The Unvegan

This year I got biblical for Valentine’s Day. No, not like that you sicko. Instead of having a boring, fancy meal with my girlfriend, we decided to get cooking. And not just any kind of cooking, we decided to use Lobel’s Meat Bible, which was sent to me by Chronicle Books a few months ago for free. I knew this book would be incredible just based on the cover, but the back cover really sealed the deal for me because it says, “Armed with Lobel’s Meat Bible, carnivores will find themselves with more delectable meaty choices than ever before.” Mmmm meaty choices.

It would be a disservice to call this book a recipe book, as it carries loads of information about our most common meats like beef and chicken, but also delves into game meats and organ meats. All of this information coupled with the recipes makes this a true unvegan bible. After a quick flip through the pages of the bible, I found the perfect Valentine’s Day meal: Carbonade of Beef in Belgian Beer. I must admit that the beer was the first thing that caught my eye and after a quick glance at the ingredients, the girlfriend and I decided this would be grand.

Since the recipe was coming from a bible and the feast was in celebration of St. Valentine, we decided to balance out the obvious Christian undertones of our meal by buying Kosher ingredients (to see the full list of ingredients and recipe, see image at the bottom of the page. The recipe was made to serve 6 people, so we toned down the ingredients a bit in the hopes that we could still cook the meal correctly.

Then we began following the recipe. Duvel was my Belgian ale of choice, and I hoped that using it for a recipe would be even better than drinking it. I won’t get into all the details on how to prepare this dish, but suffice to say, it started out with a whole lot of meat. About 40 minutes into preparing the meat and the other ingredients, I reached a part of the recipe that made my mouth drop. It read: “Cover and cook at the barest possible simmer for 3-4 hours. Wait what? This sounded insane to me, but apparently it wasn’t.

So our romantic Valentine’s dinner became a late-night feast, but it was so worth it.

When the three hours were up and the carbonade was ready, it was an amazing dish. The beef was so tender and flavorful, packed with Duvel’s flavoring, along with the other yummy ingredients. The only thing that was disappointing was that we hadn’t prepared something to accompany it. The recipe said it would go nice with potatoes, but when we started eating, we realized that the dish would go even better with something like rice or couscous. Nonetheless, it was quite the dish, quite the Valentine’s Day and it showed the the Lobels know quite a lot about their meat.

Check out Lobel’s Meat Bible yourself and have a meaty existence.