I’ve been known to watch a cooking show or two, but let’s face it: the big problem with them is that they cook things besides meat.
 Mmmmm. Ribby. Which is not a problem with BBQ Pitmasters though, the series that runs on Thursday nights at 10 on TLC. While they do pay a small bit of attention to sides, it’s all about barbecue pits and the teams that run them.
Each episode has four teams that have to cook a main protein like ribs, or brisket, or whatever. But while that’s going on (the process may take 12 hours after all) they’ll do a quick challenge (called a “Pit Fire Challenge,” which has a familiar ring to it) with some exotic meat like rattlesnake.
Losers of the Pit Fire Challenge go home, and the three remaining teams battle it out for the show win and the right to move on in a Kingsford-sponsored contest with a$100,000 main prize. Which will buy a lot of meat, and a hell of a cooker.
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I recently received an email from a reader who would be heading to Boston, and was looking for a good burger. As I’m not a Boston resident, I had to reach out to a meat-loving friend in Beantown for a good recommendation. And as the emailer didn’t provide a return address to send an answer to, it gets its own post. Because that’s the kind of guy I am.
So the answer, at least according to my friend (who shall remain nameless until we’re able to confirm his opinion – don’t want anyone hunting him down for a lousy tip) is Abe & Louie’s, a steakhouse on Boylston St. In his words:
“…it’s a steak house but the burger is KILLER!!!”
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 Look at these babies go. Meat moments away... So if you’ve been with me thus far, you know I hit a local Spanish market, Las Brisas, to pick up some fresh-cut skirt steak from the butcher, and immediately began marinating it in preparation for grilling its ass on my Fyrkat. How’d it all come out?
Well, I left the steaks in the ziplock bag with the salsa fresca, (I’ve posted the recipe for that salsa fresca here – even if it’s more of a guide than a recipe) for 24 hours (it only seemed like a week), stopping by the fridge every couple of hours to massage and smish the beef around in the juice and veggies.
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 A few people have asked for the recipe for the salsa fresca I made recently, and that I used as a marinade for my skirt steak adventure. I’d be happy to oblige, but there really isn’t one. So I’ll give you the ingredients and how I approach it, and the rest is up to you.
Ingredients:
4 – 6 fresh, ripe tomatoes
1 -2 sweet yellow onions
2-5 fresh jalapeños(s)
1-2 bunch(es) of fresh cilantro
Fresh lime juice
Salt
(I told you I didn’t have a recipe – it’s all about ratios, baby – so be prepared with enough of each thing)
Wash your cilantro, shake it out, and set it aside to dry a bit.
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 Fresh sliced skirt steak: it can never be too rich or too thin. You need to click to enlarge this. Really, you do. A few weeks ago, Amiel Nuchovich, occasional Meatist contributor and my token Uruguayan friend, wrote a great piece about the values that can be found at a Spanish market as opposed to your local chain supermarket.
Today, I decided to follow the advice in the pages of my own site and stop in at Las Brisas market in Jupiter.
Just as Amiel wrote, the meat case at Las Brisas was beautiful, packed with meats and meaty parts just waiting to be brought back to my house and ingested. I was dizzy with desire, drooling with anticipation, overwhelmed with options.
When the butcher at last looked my way, I pulled the trigger on some skirt steak, which looked fantastic and was reasonably priced at only $4.59. That’s right, if you’ve been dropping close to 10 bucks for this stuff at Whole Foods, you’re getting reamed, friend.
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 Yours truly, smished between Kaspar and Henrik, and looking like a goof. I had that rad jacket Henrik's sporting though. Wore it to Studio 54 when I was a kid. If you go backstage at Antone’s, the legendary music venue in Austin, head upstairs past whatever band is lingering on the first floor, and look closely at the back wall of the small balcony, you’ll see a small door, plenty wide but only about three feet high, marked “Lilliputians only.”
