Shopping for Meat

Last week, we headed off to our favorite Hispanic supermarket with list in hand, intent on preparing some savory dishes for the holidays.  We knew the market had beef shanks and beef soup bones on sale, as well as a pork mix for making pozole.

We had thought about perhaps doing an oxtail casserole, a couple of types of scrapple, a pork pie, and had a few other things in mind, depending on what looked good at the market.  The tentative list looked like this:

up to 6 lbs. oxtails (only 3lbs. if only doing the casserole, more if also doing an oxtail terrine)
up to 6 lbs. beef bones
some pork bones
one trotter (pig's foot)
some beef, maybe shank, about a pound
some pork, maybe shoulder

The list lasted no longer than the trip to the carniceria counter!  They didn't have oxtails on display, but they did have some beautiful beef shank (shin, for our British friends) sections.  As our local butcher wanted $4.95 a pound for oxtails, we thought we'd adapt the oxtail casserole recipe and just use shank.  The beef bones looked good.  But so did an entire section of pork neckbones, which had lots of meat on them.  Pork shoulder was on sale, as well as the pozole mix.  So what we walked away with was:

3.37 lbs. beef shank at $1.99/lb.
3.55 lbs. beef soup bones at $1.59/lb.
3.36 lbs. pork neck bones at $1.99/lb.
2.21 lbs. pork pozole mix at $1.79/lb.
2.17 lbs. pork shoulder (butt) at $0.99/lb. (great!)
two trotters, split, 1.62 pounds at $1.49/lb.

In addition ,we picked up a lot of veggies; this market has a great selection and excellent quality at low prices.  Now we just needed to plan some dishes!