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Meatballs: the way to her heart, says one Danish band member.

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If you go backstage at Antone's, the legendary music venue in Austin, then head upstairs past whatever band is lingering on the first floor, look closely at the back wall of the small balcony and you'll see a small door, plenty wide but only about three feet high, marked "Lilliputians only." Last week, during SXSW, 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 Trespassers, which is completely worth doing whatever you have to do to acquire it, then you know that there's no way they're vegetarians either. Albums that good need to be fueled by meat, and Kashmir are all avid carnivores. What do they dig?

"Bloody red meat," said Asger Techau, Kashmir's drummer.

"That's it?"


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Hide your meat in baked ziti.

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It's no secret that I'll eat pretty much anything made from, made with, or made in the same room as a meat or meat byproduct. Oddly, not everyone feels the same way. Occasionally, someone around here whom I won't name because she knows where I sleep -- cough, my wife, cough cough -- will complain that the meat I've just purchased at my local meatery "looks a little too much like an animal" to actually eat.

This problem is not confined to my house. I've heard comments from people who you wouldn't think were crazy about how they like meat but don't feel right about eating it.
"It's not the taste -- the taste is great. It's that it's an animal."

Um, yeah. That's kinda the point. If it weren't animal, it wouldn't taste nearly as good. Anyway, technically it stopped being an animal and started being food a while ago. Still, I've seen a grown man leave the table because he found a tendon in a chicken drumstick, and one of my sisters, who I happen to know eats More >>

Photo by Bradford Schmidt

I do the heavy testing so you don't have to.

​It took her a good 30 seconds of sniffing, poking, and staring before she'd just try the damned thing.

"I don't know about this," Joanna said.

"Trust me -- it's different than you think it will be."

We were in the kitchen again, this time with a platter of sausage variants that I thought I'd try out for my column this week. Normally, Joanna will wrestle a rabid badger over a plate of sausage, but the box of Tennessee Pride Sausage Balls ("Taste the Pride"), made with sausage, cheddar cheese, and biscuit mix, had her standing still with half a ball impaled on her fork, reminding me of one more reason I'd never cross her. She finally took a bite.

"You know, that's actually pretty good," she said before chasing it with a couple of Jones links, grabbing one for the road and leaving the kitchen to make soap in her formulary.

It was the Tennessee Pride jamskies that got me thinking "breakfast meat taste test!" at my local supermarket the other day, primarily as an excuse to buy them. I'm almost powerless over my desire to try oddball meat-based products, and I consider it a personal triumph that I resisted the hamburger on a glazed doughnut I saw at this year's South Florida Fair. So my cart filled with sausage products, my kitchen filled with spitting grease, and now I'm filled with pork.
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Unfortunately, most prime ribs don't look like this charred beauty.

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Growing up, a good friend's father ate more meat more regularly than anyone I knew or have known since. He would devour a half-pound of bacon for breakfast, eat burgers cooked in butter for lunch, and put away a hearty steak at dinnertime. Occasionally, he'd take us out for a meal. My friend and I would have to get burgers, but John almost never passed up the opportunity to grab filet mignon.

Once the server brought him his slab of protein, John would reach into his pocket for a small silver pill box from which he'd take a couple of pequin peppers, tiny little fellows he grew himself that are seven to eight times as spicy as jalapeños. He'd cut them up with his pocket knife, his chunky sausage fingers working far more delicately than you'd think possible, and then put a tiny slice on each bite of filet.

And that is the only way a filet should be eaten. If you've got the brass attachments to eat them with something so hot that it will kill a good-sized wolverine,
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Photo by Bradford Schmidt

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The Brooklyn neighborhood where I used to live had quite a few burrito/taco bars within walking distance from my apartment. They made obscenely large burritos in two sizes: huge and huger, which actually employed two tortillas. The assembly line offered a choice of marinated meats and a vegetarian option, though I never wasted time or money on it.

