Glazed Pork Chops

This is a Hearty Fall and Winter time recipe.  It not only makes the house smell great it also fills the hungriest of stomachs. Use www.premierfoodsgroup.com Boneless Pork chops !

These juicy Glazed Pork Chops are sweet, salty, and a little spicy.

glazed pork chops.jpg

 Prep Time 10 minutes

 Cook Time 15 minutes

 Total Time 25 minutes

 Servings 

INGREDIENTS

  • 1/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1/2 tsp cayenne powder
  • 1/2 tsp garlic powder
  • 1/2 tsp paprika
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1/4 tsp black pepper
  • 2 Tbsp olive oil 
  • 4 thick cut boneless pork chops

INSTRUCTIONS

  1. Preheat the oven to 350F. In a small bowl, combine the brown sugar, cayenne pepper, garlic powder, paprika, salt, and black pepper.

  2. Remove the Premier Foods Group pork chops from their package and rub the seasoning mixture over all sides of each chop. The moisture from the meat will help the seasoning to adhere to the surface.

  3. Heat olive oil in a large, oven­-safe skillet over a medium flame. When the oil begins to shimmer, add the pork chops. Cook the Premier Foods Group pork chops for about 5 minutes on each side, until nicely browned.

  4. If your chops are greater than one-inch thick, transfer the skillet to the preheated oven for another 5­-10 minutes to finish cooking. Test the chops with a meat thermometer to make sure the internal temperature has reached 145ºF. Cook longer if needed.

  5. Dredge the chops through the thick sauce in the bottom of the pan just before serving.

USDA inspection speed for a chicken production line- 140 birds per minute

Are you aware that chicken processing, INCLUDING ORGANIC, is allowed to be at 140 birds per minute? That allows 0.43 seconds for a USDA inspector to inspect that chicken that is on your plate for health, abnormalities, defects and infection.

There have been 3 petitions to increase the speed to 175 bird per MINUTE, so far those petitions have been defeated.

Let us look at this from a health and food safety perspective. Is it possible for a human to inspect a chicken for infection, health, defect and abnormalities in less than half of one second. Of course not.

Why are we concerned about cross contamination ? This was not a concern 60 years ago in this country. We are concerned, because with the reduced time for inspection and the speed of the production line. Bacteria, most of it comes from the intestinal tract of the birds and the production practices used that interrupt the intestinal tract, is spread from fecal matter and that bacteria is spread from bird to bird and machine to machine. The dangerous bacteria is anaerobic bacteria that lives only in the intestinal tract of animals. Those types of bacteria include; Listeria, Salmonella, E-coli. These are the most common and generally accepted as the most dangerous types of bacteria.

 

chicken production line.jpg

Look closely at this picture. What if just one of those chickens has an infection? What if just one of those chickens had its intestinal tract interrupted? The answer, every chicken processed that day is contaminated.

Why is it now our problem ? Why do we have to cook our food to kill bacteria that should NOT be on our food?

There is an alternative. We do NOT have to accept this !!!!!

We, at Premier Foods Group, hand process our North Carolina chicken. We do 15 per birds per HOUR. We do NOT contaminate our food because we inspect our birds, we do NOT interrupt the intestinal tract because we hand process.

www.premierfoodsgroup.com is the answer.

How many cows are in your HAMBURGER ?

We, at Premier Foods Group, small batch in our North Carolina USDA facility and hand trim. That means ONLY 1 animal is ever harvested, trimmed and packaged at a time. Your grass fed North Carolina ground beef from us not only comes from 1 animal and is also only made from the best parts of the cow, we do NOT use scrapes as filler. Also, your entire order comes from that one animal.  That allows us to know, what animal your order came from, where that animal grazed, what field that animal was raised on, the parents of that animal, the people that harvested the animal, the people that cut and trimmed the meats and the person that put it in the vacuum sealed bags. That gives us the traceability and accountability that NO ONE else can even come close to. We package our product with a date on every package so we can trace EVERY aspect of your food from the time it was born until it was packaged. Visit www.premierfoodsgroup.com to find out more.

 

Reposted from the Washington Post August 5, 2015

Pursuing the unsettling question of how many cows are actually in a hamburger.

