my ground veal education

I bought ground veal for the first time yesterday. As often happens with impulse buys, in the moment I felt sure of having seen a hundred intriguing recipes calling for veal, which I had never bought due to the difficulty of finding it. Now Publix carries Strauss "free-raised" ground veal and perhaps as an introductory promotion had it on sale at half price this week. After bringing it home I engaged in another consequence of impulse buys: an  inordinate amount of time surfing Epicurious and leafing through my cookbooks. It turns out you can use ground veal in bolognese or meatballs, meatloaf of course, or some Indian dish that looked sort of interesting (keema). That's about it. I've already made pasta twice this week, we don't love meatloaf, and for keema I would have had to buy more ingredients. So I opened the package to divide it up into portions for the freezer, and to my squeamish surprise I found several grayish-blue spots distributed throughout the meat. Since I immediately thought "mold?!" I turned to the internet for guidance. The internet didn't have an answer to the eloquent query, "blue gray spots ground veal mold?" but now I do, thanks to a brief phone conversation with Jim at Strauss Inc., and I will pass it along so all the world may know: it's just ink---food grade ink that the USDA uses to label the veal before it is ground. Sometimes the marked parts get mixed in with the trimmings that end up as ground meat in a package that you buy and open up and freak out over because it looks like mold. But it's not! Jim sounded very confident on this point. And there you have it.

Tomorrow I'm planning to make at least a batch of bagels and something dessert-y, because I haven't baked a thing except Jiffy corn muffins (!) since my pumpkin spree and I'm feeling some baking withdrawal coming on. I saw Lisa Yockelson's new baking book (how could I not---it was hot pink) at Barnes & Noble tonight and flipped longingly through it for about 10 seconds. I have a guilt complex about browsing in stores where I never buy anything because of Amazon + cheapness. But I digress. Saturday I made chocolate sorbet. Sounds pretty underwhelming, right? Wrong. So very, very wrong. I needed an influential food blogger's prodding to  try this out of A Perfect Scoop, and I'm so glad I did. The only thing is that like many sorbets, this stuff freezes hard. That just means you burn approximately half of the calories you are about to consume while scooping it out. Perfect.