Saturday, January 22, 2011

Christmas dinner with a most excellent Running W rib roast

Because we had vegetarian guests here for Christmas Day, we delayed our “Christmas dinner” until January 2, when we had an open night between guest bookings. I knew way in advance of Christmas that we were going to have vegetarians here, so I had sort of decided to skip the rib roast this year. But, I made my weekly stop in Running W one day in the middle of November and ran into Escandar. He asked me if I would be ordering the rib roast this year, and I started to say no and explain, and he looked so disappointed I stopped and asked why he was looking like that was such bad news. He explained that he already had the cow being sacrificed for The Roast picked out, and had scheduled the butchering for Dec. 13. Being a mush, I decided that I would get the rib roast anyway, and told him that I’d want it the week after Christmas rather than for Christmas day.


So, that week I picked up the roast. I put it in the refrigerator and pulled it out to show everybody I knew who gets excited about that sort of thing. We invited a bunch of friends over for Sunday night dinner, and I got the rest of the supplies to make the rest of the dinner, like the all important twice baked potatoes. I remembered how I had cooked the rib roast the year before, and did the same thing that day. It was perfect, again! Everybody loved the dinner and we all ate too much, and it was actually a lot of fun to have Christmas a little over a week after the real day. I can’t say enough about how good the meat is. The grass fed beef here is not as fatty as rib roast in the US, but it is exceedingly tender and tasty. Becky was here, and she’s a Dallas girl, and she declared it the best beef she’s ever had. It was so good that I went back to Running W early that week to see if they still had the matching roast from the other side of the cow. They did, so I asked them to hold it for me to pick up a week later so we could have another beef-o-rama with Julio’s family, which we did. And it was delicious again! Now we just have to decide if we want to wait until next Christmas for another roast, or if we can come up with some excuse to order one (or two!) for some occasion this year…and something tells me we’ll find some reason to do it!

2 comments:

sandy a. said...

And Belizean beef does not have hormones etc. in the meat! When I first saw Belizean cattle, I wondered why they were all so thin-looking. Then I realized that it's because they aren't full of steroids, like US cattle!

Becky said...

Thanks for updating all your post! Its so nice to "Catch up" on what is going on in the little jungle of yours. All is well here, despite the fact I miss you all terribly.