UT Natural Meat

Last Friday afternoon A~ and I needed to head into Salt Lake for some errands and scheduled a part of the trip to stop by what turns out to be one of our areas only small farms that sells locally raised pastured meat in smaller quantities.

As we spent some time earlier this year tring to find as good source for better quality, more sustainable meat, I thought we were in luck with our local butchers. Wrong! Dons meats, the one in Syracuse at least, was a total flake. He told me that they would be able to order meat in for me from a local producer and that he also brought it in from time to time to just be able to sell it. I've checked with him a number of times, and told him what we'd like to buy but never managed to have him have any on stock but for the first time I was in there. I wonder if I wasn't duped that time and just told it was local.

Of course there's really only one way to make ABSOLUTELY sure that the meat you get is actually a locally grown and pastured product. Go to the farm! So we did.

UT Natural Meat is located on the WEST side off the valley on a pretty modest piece of land, no sprawling pastoral hills our anything like that, but they're average people that care about their animals and about the food that they will one day bring to their and their customers tables.

We had a great time at the farm talking with Kristen and briefly with her husband Shayne in between his caring for a sow pig that had just birthed the night before. It was readily apparent to both of us that they are very interested in making their small farm a local source for grass-fed, hormone free meats. She even had a table full of all the "required reading" for any aspiring localvore like _Omnivores Dillema_, _Everything I want to Do is Illegal_ and videos like Food inc for example.

No doubt though, one of the best parts of the day was getting to see the piglets prancing around their spacious new digs. This is the part of visiting and making an effort to get to know the people that produce your food that cannot be beaten.

At the end of the day, we brought home a couple of Corriante (a heritage breed of cattle) beef roasts, some ground beef for the periodic recipies that we use it in, and a few packages of pork chops. It wasn't a huge order, but that was part of our attraction to this farm. We wanted to get a good sample of what the product that they offer is like without having to invest hundreds of dollars in it. The other reason was that we really don't eat a ton of beef or pork at our house. A~ is largely vegetarian and our kids are picky about meat. Mostly because they don't like the heavily fatted nature of traditional meat. Hopefully this will help with that too.

If your in the General Salt Lake City area, I definitely recommend you check out UT Natural meat. Very Nice people running a small operation and trying to make a good go of it. As for the product, I have great hopes but have not yet had opportunity to cook any. As soon as I do trust me you'll be first to know!
Local First..
P~

I almost gave up...

Really, I was this close to it. I'd done my homework, diligently looked for alternative options and had come up short. All but for one option that I thought I'd already covered... bingo! Oh geez, sorry, I guess I didn't mention what the heck I was talking about, let me take you back a little ways in my thinking and this might make a little more sense.

Every year I take a look at my life and try to find the things that I think I really have a chanced at making a difference in with it. One year I decided too really focus on learning about and becoming more sustainable, another I focused on really getting a good yield from our garden and so on. Some years have been more successful than others, but all have enabled me to at least take a good look at how and why I am doing things the way I am. This year was no different, I just haven't had the chance to get online and put it down in writing for posterity.

The thing that I've decided on, or had decided on but wasn't sure was going to happen, was to finally put my money where my mouth is and actually make a concerted effort to consume primarily sustainable meat products. I'll get into the details more another time, but let me first finish what I was saying about almost not even being able to do it at all.

So, as I was saying, I had been looking for options to buying what is essentially factory meats, beef in particular, and had not had a lot of luck. Oh there were products available, but really they were pretty price prohibitive because you generally have to buy them by the quarter or the half of beef, which at $3.00 - $5.00/lb and two to four hundred pounds respectively, is quite an investment. I looked into a couple of local producers that I knew of, combed the web for others and talked to friends that I knew had ordered "good" grass-fed beef before. Still I came up short, and that's where we came in to this whole story - with me about ready to give up on the whole experiment before the first month was over.

If you've been reading this blog for very long at all then you've probably heard my proselytizing about how we can and will receive those things that we believe in and fully expect will come... well, here we go again. Just as I was about to give up on the whole thing, and I mean the day I had really gotten down about it, I had a friend of mine mention that he was in a conversation with a guy the day before who had mentioned that he bought locally raised grass-fed beef from a local butcher that was literally just around the corner from my house. I had talked with that same butcher last year when they opened the shop about this exact thing and had found them, quite honestly, to be what I thought of as very pro grain fed and not very open to the idea of organic local products. I decided that I at least had to check in with them and see if what I had heard was right and lucky day it was! As it turns out, there are a couple of other families that are also coming to the butcher for local grass-fed beef and he's able to get it in regularly on request. While we were in there he did have some very nice pieces of tenderloin available from the local provider so we went ahead and bought a few steaks.

This weekend we grilled them up and ate them with some homemade butternut squash ravioli and roasted fingerling potatoes and they were delicious! Our boys, who are sort of on the fence meat eaters, like to have steak occasionally but really can't stand fat; that wasn't a problem with this meat. The steaks were very tender with just enough marbling to give them good flavor, but not enough to make them fatty. I think we have a winner.

Oh, and by the way, the butternut squash raviolis... delicious! I'll have to get around to getting that recipe up online for ya'll.
Be well.
more to come soon.
P~