Ted Has the Right Idea

Yesterday I wrote about bringing nine pounds of prime beef home for aging, and a reader had the temerity to suggest that I was just trying to make all of you suffer. I resent that. I don't understand how writing about things like this:

can in any way be construed as an effort to make you miserable or jealous.

Oops. My fingers slipped.

By God, life is sweet when you live in a country where you can buy meat like that and age it in your own beer freezer.

While I'm on the subject of food and drink, let me mention Cafe Aldea. I don't know too much about it. It's from Nicaragua, and it has something to do with one of the Mercy Corps' charitable programs down there. If you donate to the Mercy Corps, they'll send you some of this stuff. I received some, and I figured it was probably pretty bad. Charities aren't the first place you look when you're trying to get good coffee. But I tried it anyway, and it's really good. It has a very rich flavor, not too much bitterness, and sort of a chocolate overtone to it. And naturally, I can't find a place on the Mercy Corps site where you can buy it. But you can get it at Coffeeplanet.com, and two dollars from each pound purchased goes back to the people in Nicaragua whom the Mercy Corps is helping.

I'm drinking it right now, mostly because I ran out of Cafe Pilon, and it's very nice. And the cost is not out of line with other luxury coffees.

If you want to do more than two dollars' worth of good, you can get it by donating to the Mercy Corps at the handy link I just provided. They're doing good things in Darfur, if that interests you.

I'm hoping the meat will develop a nice stink by Sunday so I can have steak that night. You can age beef up to three weeks in your fridge, but last time, mine got so funky after three days, I was completely satisfied with it. The prime rib I had at Shula's Steakhouse the other night was probably aged a lot longer, and it was actually a little smellier than I like. When you age beef, you don't want to go so far it starts to smell like roadkill.

Right now, I cut my prime rib roasts into steaks with a big Japanese cleaver, but it would be great to have a meat saw. I get two-inch-thick steaks by cutting between ribs, and that's dandy, but it would be nice to have the option of cutting through bone, so I could have thinner steaks for wimpy guests or occasions when I simply don't feel like foundering. Unfortunately, it looks like the choices are pretty bad. Either you buy a hack saw, or a cruddy used hand saw made for meat (I don't see any new ones on Google), or you have to shell out at least two hundred bucks for a free-standing electric job. Maybe this is God's way of telling me two inches is about right.

Maybe a tree saw would be okay, if I had the right blade. Actually, a plain old wood saw might be best, since it has a deep blade to stabilize the cut and prevent squiggly slicing.

Hmm...here is something a guy says about it on a forum:

"I use a Wyoming II saw. It has a meat and a wood blade, is compact yet long enough to take the skull cap off a moose. I also have a small one I got from the North American hunting club that works but not quite as well."

By God, tell me you don't love a country where people can shoot a moose and then buy a special saw made for cutting it up. They can't do that in socialist countries. In socialist shitholes, you can't have a gun, you're not allowed to hunt because the moose all belong to the dictator and his stooges, you can't buy bullets, and if saws ever become available, you have to take whatever they give you when you get to the end of the five-mile-long line at the government hardware store.

Here's the saw, at Cabela's.

Honestly, when I think about all the things you can do in America if people will just leave you alone, I really want to buy my own compound. Like Ted Nugent, only without the ridiculous camo and chin beards. Barbecue area over here, fruit trees over there, tomatoes and beans behind the shooting range, concrete brewing shed next to the garage/workshop. Don't even tell me that doesn't sound good. Even if you're a woman, you have to like that.

Well, maybe not. Maybe a certain KIND of woman. And by that I don't mean lesbians, although I can see how you would get that idea.

I'll bet there are lesbians in America who, from a distance of ten yards or more, are indistinguishable from Ted Nugent.

Right now I am picturing myself sitting in my compound with a smoking Desert Eagle next to my plate, eating a home-aged prime rib eye at a picnic table by the barbecue area, while drinking my own homebrewed ale. If things like that are possible on earth, what is the point of heaven?

I think maybe there is something special about the caffeine in this coffee.

Okay, I have to run. I want to create another brief podcast rant and then put more grease on Marvin's toe.