Something we gut-wrenchingly miss about Italy: the plentiful celebratory festivals that take place in small towns across the countryside. A typical Saturday in Piedmont would consist of Jonas and me revving up the Alfa to hit the hills in search of a gathering of townfolk united in their reverence for classic Fiat 500’s, white truffles, esoteric antiques, gelato, formaggio, vino, et cetera.  One of our favorites was the Festival delle Sagre, translated that’s the Festival of Festivals.  It takes place in the town of Asti, famous for great wines (Barbera d’Asti, Asti Spumante), horseracing (The Palio), and its close proximity to the heart of the best white truffles on earth, tartufo bianco d’Alba.  The festival is a great place to sample rustic Piedmontese cuisine in a large-format, entirely informal setting.  It is also a great place to drink plentiful amounts of wine poured directly from large glass damigiane (carboys, casks, huge glass vessels used to store wine) and have a sinfully good time.

One of the more memorable dishes on hand at the Festival delle Sagre is carne battuta, which means (now get your mind out of the gutter here) beaten meat.  The longer version, carne battuta al coltello just means beaten with a knife. In other words, you cut up chunks of raw, very high quality beef or horsemeat, then beat it into submission (and tiny little pieces) with a super-heavy meat cleaver.  It’s like the Italian version of the French dish Steak Tartare, only with different flavors.  Typical Piedmontese additions would be lemon juice, olive oil, salt, pepper, and perhaps some herbs. I have seen people add cream as well, though rarely.

In my case, I wanted to top my battuta with a quivering quail egg because I thought it would add a nice, carbonara-like texture to the finished plate.  I started with extremely fresh Wagyu filet mignon cut from the center of the tenderloin and trimmed of any oxygenated pieces just before preparation.  Then I roughly chopped it before going to town with my man-sized meat cleaver. I beat up half a pound of filet so much my arm is sore today, no kidding. Perhaps I am just a big wimp!

Once I had my perfectly beaten cubes, I used a fork to stir in lemon juice (one small lemon for half pound of meat), olive oil-to taste, ½ c of freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano, ½ tbsp chopped fresh oregano, and Maldon salt.  I then plated the battuta using a cookie cutter as a form, topped it with a sous vide quail egg (you could just soft boil too), and sprinkled on some fresh pepper.  I served the battuta with celery and carrot ribbons because they are nice to break up the mouth feel of the meat.  It’s a great appetizer for a more adventurous dinner party, of course you’d want to be sure everyone was ok with raw meat before you wasted all that delectable filet.

Since time immemorial, mankind has brought his food from a live state to the plate in short order. Sadly, the amazing modern preservation techniques discovered in the last 100 years have had the unfortunate side effect of causing major disconnect between the cock and the coq au vin, or in this case the prawn to the plate.  It is so disheartening when I think of my personal experience with this travesty, I almost feel like chalking up nearly 20 years of my life as “lost years” merely because of lack of awareness and education.

I was a firmly established young California girl when my father got the idea to move his bi-racial city-dwelling family to the Ozarks of Idaho and plop us down on 10 acres complete with horses, cows, ducks, goats and even the odd stork or bullfrog.  The townfolk weren’t entirely standoffish to my black mother and two much-darker-than-me older siblings, but let’s just say we weren’t winning any Idaho family popularity contests.  Consequently my parents tried to make up for my lack of human friends by putting me in primary charge of bottle-feeding a feeble baby cow I named “Slobber.” Slobber and I were fast friends and became inseparable all summer long.  When I returned to California at the end of the summer for a month-long visit with relatives, I cried all the way to the airport over losing my bovine companion.

The day I got home from California, my dad had made a special meal of hamburgers to welcome me home. He proudly asked me if I knew where the hamburgers had come from, to which I excitedly replied “McDonalds?” He said no, and encouraged me to keep guessing. “The store?” Nope. He chose that moment to reveal to me the source of the meal I was eagerly licking off my fingers. “These hamburgers are made with meat that we received from butchering your cow, Slobber.” At first I didn’t understand. The disconnect between animal and food was really so vast to my mind that I really could not fathom meat coming from a living, breathing kind-souled loppy-eared animal I had just said goodbye to weeks previous.  Once the lesson sunk in, it was so overwhelmingly shocking that I vowed never to eat meat again. That vow lasted nearly twenty years and all I can think of now is “what a waste!”

That lesson could have been so meaningful, reverential, important, and yet it was tragic, heart-wrenching and completely off-target for what it was intended to accomplish.  Once I cautiously stepped back into the waters of carnivorousness, I did so armed with education and respect. It is crucial to understand that there is an impact to popping back chicken nuggets like they were kernels of corn, and that impact can be traced back to a single animal.  Eating animals is not something that should be taken lightly, but it is something that we were born to do.  For this reason I feel like I should personally be comfortable with every step of the process from live animal to filleted fish, so I try to trace that process with every piece of meat I eat (yes, I consider fish meat since it is an animal and we eat its flesh).  The process of how animals are butchered for human consumption is not always pretty, but don’t you agree that you should be able to stomach it if you desire the finished product? Out of sight out of mind just won’t work in our global society, as history has shown time and again.

