I'll Take Eleven Chuck Roasts, A Dozen Ribeyes, and Thirty Pounds of Hamburger. And Another Piece of Pie, Please.

I have just returned home from a lovely dinner at an old friend's house where we discussed, primarily, the ideal way to hack up a cow. Lots of fun.

We didn't lead with cow-hacking, because that would have just been weird. This is a friend whom I have not seen face-to-face quite literally since high school graduation. And honestly, I don't exactly remember what time I may have spent with her on that specific day. There was a lot going on. But thanks to the miracle of social networking, I have been able to reconnect with said friend. We have "chatted" and what have you over the past year or so. Catching up with her has been one of a variety of positive experiences I have had since I reluctantly dipped my Luddite toe ever further into the realm of twenty-first century communication.

Another of these positive experiences took place a month or so ago, when I was reunited with another high school friend, whom I have also not seen since the fated step-up into the real world. This other friend - CG, we'll call her - showed up at my house to carry away a desk that I was not taking with me to the new home. Drove multiple hours to get to my house, in fact. We then found that we did not have the collective strength to carry the desk down the walkway, so we proceeded to empty her car of blankets and random two-by-fours to craft a device for dragging the desk across the lawn. I didn't ask why she had 2x4's in her car. Because I remember her in high school. Anyway, then she left to drive multiple hours back home. It was nice. But odd.

So back to the original friend. We'll just call her C. So we had occasion to get together this evening for dinner, and continue the catching up process, with the excuse that we needed to discuss how to cut up the grass-fed cow that we had decided to purchase together. Well, half a cow, actually. Anyway, according to the cow's current custodian, it seems the time has arisen to prepare for its arrival. So C and her husband had us all over for dinner (a fine barbecued rib roast, thank you husband-of-C, who also bakes a mean apple pie.)

After dinner, Husband-of-C presented a diagram of a cow. The four of us - C, Husband-of-C, myself and Future Husband, then took a trip around the cow, in sections, and I now know precisely where the meat for steak fajitas originates. Husband-of-C was quite knowledgeable about the regions of cow. Apparently, there is some butcher shop experience somewhere back in his youth. This was a relief. I fear that, without him, I may have just elected to grind up my whole quarter of a cow into hamburger. There are lots of ways to use hamburger, you know. Fortunately, Husband-of-C was able to educate us to a degree about the various kinds of roasts one can procure from the Round Region. And the answer to "why can't we select both porterhouse AND filet mignon"? Well, I doubt I can relay it in any kind of educated fashion, but you just can't have both. But you can have strip steaks with your filet. So that's good news.

Our take on this joint cow purchase will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 125 pounds of meat. I'm feeling a little Ted Nugent-y about the whole thing, to be honest. But I've done a fair share of nutrition reading this year, and this seems like a wise decision for a family that is going to eat red meat anyway. And for a woman who has always secretly wanted to own a deep freezer. Which I guess we will be purchasing in the near future. Because the cow is coming. And he'll need a home.