By Roberto A. Ferdman August 5, 2015

The last time I ate a hamburger, the meat didn't taste as good.

That's because rattling around in my head was a fact that should have been obvious but hadn't dawned on me until recently: that meat patties aren't just made from the muscle tissue of a single animal, but from the fibers of as many as a hundred cows, or even more. We mix different kinds of cow tissue like one combines colors on a palette, potentially putting animals that once grazed next to each other into tightly packed beef discs.

It shouldn't matter how many cows go into a burger, but the number is a vivid and maybe even repulsive reminder that eating meat exposes us to a process where animals are slaughtered and mixed together for our eating pleasure. And while that may not change anyone's opinion about the morality of it all—it hasn't changed mine-—it still exposes us to a lingering pang of doubt about whether any of it is ethic

"If you have a negative reaction to it, it’s probably because it makes you realize how much of an industrialized process animal production is," said Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, and acclaimed moral philosopher. "You might still have this ideal that there’s a farmer with cows, and every now and again he has to kill one. If that's the case, you might not have a good grasp of how modern meat production works."

But the thing is that I do. My job is to think about the food industry, which means that I think about meat production ad nauseam. And that makes my reaction all the more telling. 

Hamburgers are the ultimate embodiment of modern day meat production. They are both one of the most ubiquitous forms of processed meat—they're on menus practically everywhere—and one of the least considered. Unlike a cut of steak, which necessarily come from the meat of a single cow, hamburgers are almost always a mishmash of many animals. The ground beef we buy at the supermarket is made of an unknown collection of muscle tissues. 

I tried to figure out how many cows are in a single hamburger. And it was really hard.

It is possible to eat a hamburger made from the meat of a single cow. Restaurants that grind their beef in house, mixing the cuts of only one animal at once, serve them. Those who raise their own cattle, and then slaughter them for food, can have them too. But the single cow burger is a rarity.

Last year, McDonald's confirmed that its beef patties can contain the meat of more than 100 different cows. But it isn't just the world's largest purveyor of hamburgers that has trouble keeping track of the animals in its meat.

I called the fresh meat department at a local Costco, where a butcher who asked not to be named said that there is no way to tell how many cows contribute to a single packet of ground beef. Costco grinds the beef in house, but does it by bulk. "Sorry I cannot tell you how many cows, because I don't know," he said. "But it's more than a few."

I reached out to the butcher department at Giant, and they didn't know the answer. The stores don't grind or pack their own hamburger meat—an outside distributor does. So I called National Beef, one of the country's largest providers of packaged beef, to figure out whether they had a clear understanding of what exactly was in their ground product. They told me Keith Welty, the company's spokesperson, would get back to me shortly. He hasn't. That was last Friday.

I also posed the question to Mark Pastore, the president of Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors, a high end distributor used by some of New York City's best regarded chefs. He told me that ideally they would be able pack hamburgers made from the meat of a single cow, but that it would be hard and expensive. Pastore estimates that Pat LaFrieda patties contain the meat of roughly four animals, mainly because they grind about four times as much beef as any one cow can offer at a time, but said that it can be a misleading metric.

"Single sourcing is the best way to do things, it's the handmade way, but it would increase the cost," he said. "I would probably just worry about the cheaper end bulk grinders, the ones that make the meat for McDonald's and Wendy's and other fast food joints. That's where price plays too big of a role."

From an efficiency standpoint, hamburgers might, in fact, be one of the more ethical uses of meat there is. After all, they make use of disparate scraps, many of which would otherwise be discarded. At the very least, eating a hamburger, which might contain the remnants of more than a hundred animals, should arguably be seen as no less ethical than eating a steak, which, necessarily, involves only one.

There are many reasons to be skeptical of the hamburgers that McDonald's serves.  In 2002, PBS ran a short documentary called 'Modern Meat,' which explored the contours of the American meat industry through the lens of its favorite child: the commercial hamburger. The confinement of thousands of cows on single farms, the film argued, was compromising the safety of American beef.

As Singer alluded, the reason that people feel so uncomfortable when they think about hamburgers being comprised of hundreds of animals is pretty simple: We are thoroughly detached from the process that allows everyone to eat meat.

cooked hamburgers.jpg