What's For Dinner?

Richard had brought home a bunch of peppers, so I decided to make stuffed peppers.  I wanted lamb for this.  Today I went to all the meat departments of the supermarkets and specialty stores in a radius of maybe fifteen miles; none had lamb for sale.  "Only at Easter," was the stock response.  There was only beef, pork, chicken, and some ground turkey, and it seemed that beef was still the biggest seller despite all the alarms being sounded about the potential health hazards in consuming beef.  Ah, well, nobody seems to believe in global warming either.  Mary Roach whose new book entitled Gulp is all about the phenomenon of digestion has several pages on the diet of the Inuit who reserve a major part of their diet for animal organs, something, as she points out, not to be found in the butcher shops of the lower forty nine states.  Reading that took me back to the Sunday morning breakfast of my childhood when we almost invariably were served lamb kidneys sautéed in butter and vermouth on toast.  We children all loved that meal, and when I became a father and head of a household, my wife and I often served them to our own children as a Sunday morning treat.  Earlier on when I was a college student I often baby sat for my brother and his wife, enjoying a dinner with them before they set off for whatever they had planned for the evening.  My  sister-in-law kept a tight budget on the income of a young resident in the university hospital supplemented by her doing night nursing when he could be home.  A favorite was beef heart which I grew to love, although I must admit she sometimes did cook the thing to death, and the expression shoe leather was entirely appropriate.  When I was in graduate school my first wife and I bought it cheap at Haymarket and learned how to cook it in way we thought was better, and kept it relatively tender.  Calf's liver was something we were served quite often in my childhood home, and always very poorly cooked, that is to say, always overcooked, and it was indeed shoe leather.  It really wasn't until I was in my forties that my live-in boyfriend taught me how to take care that liver is cooked just to the point where it was still pink, and delicious--oh, all those awful liver dinners of my childhood, how sad! My second wife who had lived around the world as a child was exceptionally adventurous with cuisine, if indifferent to fashioning menus.  So she was happy to go along with me when I brought home fresh beef tongue, and the children were happy to eat it, served on a platter, and still looking as though it were going to be part of an utterance of "Moooh."  What I wouldn't give for a slice of tongue right now!  And we had cervelle au beure noire, that's calf's brains, again delicious, delicious, and sweetbreads a prettified name for some gland in the cow's neck or something like that, although I don't remember the children relishing that item, just as they would not go near shad roe sauteed simply in butter with some capers thrown in.  I almost never buy any of those bloody steak items I see at the meat department, and oh, Lord, I am so tired of chicken.  Beans give me gas, and Richard does not like them.  Thank heavens we live by oceans, since what we eat almost every night of the week is some kind of fish.  Oddly enough in the Iowa of my childhood far away from salt water we almost never ever were served fish, and when it appeared quickly turned our noses up at it.  De gustibus and all that.