Well, welcome to Mexico:
What the heck is going on here? Soon after we arrived, we bought a roasted chicken off the street. I felt a little squeamish boning it so Evboy ended up doing it for me. I admit it, I'm a pansy. We're eating mostly Costco boneless, skinless, light pink flash frozen chicken breasts. Last month, I happened to meet the Tyson distributor for Mexico and his American counterpart. I learned that in this part of the world yellow chicken are thought to be more healthful. Guess what? Mexicans feed their chickens marigolds. It's not that Americans bleach their chickens like they do their flour and sugar, it's the marigolds!
Beef. My Mom was brave to go to the meat market as a young sheltered wife and mother in Mexico. She tells a story about taking us to our first bullfight. Once the bull fell, she was astonished to note that it was her butcher who ran out to do carcass duty. Dad asked her not to buy beef on Monday after bullfight Sunday. So there's that memory logged jammed in my ol' noggin.
I really was dreading going, but we were tired of light pink skinless boneless flash frozen chicken breasts and the pre packaged beef parts were unrecognizable at my supermarket. They looked kind of like the butcher had taken a cow and run it through the saw and gathered up a pile of meat and bones, wrapped it up and slapped a price per kilo on it.
This delightful gal agreed to take me to Chapala Mercado and show me the ropes. Ev agreed to go with, just in case I wasn't up for the job. Yvonne told him everything she knows. Because I can't walk on cobblestones and listen at the same time, I hung back and let him become the expert. See how smart I am?
I did pose by a hanging Something or Other just to show I'm a good sport.
So the way you do it, is, you point to the place on the cow where you want your meat to come from. Alternately, you print a picture off the internet and just keep it in your purse. You tell your cute and darling butcher if you're going to grill, bake or stew it. He magically brings out the slab of beef that you want. You quickly check your purse to help you remember that ONE kilo is TWO pounds (not the other way around) so you don't accidentally end up with too much of a good thing.
Yvonne gently guided me to buy this backstrap and a kilo of hand cut bacon. My bill was the equivalent of 23usd. "We" cut 14 filet mignon, wrapped them in bacon and froze them. I made Carne Guisada for tacos with the long pointy end. There was not a speck of fat or silverskin on it.
That day, I also needed ground beef for dog food. Adorable, adept butcherman ground it for me. It was so lean I had to ask him to add some fat to it. He held up a chunk of solid fat and said, "como asi?" (like this?) Now how the heck am I supposed to know? I shrugged, smiled and raised my eyebrows and asked him to make the decision for me. What followed was a serious discussion about how big my dogs were, if they were underweight or overweight, what else I put in the food, how I prepared it. I think he was really just gathering evidence for his night school paper titled "Americans are Nuts about their Pets" He ground the fat, kneaded it in the meat, wrapped it in white paper and I was on my way. It was perfect.
Let's end this post at the make your own sweet salty and sour granola booth, shall we?
Meat market day got a two thumbs up.
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