Do you eat organ meats yet?
Don’t tell my husband, but we had beef tongue fajitas again a few weeks back after my mom gave me a pastured beef tongue (Mom, you should have kept it, but we enjoyed it!) (And dear Husband, I know you follow me on Facebook now. I wasn’t able to mention this until the leftovers were all gone.)
I don’t know, I guess, if tongue counts as an organ. It’s a muscle after all…but so is heart! I’m looking forward to learning more about the fine art of cooking grassfed and wild meats and those pesky organs from the new eCourse at GNOWFGLINS: Fundamentals II.
I’m planning to get back in the habit of getting some beef liver and heart into the meals whenever I used ground beef, and some of Jonathan’s first foods will likely be the same. Our pediatrician said really the only reason for babies to eat rice cereal is for the iron (fortified, fake), so as long as we get some early foods with iron, we’re good to go grain-free for the first year.
Red meat is the only food she could think of, and liver is an excellent source of iron and also vital B vitamins. Mmmm, liver puree.
If that overwhelms you already, perhaps you’re also a good candidate for Real Food Fundamentals and then moving on to Fundamentals II. Wardeh and her family over at GNOWFGLINS are simply masterful when it comes to the real food cooking dance and balancing all the kitchen (and farm!) tasks that come with eating well.
Here’s what we’ll learn about traditional cooking in Fundamentals II, which offers new video and PDF files weekly from January to June:
- important equipment
- natural sweeteners
- healthy desserts
- traditional fats
- dark stocks and fish stock
- wild and pastured meats
- organ meats
- advanced grain preparation methods
- vegetables
- homemade salad dressings and sauces
- real salt
- superfoods
- healthy snacks
- traveling with real foods
When you register as a member, you’ll get weekly lessons with print downloads, recipes, and a video demonstration so you can see how all this crazy stuff looks in a real kitchen. You’ll also have access to a member forum where you can get encouragement from others (there are tons of really cool real foodies in there with so many good ideas!) and ask questions of the teachers.
Also, something new: all members receive a BONUS, which for January and February 2012 is an "Easy Sourdough" booklet.
See more in this video.
Members Get it All
Perhaps you’ve been considering sourdough as the ferment you’re going to start to complete this week’s Monday Mission: ferment something. All members also have access to all the courses completed in the past: sourdough, cultured dairy and cheese, and fermentation (aha! More fermenting!). The team of teachers Wardeh has (me included – I teach sourdough bread, crackers, and yogurt) is just incredible, so you won’t be disappointed in what you learn.
What I love most about the GNOWFGLINS system is that you can purchase a month membership for only $11 and see EVERYTHING. That way you don’t have to feel like you’ve wasted any money if you’re only interested in part of the lessons in a given course. (You’ll probably need more than a month to get through the interesting looking parts, though!)
But If You’re Like Me…
…You don’t make time to watch videos online. That’s why I’m always excited when each eCourse turns into an eBook! The latest book to be completed holds all the information about dairy you could ever want: the Cultured Dairy and Basic Cheese eBook, including my yogurt method with all the updates that are scattered around KS.
I love having the information at my fingertips, in one easy-to-find place on my computer. Maybe when the fermentation class book comes out in a few weeks, I’ll be able to wrap my brain around fermenting even more! (eBook purchasers also receive the bonus gift for that month…)
Check out the lessons for all the eCourses HERE and grab the Cultured Dairy and Cheesemaking eBook HERE.
Let me know if you have any questions, or email Wardeh. I’d love to see you in the forum!
Come on back tomorrow for my super-sloppy but hopefully informative video showing how I make water kefir, plus our favorite way to flavor it. My goal is to show you that fermenting doesn’t take much of your time, and the video is under 3.5 minutes, including my gabbing! 
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I’d love to see more of you! Sign up for a free email subscription or grab my reader feed. You can also follow me on Twitter, get KS for Kindle, or see my Facebook Fan Page.
If you missed the last Monday Mission, click here.
Kitchen Stewardship is dedicated to balancing God’s gifts of time, health, earth and money. If you feel called to such a mission, read more at Mission, Method, and Mary and Martha Moments.
Disclosure: As a teacher and partner with GNOWFGLINS, I do receive some portion of your payment if you click on the links above. Thanks a bunch! See my full disclosure statement here.
Umm, where’s the dislike button? Tongue? Eeewww, disgusting. Sorry, I’ll pass.
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Jennifer , just consider it a refined “taste” lol.
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Well Katie you know pretty well how I feel about it
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hi katie! late congratulations on your new baby!! you mentioned iron in this article and food renegade had a 2 part post recently on babies and iron, very interesting thought you might think so too…http://www.foodrenegade.com/should-feed-your-baby-iron-fortified-foods/
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Katie Reply:
January 19th, 2012 at 10:49 am
Thank you!
