Bison on the Grill

One of the things we missed when we moved to Santa Fe was a good butcher shop. The supermarket has meats of course, and the restaurants do too. Whole Foods has a butcher counter if you can afford it. But we were used to buying fresh cuts at a specialty butcher shop back east.

Finally a butcher store opened up here this spring, and last week we went shopping. Beck & Bulow is in a tiny storefront next to a hairdresser on a busy street, and I expected to walk in and see a crusty old guy in a hairnet and white apron behind a display counter. I expected to walk up, tell him what I wanted and how much, and have him go in the back and chop it up for me.

Instead, Beck & Bulow is definitely a gourmet shop -- this is Santa Fe, after all -- and the sales people were young hipsters touting the health benefits of bison, the ethics of wild caught Alaskan fish, and their sustainable grassland bison ranch south of Madrid, NM. 

They sell online as well, and have a glitzy blog and a robust social media presence. Here's their blog article about introducing bison herds back to New Mexico at their ranch. It's full of youthful wonder and mystical connections to the land and shrub hugger stuff. But still, admirable.

Well, it was not the old style butcher shop I anticipated (and really wished it was), but the meats looked wonderful and the young sales help were eager proselytizers. We bought some lamb and some bison spare ribs and two bison steaks. It was not inexpensive.

Over the course of our marriage I have tried to get Jim (he's the cook) to try more vegetarian meals and get us away from meat at every dinner. He's a great cook, and he tries. We read Mediterranean recipes together and I encouraged less meat consumption, and that usually worked for a few weeks.

But then he'd slip back to his usual meal planning, and a meatless pasta dish would show up only once in a while. He just doesn't consider meatless meals "dinner", he thinks of them as "cook's night off".  I don't cook often enough to make a dent and after repeated encouragement to try meatless meals, the effort dwindled.

We eat meat. We do. A lot of chicken, and a lot of other meats. So buying grass-fed free-roaming lean bison from a ranch nearby feels like an improvement we can make. And the expense may help us cut down, we simply can't afford big quantities of what they sell.

Okay, I have to run. The grill is heating up and table must be set.