We need to understand these processes in order to determine whether we are okay with accepting them, and for this reason every food chain should be transparent. You should be able to ask your local butcher where he sources his meat, and if you get any response besides the names of actual farms and ranches, know that there is something wrong with the picture (shame on you BILL THE BUTCHER).  Further, I feel everyone should at least witness if not partake in the humane taking of an animal’s life for the sake of our dinner.  If you can’t take it, should you be eating it? I have documented my own experience with killing my own Thanksgiving turkeys, and am constantly educating myself in this realm.  It has had a twofold effect on my. On the one hand I am nearly cured of the squeamishness I used to exhibit around gizzards, livers and the general blood and guts present in any animal slaughter.  On the other, it has caused me to eat less meat.  This is a two-part reaction. First off, I now only want to eat meat that I trust comes from a clean, humane, organic-if-possible (but then, what does that even mean?) source.  Secondly, meat really is a big deal, and it should be treated as such. Americans eat more meat than most other nationalities and yet we are the most disconnected and squeamish about the process.  I tweeted out a picture of some chicken head and foot stock I was making recently and half the responses were along the lines of “ew” and “gross.” I am sure these same people don’t think twice about spearing into a juicy chicken breast, but come on people, isn’t it incredibly wasteful to just leave the whole damn animal by the wayside so you can suck salt off drumsticks and braise breasts in barbecue sauce?

I’m going to step down off my soapbox now, whew, guess I really needed to get all that out. I realize there are a lot of buzzwords going around right now surrounding the “sustainable” “organic” “farm-to-table” “foodie” movement, and I hope my words don’t simply add to the unintelligible din, but THIS SHIT IS IMPORTANT, PEOPLE!  Take responsibility for what you eat.  Ok, enough said.  All that was a preamble for the wacky live prawn experience I had last week.  In Seattle at Mutual Fish you can buy live spot prawns that come from Hood Canal, WA. They are so fresh you can eat them as sashimi, i.e. completely raw.  I had some friends over for the prawn-cooking experience and I’m happy to report that most of them were completely ok with the fact that we would be killing the prawns in order to eat them. I mean, seriously, what is wrong with people who still don’t seem to get that just because you didn’t do it yourself doesn’t mean that they weren’t alive at some point before you ate them. If you feel this way you should be VEGETARIAN.  Practice what you preach.  And eat the whole god-damned animal aka SUCK THE HEADS. In many cultures it’s considered the best part.

I had some help from some amazingly creative people on twitter in coming up with this preparation, which is basically like a Mexican tequila shot version of drunken prawns.  It’s easy. First you put live prawns in a pan (something deep like a Le Creuset bouillabaisse pot works best I learned the second time around since the little buggers jump high) then you douse them in tequila. Let them get a tad drunk and sleepy, then light the tequila on fire. Don’t worry if it doesn’t all burn off- this adds flavor. Obviously higher heat tequilas will burn more.  Next up, douse them in cilantro, oregano, lime juice and enough Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt to cover them completely.  It’s pretty important to use Diamond Crystal Salt because you don’t want to waste a ton of really nice finishing salt on them since you’ll need a few cups. On the other hand you don’t want to use Morton because it is much saltier than Diamond Crystal and imparts a saline flavor on the prawns.  This is a good general kitchen salting rule, by the way.

Toss the now-lidded pot into your oven on super high heat.  Cook for about five minutes (don’t overcook or they’ll be tough) then pull them out and rinse them from the salt.  Reserve some of the liquid to flavor the hominy mixture.

To make the hominy mixture, sauté equal parts celery, carrots & shallot in butter in a dutch oven. Add chipotle in adobo and garlic to taste. Add hominy, chicken stock & tomato. Season with oregano and pepper. To finish the hominy add some of the reserved tequila-prawn liquid to taste. It will be salty, so as you’re adding, test the saltiness of the hominy and stop when you’ve achieved the right flavor balance.

Place a portion of hominy on the plate and surround with cooked prawns.  Squeeze lime over everything.  Put out discard bowls so guests can shell and set aside the exoskeletons, heads and tails as they eat.  Believe it or not, kids love this super-interactive, fun meal, just be sure the alcohol from the tequila has really dissipated if you serve to little ones.  The head-sucking bonus with this dish is that not only are you getting the supposed-best part of the prawn, it also tastes quite a bit like a tequila shot.  Here’s a short video of the prawns being corralled into the too-shallow frying pan. I learned my lesson and used the Le Creuset the next time.  *video not for the faint of heart.

All three men in my life love meat.  The cat loves it for innate canine reasons that I can’t fault.  My husband loves it so much an ex once broke up with him because she thought his diet was excessively carnivorous.  My 18 month-old toddling bundle Bentley Danger gnaws on steak above chocolate, leading me to believe it somehow runs in the family.  It’s slightly appalling to me given the fact that I only started eating meat several years ago and I still view it as more of an accoutrement than a centerpiece, but I guess boys will be boys. 

In an effort to satisfy their primal desires I try to make a red meat-focused dinner at least once a week.  I get bored of filet mignon on the barbie which is what I think Jonas would prefer; from Angus to Kobe he just really enjoys that umami richness.  I’m forever dousing steaks in tamari, garlic, ginger, even hoisin sauce, which makes them tender, flavorful, and often decidedly un steak-like, according to Jonas.  I decided to treat him to a serious dose of unadorned meat, but went with lamb because I think it has so much more natural flavor than good-ole beef. 

I didn’t do much to pull this dinner together, in fact sometimes the simpler the better, I’ve found.  Just a quick smattering of salt and pepper, a vacuum seal in the sous vide, and a two hour cooking period at 134°.  Once I took the chops out of their bath and let them rest for a spell, I torched them on all sides with my overly-miniature crème brulee torch.  This helps to take the anemic pink-grey hue away, but it also caramelizes and seals in the meaty flavor. 

I served the lamb chops with healthy broccoli and cauliflower, but I couldn’t let it be that boring so I whisked together a cheddar cream sauce in which to douse the veggies.  They were happy to be covered by a layer of cheesy goodness, meanwhile my family had our calcium requirement satisfied in a rich and creamy way.  This simple, satisfying meal is the kind that makes me miss my kitchen when I’m away. It’s relatively easy to pull together with the right equipment, yet elegant in its homey ease.