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We grew up eating cold tongue sandwiches with mustard…yum!
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We have a bunch of grass feed bufflo liver and heart in our freezer I just cannot bring myself to cook them….maybe if I mix them in with other meats I could tolerate it:) My grandmother use to boil liver and serve with onions EVERY SINGLE friday night, I just do not have good memories of it!! but I know its good for me so….
I have a question for you or your readers, I just found out that my daughters allergies are not environmental as though but a combination of corn, casein, and dried bean allergies. Yikess! This is killing my real food cooking plan, we eat meat but I try to limit it to a few days a week, homemade yogurt, cheese, raw milk or eggs are a daily occurance as well as beans and non-gmo corn (she can have white corn but have not been able to find this in non gmo form except popcorn). Help!!
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Katie Reply:
January 19th, 2012 at 10:51 am
Teresa,
Ack! Thank goodness you can still have eggs. All dried beans? Lentils too? Phew. You might try the menu planners at Heart of Cooking for some ideas: http://allergyfreemenuplanners.com/dap/a/?a=120 (that’s my affiliate link).
For the organs, I recommend grinding them and freezing in small batches to add to ground beef or cooking first and adding to anything (chop small!).
Good luck!
Katie
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Teresa Reply:
January 19th, 2012 at 7:59 pm
Thank you and sorry I forgot to add congratulations. I will look into the link. We are not sure about the eggs yet it is a possibility. I am grateful we do not have to completly eliminate, but seriously cut down.
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Is there any reason a baby would not be able to absorb iron from beans? I gave my daughters lentils as one of their first foods for the iron. That was before we switched to real foods, but we avoided gluten (I have celiac) so I wanted to avoid the barley, wheat, and oat cereals and didn’t see any reason why I should feed my child white rice!
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Steph (The Cheapskate Cook) Reply:
January 19th, 2012 at 9:46 am
I second this question! Maybe I’m way off here, but I gave my baby sweet potato as one of his first foods because I read that it was a good source of iron, and that was the only reason I was starting to supplement with solids. Are lentils and sweet potatoes good sources of iron if you don’t can’t get good liver?
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Katie Reply:
January 19th, 2012 at 10:57 am
I do think there are many sources of iron – should be promulgated more!
Here are a few resources:
http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/top-10-iron-rich-foods
and
http://www.ironrichfood.org/
I know there are some absorption differences between plant-based and animal-based iron, but honestly? I bet the stuff they add to cereal absorbs the least well, wouldn’t you guess?
I’ll be looking into this sooooo much more in a month or two (John is 5 mos. now), so keep watching for more info!
Katie
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Where my husband comes from, the cow brain is considered a delicacy. Me: won`t cook organs, won`t eat organs. Serious gag reflex. Love me some boiled chicken throats, though. Go figure.
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I live on a ranch and recently shot a doe. Which is great because I feel that it is as natural as it gets. When gutting it I decided to save the liver. So I flushed it (well I thought I did) and ground it in my brother’s KitchenAid attachment grinder. It was a little messy and my brother just told me that while he was grinding his doe’s shoulder the smell of the liver was still over powering and it seemed to have seeped into the motor and for me to never grind liver with my KitchenAid.
I really want to still grind any other livers, what did I do wrong?
Also, is it okay to still use what I did grind and add about an ounce to ground meat?
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Katie Reply:
January 19th, 2012 at 10:45 am
Jaclyn,
Katie
Boy, i wish I had any knowledge to share with you! I don’t have a grinder – just use my food processor to make the meat “ground” OR I cook it first and chop it up. ??? As far as if it’s safe, you’d want to consult with a hunter. I hope you can use what you have; it’s easy to “hide” in other meals!
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Tongue. The first time I had it, I was an exchange student in Costa Rica. Delicious. Didn’t know what it was until afterwards. Then a few months ago, I prepared it for the family. I was so repulsed by the preparation, I couldn’t eat more than a bite or two. The rest of the family gobbled it up.
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OMGoodness, we LOVE beef tongue!! We don’t have them real often, because we have to buy them…and thats not something we afford to often (well we did have one from the one cow we butchered…but we don’t butcher enough to have tongue as often as we would like). LOL DH is actually the one who usually cooks them around here, there are a few dishes that are “his” dish to cook and that is one of them. He puts it in the crockpot and cooks it all day and usually after supper gets it out…and we end up eating the whole thing before we go to bed, cause we love them so much and only have one or two (if we are lucky) a year, so can’t stop ourselves. *giggle* *sigh* Now I wish we had one to cook up, cause boy are they yummy!!! Our FAVORITE part of the cow!!!
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My mother use to put liver in our stuffing. The best! Anything liver and onions and chicken gizzards and liver with oregano and garlic sauteed in olive oil. LOVE LOVE LOVE!
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