When my wife was pregnant, I was sent over to the closest one fairly regularly to buy her a meal that weighed approximately the same as her huge-ass belly.  Five minutes after walking in, I'd be on my way back home, freshly grilled steak burritos wrapped and bagged, their weighty goodness tiring my arm and reminding me that we could share with two or three friends if we so chose.  Which we did not: You do not get between a pregnant woman and her football-sized burrito, not unless you want a fork through your shoulder.

My other big time Mexican food crush is on the simple taco. I'm not talking about those unauthentic things you get at a certain fast food joint, which may be fine for a rat-sized dog. Which doesn't mean I don't kinda yo quiero them anyway. The tacos I'm really hot for are basic: choose your meat, mix with salsa More >>

Photo by Bradford Schmidt

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"Are you really so unhappy working here that it's necessary to be a douchebag?" I thought.
 
I was out to dinner with a friend at a local restaurant, and the chef was sitting with us. He's a pretty well-known guy, and the restaurant had opened fairly recently, and I assumed he wanted to talk about cooking, food, whatever. Which is nice, if you're not a jerk.

My dinner companion mentioned that I wrote this column, which led to the topic of oxtail, something I had never cooked but wanted to dig into. The chef, who'd been acting like he was too good for the likes of us since he'd sat down, mentioned he was well-known for an oxtail dish. And even though he seemed as pissy as a spurned 12-year-old about the fact that I didn't already know how to cook oxtail, I still thought I'd gotten lucky: Tips coming!

Yeah, not so much. "To be honest," he began. According to a judge I had to, ahem, go before when I was younger, "to be honest" usually implies that you're lying. He continued, "I'm not really comfortable sharing recipes. But I'd be More >>

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The Eagle created the new, dickwad name for a restaurant.

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David Eyre and Mike Belben are two blokes who own the Eagle pub in Clerkenwell, London. And by blokes, I'm talking British bitches.

Anyway, David and Mike were looking for a new term that would imply that their pub's food was better than every other pub's food. It was not the toughest mountain to climb, improving on English pub food, but they combined gastronomy and pub and came up with the horrid gastropub.

And so, thanks to David and Mike, there came unto us yet another trend for U.S.-based restaurateurs to glom onto, this one possibly more annoying than listing the village of origin of every ingredient on the menu, like hand-selected, scissor-cut, organically raised, hormone-free, North-Western Upper Bumfuck cattle. Thanks, you British bastards.

As long as I can remember, the only name we needed for a place that serves good draft beers and delicious burgers was "awesomeville." And yet, just
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Photos by Bradford Schmidt

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"What about Meat Cupcakes?"

"The what now?  Are you making reference to that insipid Michael Jackson song from the Grammys?"

"No, no - I just had a vision of meat cupcakes and thought you'd like to make them for your column."

I'd been wondering about what I should do for this week's Meatist for days, running through what I've written about and what I haven't, and decided to ask my wife, Joanna, what she thought. In three seconds flat, she comes up with meat cupcakes. And now
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Photo from Flickr user Daniel.Techie

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"I don't know, dude... veal... not sure how I feel about eating it."

My friend Andy, an avid meat eater, wasn't saying anything I hadn't heard before. Hell, I'd considered it myself.

"Look, Andy, a lot of the anti-veal stuff you've heard isn't true. The industry has changed in the last 20 years." I knew I'd have to come up with something better than that, but what did I know about the veal industry? Exactly nothing.

"You know, they even have free-range veal now." I was way out on a limb here; no way he'd believe that absurd lie. Still, I was unwilling to concede any part of this
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Photos by Bradford Schmidt

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"What are you doing?" My wife, Joanna, had returned unexpectedly from some errands was staring at me from the doorway.

"What? The house is always filled with kids. I had some time alone -- what do you think I'm going to do? You, uh, want to help me out a little?" I asked her.

"Hmmm. I don't know, I'm kind of enjoying just watching. I've just never seen anyone actually weave something out of bacon."

Neither had I, but she was partly responsible for me taking on this latest meat-craft.


The Bacon Explosion was created by a couple of guys in Kansas City in 2008, and the recipe was posted on their BBQ blog. Basically, it's a couple of pounds of sausage and bacon rolled up in a bacon lattice and cooked in a smoker for a
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