife through a sea of emerald-green vegetation.

  “Sit,” I implore, ignoring her question. “I made a salad.”

  “With the oven?”

  “It’s a good salad.”

  She smiles a bit, noticing that I’m being coy. She crosses her hands on the table expectantly.

  I array the marrow bones between us, in a ring surrounding the parsley-and-shallot salad. “Bold move, Stone.” She looks from the bones to me. “We’ve always fed these to Basil.”

  “Let’s see what we’ve been missing.” I dig the marrow out of the bones with a butter knife. Then I pick up a slice of toasted baguette, smear the bone marrow across the top, and cap it with a pinch of the parsley salad.

  We crunch down into our salad-on-toast. I’ve never had straight bone marrow before, but now I know this won’t be the last time. It’s phenomenal. It truly is God’s butter. It’s well worth briefly violating my prohibition against bread.

  “Wow,” Summer understates.

  “Yeah,” I reply. My eloquence knows no bounds.

  “Why have you not made this before?”

  “Because I’m not very smart.” Clearly. “I want to eat this all the time. I want this to always be in my mouth.”

  She takes another bite. “I’m so happy right now.”

  “Me too.” We chew in silence for a moment, then we each begin to giggle. It’s that good. “I�
�m not giving these to Basil ever again.” We laugh like idiots, enjoying the unexpected pleasure of this unplanned culinary adventure.

  “How did you make this?”

  “I roasted bone marrow and ran a knife through some greenery.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “It sounds so easy,” she notes. She isn’t wrong. “You should make this during the week.”

  “I’d love to. But it just takes a little more time on a Thursday than we actually have, you know?” I crunch down on another bite. “I can barely start cooking by eight. Seven if we’re lucky.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “The by-product of a two-income household, I suppose.”

  “Maybe.” I gather up some fallen parsley with a fork. “This is food, though. We should have enough time in the day to adequately feed ourselves.”

  “We’ll work on it,” she offers, reaching for another crust of bread. “In the meantime, we aren’t starving. Don’t be a downer.” She grins.

  “Fair enough.” I laugh. “I’ll save up my existential crises for later in the week.”

  “There ya go.”

  The fauxxo buco comes out of the braise butter soft and gloriously rich. I pair it with an easy reduction sauce and a quick gremolata—a bright little herb condiment pulled together from some finely chopped garlic, parsley, and lemon zest—and then play the whole drama out over a little pile of long grain and wild rice.

  Summer and I laugh and talk—lingering over the meal, enjoying the moment. We pointedly don’t talk about the next day or plans or boxes on our to-do list that we need to check off. In other words, we have a completely impractical conversation.

  This dance with bones is my first step into offal. And it isn’t awful at all.

  * * *

  For Valentine’s Day, I’m giving my wife a heart. Not mine, though.

  “Hey, there,” she says, sauntering up to me in the kitchen on the evening of February 13. “Are you cooking tomorrow?”