Who Knew Dinner Could Be So Difficult to Make!?

Okay, the day was going smoothly - pretty much. I’d been to the gym, helped a friend tabulate and package items for a trip and accomplished a number of other things.

I knew I was going to be on my own for the evening and so yesterday, I transferred a small steak from the freezer to the fridge.

That’s what I call, thinking ahead!

I also knew that I didn’t really want the steak, as such, but thought I would grind it into hamburger - hamburger being what I really craved (don’t ask me why - I don’t know).

I also knew that, having read all this business about the ‘pink slime’ being added to ground beef - and the fact that you really don’t know what part(s) of the animal you’re getting - and the possibility of e-coli or something more sinister, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease could contaminate ‘store-bought’ ground beef because of the mixing of various parts of the animal - I decided, that I would use my fabulous KitchenAid Stand Mixer meat-grinding attachment to make real ‘quality’ ground beef.

I’d done it before (once) and it worked like a dream.

This was not a recurring dream.

I set everything up, cut the meat into cubes, attached the attachment, turned it on (funny noise) and began feeding the beef into the ‘hopper’.

Mere seconds later, ground beef began to come out of the extrusion end of the apparatus.

Yay!

Then - Grinding, thumping noises. This was not good. In fact, this was bad. Very, very bad.

The meat stopped coming out.

The screw refused to turn.

Henry James would have been disappointed.

But not half as disappointed as I.

What was I to do with my meat?

Lightbulb!

Years ago, on the occasion of my partner’s ___ birthday (we don’t need numbers, right?), an old and dear friend of his gifted him with the strangest thing - a hand-cranked meat grinder.

Now, I wasn’t sure if we still had it (of course, I was sure - I know what everything is and where everything is in this household!) but I thought I’d laid eyes on it in the storage locker.

A quick search, turned up the screw (sorry about that).

After cleaning it up and figuring out how to attach it to a chopping board, I managed to finally get the beef ground.

But, honestly - the whole thing ended up taking at least an hour - and probably longer.

The real disappointment is the fact that my KitchenAid failed so miserably.

How could that happen to a product I hold in such high regard?

I don’t know.

What I do know is this:

I’m getting a new one.

Soon…