When I was a little girl I remember how much I absolutely loved Thanksgiving dinner. It was probably my most favorite holiday. I loved a whole mouthful of turkey, mashed potatoes, corn, and gravy all at once. It was like heaven. I also remembered my mother making some silly comment about how some day she'd come to my house for Thanksgiving dinner. I distinctly remember my precocious response, "You can come but you're cooking it. There's no way I'm ever sticking my hand up a turkey's butt."
Yup, that's me, the happily unaware meat eater. My meat does not come with a head attached, nor feathers, nor anything else to remind me that it was once a living breathing thing. And in my mind I can easily disassociate my meat products from the animals they used to be. I need to be able to disassociate because as you all now know my becoming a vegetarian would most definitely lead to starvation.
So, I love bacon. It does not look like Wilbur. I love pork chops. Also, no resemblance to Wilbur. And who doesn't love a freshly warmed honey baked ham? No Wilbur! So, when I saw a "fresh ham shank" sitting in the freezer of my ecologically responsible local farm store, I decided I would go for it even though I knew it would not be conveniently spiral sliced for me.
Yeah, want to know what a "fresh ham shank" looks like?
This is my idea of a yummy ham:
See how little this looks like the animal it came from?
This, on the other hand, is a ham shank.
I can picture where it's little leg used to be!
Imagine my surprise when I removed the shank from the opaque butcher paper, which I know they used to hide the contents from unsuspecting souls like myself, only to find an actual honest to goodness pig hind-quarter...blood and all! Eeewww! It still had the skin on it! Why didn't anyone warn me? Yeah, yeah, I've seen chicken skin and turkey skin, but I didn't grow up on a farm so I've never seen pig skin. It still had a few stray hairs! Ach!
Okay, okay, so I guess I'm growing up a little here. I still use a long spoon to get the giblets out of my turkey butt and push the onion and carrots inside. But today I actually did score an honest to goodness ham shank per the instructions in my Joy Of Cooking cookbook and I have to say that for the next 3 hours the house smelled tremendous.
I will admit to feeling a little bit guilty about being a meat eater, though. I mean, I just can't help feeling sad knowing that, because of me, somewhere out there is a very gimpy three-legged pig.
1 comment:
So about the three legged pig thing. Usually when they extract a ham shank from a pig, as you so eloquently put it, blood skin and all, usually the pig from whence it came has probably already been ground .....
you know what. yeah, there's a three legged pig out there because of you. But he likes it that way.
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