I am skittish about buying meat at Pick N Save or Metro Market. The organic ground beef I buy looks not-pretty and comes vacuum packed in plastic squares. To be fair, Metro Market has organic high-end meat like New York strip steak and filet mignon in the butcher case but I rarely eat this kind of thing and it is not local and I don’t know what they really mean by organic and I am more concerned about the animal welfare than anything…seems ironic when in fact I am eating them. Same goes for their chicken. While it looks OK, I just can’t be OK with it. Plus they have, right next to chicken in packaging that looks pretty much the same but is not organic. It is “natural.” Everything is natural. If it exists. OK, I get it, natural has some sort of connotation but it doesn’t have any kinds of legal restrictions (although the FDA is currently entertaining the notion, see here.)
So I was wanting some ground beef that didn’t look like Play Doh and googled organic meat Milwaukee and found Kettle Range Meat (you can look at their website here). I’d been there before and been impressed but somehow it slipped from my mind like many things these days. And I hadn’t realized their commitment to local, organic and freerangishness. The guys who run it are really nice, very earnest and they have a broad selection of meat and prepared foods. Fresh and frozen.
I just wanted ground beef for my mother’s meat loaf (minus the fat-trapping and carb-laden bread crumbs) but I skipped out of there with a pot roast and turkey thighs.
The meat loaf was good enough. Hockey puckish, the result of no bread crumbs. But, you know, I’ll eat anything.
