50% off Sale on Aisle 3 Frozen Meat: Cherchez la Green Dot

The Coop needs to reduce inventory on frozen meat, so here's your opportunity to savor (economically) such high-ticket items as Pollo Rosso heritage chickens and grass-finished short ribs of beef. Also a variety of sausages and pork roasts, ready for your 4th of July grilling pleasure.

Check the Aisle 3 meat freezer -- across from the soy milk -- look for the "Special Sale" Coop price sticker, and the green dot. The green-dotted items will scan at their newly-marked prices, which are 50% off the original price.

Bon appetit, snowball.

Eat like a Prince; Pay like a Pauper

You DO know that everything in the Aisle 3 frozen-meat case is 20% off the original fresh-meat price, don’t you? Of course you do.

So this is a great opportunity to make beef broth out of discounted short ribs and shank bones. They make the richest, silkiest, most flavorful broth you’ve ever tasted. Let the beef cool in the pot, chill and remove the fat the next day.

The French serve the broth as the first course and the meat as the second: pot au feu.

But you can use the broth for onion soup gratinee, or mushroom-barley soup, or minestrone, or beef borscht, or a hearty risotto.

The meat can be torn up and used any number of ways. It makes a great ropa vieja, with yellow rice and black beans.
Or a simple, delicious hash: sauté it with chopped onion and potato and add a bit of the broth.

Easter Lamb is In.

For the Sunday joint. Bone-in legs. Boneless legs. French racks. We also have the spiral-sliced hams, for those so inclined.

Holiday Brisket - Buy Early or Settle for Matzoh Balls

We're getting lots of brisket for Passover!

A word to the wise....the Coop carries locally pasture-raised, grass fed- and finished beef. 80% of our beef comes from whole animals, purchased weekly from Slope Farms and McDonald Farm. It's difficult for us to receive enough brisket within one week to satisfy the holiday wants of our membership. We supplement with Hardwick and Natural Acres, and they've started to give us as much as they can.

Brisket is coming in briskly, beginning this week. It's the only way we can get enough. Don't wait until the last minute to get yours -- it really is not going to be here at that point. And no wails of remorse, please.

Golden Pig

Milano's Suino d'Oro is new to the meat shelves this week. Handmade traditional fresh sausage, containing no preservatives, antibiotics, or other gunk, made from small-farm Duroc pigs and free-ranging chicken. Made in NYC by Charles Ventre, a genuine Brooklyn boy whose family has been crafting magnificent sausages for over a hundred years.

We're currently stocking a sweet Italian with fennel; a cheese & parsley; Irish bangers; and a chicken sausage with broccoli rabe and provolone. Spicy lamb merguez arrives next week.

Perfect quick dinner on the grill, in a saute pan, or just pop in a 375 oven for 20 minutes, turn once for even browning. Mashed spuds and onion gravy are the best accompaniment for bangers, sauteed peppers and onions for the others.

Best of all, these sausages are TOTALLY DELICIOUS. No fooling.

Festive Holiday Meats

Turkeys, organic and non-. Ducks, and duck breasts. Rabbits. Whole beef tenderloins. Legs of lamb, bone-in, bone-out. French racks of lamb. Geese show up on Monday the 21st. Spiral-cut hams: bake 'em for dinner, or just leave 'em out on the sideboard with a loaf of good bread and the mustard-pot.

Tales of the Unexspeckted

You may have noticed the cured meat item next to the new prosciutto and pancetta down in the meat cases. The La Quercia brand. And you may have wondered, what the heck is Speck?

Speck is a smoked prosciutto from the Tyrol, a region on the border of Italy and Austria. After being cured in salt and spices, the ham is cold-smoked, using a hardwood like beech or (as ours is) applewood.

Okay, so what does this mean to us?

In short, it means we now have a delicious and comparatively low-fat alternative to smoked bacon, which can be used in dishes that call for prosciutto or pancetta but in which you want a hint of smoke flavor. Or in dishes that use smoked ham or bacon, but you want to strike a more subtle note.

The classic Roman pasta all'amatriciana is a fine example. This simple combination of bacon, onion, and tomato benefits enormously from the flavor of speck. The other night I sauteed 3 ounces (one package) of speck, chopped, in a tablespoon of olive oil. When it began to color I added a chopped onion and a few gratings of black pepper. When the onion went transparent, in went a half-dozen large quartered plum tomatoes. A half-hour of simmering yielded a thick and aromatic sauce to be stirred into cooked linguine and topped with grated asiago. Best all'amatriciana we ever had...and I've made in in the past with everything from deli ham to guanciale.

When we sampled the La Quercia pancetta and prosciutto, we didn't think speck was something that would become a Coop favorite. But after tasting it, everyone here agreed that it certainly deserved to be.