Meat

I am cooking chili now. This is the first time ever in my life that I have really handled and dealt with raw meat, so even though I’ve been planning this chili event for a couple of days now, when I got home and took my 1.16 lbs of steak out of the refrigerator I didn’t know what to do with it; I kept just reading the recipe over and over. Then I read the part in the Techniques section on how to trim the fat off of meat. All I could think about, looking at it in its dinky styrofoam package, (because I had only worked up the courage to slit the plastic wrap all the way down) was Lord of the Flies: “Kill the pig, slit her throat, bash her in, spill her blood!” My kids are working on Lord of the Flies right now in English and I’ve been reading it with them to refresh my memory and less than 30 minutes before now, staring at the meat in its styrofoam tray, was the truly chilling description of the boys killing their second pig, the sow who had been nursing her piglets. It was bloody and visceral and frightening and the ropes of shiny colored guts, Jack laughing as he gets drenched in blood, and the head on the stick, with the blackening liver and the flies and the pig’s cynical conversation with Simon. So here’s me again, in my kitchen, knife in hand, staring at this tray of meat. My knife, btw, is about the length of my index finger; I really don’t have many cooking supplies. And my cutting board is this ridiculous yellow plastic 70’s thing with flowers on the handle, it is a little larger than a postage stamp and looks laughable when I work up the courage to touch the meat and pull it out of the plastic and slap it onto the cheerful little cutting board. My pets are both crowding around me, what is going on? Is this for us? Let us cut it, we will just take off the fat!