SW wrote:
> Anybody have any pointers for cooking beef cheek meat?

> So what's the secret?

The more mysterious secret I'm wondering about is, where is the rest of
the beef and how do Mexican cooks prepare the better cuts of meat?

I'm reading messages from people praising tacos made from cabeza and
lengua, and sesos and wondering when I'm going to read one describing
the pleasure of eating a
taco filed with beef eyeballs or ground up beef lips.

All that Mexican "soul food" is made with trash meat, but the fact that
a steer has
a head and tongue and brains and eyeballs and lips implies that there
must be sirloins and porterhouses and filet mignons and all the rest of
the beef.

So, who gets that, and how do they prepare it?

100 million Mexicans couldn't possibly be throwing the rest of the
steer away, just to get the trash meat...

Steve Wertz wrote:
> > 100 million Mexicans couldn't possibly be throwing the rest of the
> > steer away, just to get the trash meat...
>
> Yeah. They throw it away. Certainly there are better groups to
> troll, aren't there? Try rec.food.cooking, eg. They're much
> more gullible. Always some fresh meat there.

Have you ever considered the sheer tenacity of the Mexican taco stand
operator?

Just imagine him getting up at 3:00 AM and rushing down to the
slaughterhouse so he can be first in line to get a bucketful of tripe
and liver and some cow heads and tails.

I think the Mexican taco stand owner is some kind of a hero for beating
the buyers for cat food companies to all that wonderful lengua and
cabeza and higado.

He works his ass off to keep his customers satisfied...

On 15 Oct 2006 05:36:35 -0700, "The Anti-Taco Speaks"
> wrote:

>
>Steve Wertz wrote:
>> > 100 million Mexicans couldn't possibly be throwing the rest of the
>> > steer away, just to get the trash meat...
>>
>> Yeah. They throw it away. Certainly there are better groups to
>> troll, aren't there? Try rec.food.cooking, eg. They're much
>> more gullible. Always some fresh meat there.
>
>Have you ever considered the sheer tenacity of the Mexican taco stand
>operator?
>
>Just imagine him getting up at 3:00 AM and rushing down to the
>slaughterhouse so he can be first in line to get a bucketful of tripe
>and liver and some cow heads and tails.
>
>I think the Mexican taco stand owner is some kind of a hero for beating
>the buyers for cat food companies to all that wonderful lengua and
>cabeza and higado.
>
>He works his ass off to keep his customers satisfied...

A tip: never visit Asia.

I. Raskolnikov wrote:

> A tip: never visit Asia.

I've been to Asia. I was hoping nobody would ever offer to serve me any
birds nest soup. I couldn't eat bird spit, no matter who claims it's a
"delicacy".

Somewhere in China, I was served a bowl of what looked like noodles
with a black pickle. Turned out it was sea cucumber in its intestines.

Another time, I was late for lunch in Beiing. It was at the Winter
Palace.The tour guide offered to share a casserole of sea slugs with
me. I told him that I wasn't really hungry. He ate all of them, saying
that they were just like mother used to make. His mother was a slave in
Burma.

Walking through the "mall" in Kweilin, I paused in front of a sewing
machine store. Like the typical bicycle shop, the sewing machine stoe
got spare parts for sewing machines by taking brand new machines apart.
The Chinese version of Radio Shack had boxes and boxes of loose
resistors.

And there was a Chinese sea food restaurant at the "mall". The
delicacies on display were peacock eels and tiretrack eels and river
turtles and golden dojos that were about two inches long. If I was home
in Sherman Oaks, I could have bought any of those creatures in the
local tropical fish store.

But they were on the menu in Kweilin. I thought of telling the Chinese
restaurant owner to fry me up a mess of those golden dojos. They looked
like french fries.

When I finally got to Hong Kong, I headed straight for McDonald's and
had some real french fries. American comfort food, yannow...

Steve Wertz wrote:

> Certainly there are better groups to
> troll, aren't there? Try rec.food.cooking, eg. They're much
> more gullible. Always some fresh meat there.

Hey, you're the one who like to eat beef guts wrapped in a tortilla, so
why call *me* a troll?

Ten years ago, I could walk into Food 4 Less and buy the cheapest beef
roast for $0.89 to $0.99 a pound.

When the butcher tried put the meat out in the display cases, all the
Armenian women would jump him and snatch it off his cart before he
could put it out.

Even when he did manage did get it into the cases, the Armenian women
would grab *all* of it, and put it into their shopping carts so they
could pick the best packages, at their leisure.

Then they would just dump the meat back on the display case and the
butcher would have to sort it all out again. But I would see Armenian
*men* with a whole shopping cart filled with packages of beef. They
would pay for it with $100 bills.

Now cheap beef roast costs $3.50 a pound, minimum. Why is beef three
times as expensive as it was ten years ago, if all the Mexicans in
California prefer to eat trash meat?

Could it be that the Armenian restaurant owners forced the price up, by
buying beef at low prices in the warehouse style supermarkets? Or is
there something else going on that I don't understand?

Enquiring minds want to know...