This past spring during Austin’s amazing South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, though not close to Lilliputian size myself, I was invited through the door and into the back room to sit with the incredible Danish band Kashmir and talk meat.
Kashmir aren’t ‘putian-sized either. And if you’ve listened to No Balance Palace , or are lucky enough to have a copy of the not-released-in-the-U.S.-yet (but available as an import from Amazon.com) Trespassers , which is completely worth doing whatever you have to do to acquire, then you know that there’s no way they’re vegetarians, either.
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 The King First of all, you should know I’m not a “Match Light” guy. I like to use charcoal lit via lighter fluid like my dad, and probably his dad before him, did because it’s all part of the process that I grew up with.
The smell of the fluid burning off puts me right back on a remote beach in the Hamptons at sundown, waiting for the grill to be ready for ribs, my dad chatting with Mr. Smith, our two families’ late 60s Jeep Wagoneers (one pea green, one brown) parked in the sand nearby, waiting to take us back to the real world, barbecue-stuffed kids lying on the roof or dangling our legs off of the tailgate during the whole miles-long ride back down the beach to one of the two-track sand trails providing access through the dunes.
So for those olfactory-triggered memories alone, there’s no Match Light for me; I need real charcoal.
But what kind? See, I’m also one of those guys that buys generic aspirin. Actually, generic ibuprofen, and I buy 500 at a time for like 6 bucks at Walmart, because there is simply no difference, no matter what the commercials try to tell you. Not in effectiveness, anyway, which is all I care about.
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 Mmmmm. Cloney. The BBC is reporting that for the second time (gasp) the meat from a bull that’s the offspring of a cloned cow has entered the food chain (ohmigodohmigodohmigod).
They’ve even reported the bull’s name: Parable. Here’s his story.
Once upon a time, way back in May of 2007, a bull was born and named Parable. Parable was a hearty bull, so hearty in fact that in May of 2010 he was slaughtered and eaten by people in Britian.
But soon, some Brits were complaining about Parable. They thought that the meat from a bull born of a cloned cow shouldn’t be eaten, not matter how delicious and tender it was. So the authorities went and questioned the farmer Steven Innes, from whose farm Parable had come, but Mr. Innes said he’d done nothing wrong, and his brothers agreed. In unison.
 None of the Steven Inneses contacted had a comment beyond saying they'd done nothing wrong, and Parable tasted great. The End.
“I don’t know, Brad. Veal? I’m not really sure how I feel about eating it.”
My friend Andy is an avid meat eater, but he wasn’t exactly raising an issue that I hadn’t heard before.
 Actual free-raised veal. And I thought I was lying. “Look dude,” I told him, “a lot of the anti-veal stuff you’ve heard isn’t true. The industry has changed in the last few decades.” This coming from someone who knew exactly nothing about the veal industry. But I like to argue, and missing facts never kept me from plowing ahead.
“You know, they even have free-range veal now,” I told him, randomly generating facts to support my argument.
“Bull. How the hell could free-range veal work?”
“I, um, think that they might tow the pens around the pasture behind a golf cart.”
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 First, a confession: I’ve been using a gas grill for quite a while. I think the switch from a charcoal grill came some time shortly after I had kids, and the entire “let’s throw something on the grill for dinner” thing had to get easier.
And gas grills do rule for that. I can grill up a hot dog or burger quickly and easily, and my Weber gas grill is still going strong after more than a decade of abuse with only the occasional replacement part (grates once, “flavor bars” once, an updated propane attachment) needed.
But my kids are older now and don’t need to be monitored constantly and, more important, my son is now old enough to begin to learn the tradition of grilling that every man wants to pass on to his boy. And I’m talking grilling old school: with charcoal.
Although I don’t currently have a Weber charcoal grill (drag) I did recently receive a Bodum Fyrkat (yes, it’s spelled like an 80′s hair band) for review recently, and it provided a great opportunity to come home to charcoal.
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