Cooking Tender Grassfed Meat (Podcast ONL072) and a GIVEAWAY!

Today’s show is an interview with Stanley A. Fishman, author of Tender Grassfed Meat: Traditional Ways to Cook Healthy Meat. Stanley shares his remarkable story of healing with traditional foods and how a lawyer became a researcher and cookbook writer. We share some updates from the farm as well. You can download the show from iTunes, Zune, Tivo or Sticher, or listen at your computer from the link below.

Stanley Fishman has been seriously ill most of his life, suffering from severe asthma, chronic bronchitis, severe headaches, skin eruptions, digestive difficulties, and weight problems. At the age of 46, after exposure to hazardous chemicals at work, he was diagnosed with severe and irreversible lung damage. He was given no more than 5 years to live. Stanley rejected this option and put his research skills to work in order to study alternative healing methods. This led him to the Weston A. Price Foundation, where he learned about real, traditional food.

Stanley began to heal and found a remarkable return to health with the new diet. His bronchitis cleared up and he was able to work and sleep normally again. His skin became clear, headaches were a thing of the past, and his digestion returned to normal. He stopped having asthma attacks. His breathing and stamina improved. All this happened without medication or conventional medical care. He remained weak, however, and tired easily. Further research revealed that traditional cultures increased eating meat in order to recover from injury. Although Stanley ate plenty of meat, he realized that it was not the kind of meat traditional cultures would have consumed. Modern meats are raised in confinement and finished on grains, often in deplorable conditions. Stanley decided to eat grassfed meat.

He writes: “I was a fairly decent cook, but the first times I cooked grassfed meat, I ruined it. It was tough and tasted terrible. I tried all kinds of marinades and recipes, but it was always tough; never good. I was surprised and disappointed to find that there was no cookbook that could teach me how to cook it. But I knew that people must have known how to cook it. This led me to research old cookbooks from all over Europe and the U. S. I searched my early memories, read old novels. While most of these sources assumed that you knew how to cook and provided vague instructions, I was able to identify common themes, ingredients, and techniques. It was like putting a puzzle together.

Eventually, I had a few breakthroughs, and I started to cook tender grassfed meat. I ate a lot of it; my body craved it. This meat and the fat that came with it restored my body. I became strong and energetic, and the lungs “that would never get better” healed. And I started to lose weight without even trying. In my early fifties, I was in the best health of my life. I realized that the methods and techniques I had developed were largely unknown, and I did not even see a hint of many of them on the internet or in other cookbooks.

I felt that real food and grassfed meat had given me my life back. I felt that I had an obligation to share what I learned I wanted to make the blessings of this wonderful food available to others, so it could help them, too. I decided to write the cookbook that I had looked for and never found, a cookbook that would make the cooking of grassfed meat easy and accessible to all who wanted to cook it.”

The culmination of Stanley’s hard work was his first cookbook: Tender Grassfed Meat: Traditional Ways to Cook Healthy Meat. I’m testing out his recipes now when I prepare grass fed meats such as lamb and beef from our local farmers. I’ve been very happy with the results. Techniques are simple, yet effective, and use the ingredients I already stock in my cupboard such as butter, Celtic Sea Salt, and olive oil. Please look for my blogs to see how I prepare these dishes step by step.

New Farmers in Texas

Rashel Harris sent me an awesome video she and her husband Andrew produced showing how they raise and harvest meat chickens on their family farm. I was impressed both with the educational aspect of it as well as their very clean, professional set up.

Rashel has a family cow they use to produce milk, cream, butter, and cheese for her family. An article about their transition from city to farm after her introduction to Nourishing Traditions is here.

Farm Updates

We’ve been very busy dealing with cold, wind, rain, freezing water, and snow here. With no barns or electricity we’ve had to find creative ways to keep our livestock warm, dry, and comfortable with a good supply of water. Our first rabbit kindling is due January 12th. Since we are expecting frigid nights that week, I’m bringing our doe inside until it warms up a bit and the kits get some fur.

In 2011 we are only scheduling time for one podcast per month. If we can do more than that we will but don’t want to over extend ourselves. Instead of podcasting, I will be doing more with the blog. If you haven’t already subscribed to our newsletter by RSS or email by clicking the links in the upper right corner of our home page, please do that so you don’t miss all the news. We will also be developing a farm website to tell more about our products and livestock available.

Contest

Stanley has been generous enough to donate a copy of Tender Grassfed Meat to give away to one of our readers/ listeners! Here are the guidelines to enter:

Up to 12 chances to enter our GIVEAWAY!

1. Blog about this GIVEAWAY and Tender Grassfed Meat and link back to this page on your blog. Post a comment below with a link to your blog. (2 entries)
2. Sign up for the Our Natural Life newsletter or RSS feed. Leave a comment below telling us that you signed up. This is for new subscribers only. (4 entries)
3. Promote through Twitter – Tweet about this contest including the URL to this page and put @ONL2 in the text. (1 entry)
4. Post a link to this page on your FACEBOOK page. Let us know in the comments and give us a link to your post. (1 entry)
5. Leave a review on iTunes about our Podcast if you have listened to one or more shows. Let us know that you have done so by listing your iTunes “name” in the comments below. (2 entries)
6. “Like” us on facebook at the Our Natural Life Podcast Page. If you already “like” us, leave a comment on the page regarding the contest. Let us know in the comments below. (1 entry)
7. Visit the Selina Naturally Store, Amazon Store, or other affiliates on our Go Shopping page. Check out the wonderful products there and tell us about one that interests you in the comments below. No purchase necessary. (1 entry)

The contest begins as soon as this blog is posted on January 7, 2011 and ends on Sunday, January 16, 2011, at noon. We will announce the winner on the blog on January 16 and inform them by email. They will have until noon January 18 to give us their contact information so Mr. Fishman can mail the book. Thank you for your participation!

For every entry you make you must leave a comment in the comment section of this blog telling us what you did. Your comment may not appear immediately until you have had one moderator approved comment. (We usually approve comments within 3 hours of posting) This is one method we use to control spam. The comments in the list will be assigned a sequential number. After the contest is closed, we will use www.Random.Org to pick a random number starting at one and ending with the number equal to the entries we received. For example, if we get 127 entries then we pick a random number between 1 & 127. The person who authored the comment that matches the number will be notified via email. The winner has until noon Tuesday, January 18, 2011 to respond. If no response is received we will choose another winner using the same process.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 54:52 — 50.2MB)