Flower Pot Party (with Steak!)

Joe recently bought an organic steak from the farmers market that was from a cow (steer?) which was raised on nothing but grass.  The organic steak is the one on the far right in the picture.  The organic steak cost twenty dollars, but was big enough for five people to have a a piece that was probably four ounces.   The other four steaks on the grill are from a beef that we bought locally, but was probably fed grain for a portion of it's life and, while undoubtedly treated more humane and raised healthier than the cow whose steaks you can buy cheap at the grocery, wasn't officially certified organic.  Supposedly, our cow, and I feel like calling it "our cow", since we got the whole thing from someone that Joe knew, was on grass only for the last few months after we decided to buy it and asked that the farmer stop feeding it grain.  Joe and his family split the butchered meat with Brandon and I.  Needless to say, we have a lot of beef in the freezer.  These were the first steaks from "our cow" that we've eaten, and we wanted to compare it with the pricey organic steak.  And we wanted an excuse to cook and eat an obscene amount of food!

After some struggles with grill, which hadn't been used since last fall, we loaded it down with sweet potatoes, then steaks, then asparagus.  Even though it's just April, I feel like summer has arrived.  Grilling season!  We had some big laughs about how much meat we cooked for five people.  I'm pretty sure we could have fed several families with those steaks.  We will be having steak left overs tonight too.  After we all ate a chunk of the organic steak, which was delicious, we barely had room in our stomachs to taste the steaks from our cow.  They were also delicious.  But, our final verdict, by a narrow margin, was that the organic steak was a fraction better, but we weren't convinced that it wasn't due to the difference in the cut of meat, or the way it was cooked. 

Personally, I was so satisfied with the other fixings, especially the home canned stewed tomatoes that Joe brought in combination with the grilled asparagus, not to mention my favorite food - sweet potatoes, and one of my famous salads, that I could have skipped the steak and been almost as happy.  Almost.

We started out with big plans to brew some beer while we made seed pots and then attend a acoustic guitar recital at the university.  It wasn't long before we decided that we might have been a bit ambitious for a week night and decided to focus on the seed pots.  Joe is gearing up for a serious garden this summer, and brought some organic compost to mix with the potting soil.  We worked as a team to roll one hundred seed pots, then filled most of them with the soil.  The only potting soil I had contained fertilizer and at first Joe didn't mind, but after thinking about it he decided he didn't want to use the potting soil with fertilizer since he may be pursuing organic certification and we weren't sure how that would factor in, You can't certify ground that has been fertilized with chemicals in the last three years.  He forgot to bring the seeds anyway, so we'll try again soon. 

We were quite proud of our soil funnel invention.  We used two long necked juice bottles and cut one to be a funnel with the perfect sized opening to fit in each seed pot, and the other made a great scoop with the handle being the neck of the bottle.  While one person scooped the soil into the funnel the funnel handler could move from pot to pot and put dollops of soil in each pot, kind of like icing a cake, only not as chocolaty. 

There were a few comments from the pot makers about how this home made flower pot system takes up quite a bit of time.  True, but as little time as we have, we actually have less money, so why not make it a group activity while we feast, and not have to store a bunch of plastic pots the whole year.  I'm sure a larger operation couldn't afford to had make each seed pot, but we were able to make enough for our needs without working very hard at all.  I don't consider sitting on the front porch rocker laughing with friends and drinking home brewed beer to be very hard work.  Instead of a quilting bee or a corn shucking party, we had a flower pot party.  With steak!