Eating through the MeatEater Cookbook: Kimchi Tacos

     Its not a stretch to say that my household has tacos for dinner at least twice a week.  It can be boringly easy in a pinch: fry up some ground meat, heat a torilla and canned black beans, pull some cheese out of a plastic bag, and if you’re really hurting for time and ingredients then put a lug of ketchup on it all.  Most of the time it’s only slightly more intentional than that, meaning we thought out our meals for the week and went to the store to buy sour cream, avocado, limes, tomatoes, cilantro and onions to make pico de gallo.  Thus, tacos occupy a strange discrepancy in my culinary world.  We eat them regularly because we love them, but lately they’ve become a utilitarian baseline hardly fitting for cuisine, especially wild game.  Every time I rush my elk meat onto an in-glamorous tortilla I feel a little pain in my soul.  Ultimately I love my tacos because I love the meat contained within.  And so, I decided to show that meat a little more love and find a taco fitting for it.    Enter Steven Rinella’s The MeatEater Fish and Game Cookbook: Recipes and Techniques For Every Hunter and Angler.
      Ground meat just isn’t associated with the kind of love-filled cooking that whole pieces are.  Think of the last time you really put your heart and soul into cooking a hamburger or hid its flavor with marinara in some pasta dish.  You don’t get much of a sense of the animal after its been through the grinder.  Not that I don’t appreciate a good elk burger.  I make them all the time.  But in tacos the naked taste of the meat is covered by a ton of spices, and when its ground you also lose connection with the texture of the meat.  It’s just kind of there and then in your belly.  What immediately drew me to change my taco routine were bones.  I had bone-in elk shanks in my freezer waiting for a menu.  In years past these would have been made into burger.  Now they were going to be something special.  So I put them into a pressure cooker with rice cooking wine, gochujang (Korean Chile paste), soy sauce, garlic, ginger, and water, and waited for three hours, wondering what might meet me when the timer rang.   
     In those hours, I had some time to think.  I thought mostly about cooking another man’s food. In my early twenties my parents bought me a kitchen knife set, pots and pans, and two cook books:  Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything.  Whether they were feeding an interest of mine or simply sending the message that I was on my own I’m not sure.  Either way, I began to study those books, and to cook.  Jamie Oliver taught me a high-heat method of roasting, which I evangelized to my wife’s Grandfather, and once I had won him for the cause we started a rather heated debate one Thanksgiving on the proper way to roast a turkey.  He’s the only other person I know who will eat a pickled tongue sandwich.  Thus, he too, is rather outside our country’s culinary normal.  Bittman showed me that with time and guidance I can cook almost anything, and back when I used his book the most I had a lot of time, and used it for cooking.  Now, sometimes, I put ketchup on my taco.  Thinking this, made me feel old and removed from a certain time in my life, but also glad I had a day in which I could spend hours staring at a slow-cooker.  As a reader of cookbooks I’ve begun to appreciate them like music.  I loved Willie Nelson’s and Merle Haggard’s version of Pancho and Lefty the first time I heard it, and it doesn’t seem to grow old, but rather it grows with me and I can keep it throughout time.  It means something to me every time I hear it.  When you cook another man’s food out of a cookbook its like singing along to the radio.  Sometimes it becomes your favorite song.        
      The rest was simple.  I took the meat out of the pot and simmered the liquid until reduced by half, broke the meat into small pieces, and returned it to the braising liquid, all by Rinella’s instruction.  Then I crisped the meat in a cast-iron skillet, spread out in a layer, over medium-high heat, and warmed the tortillas.  The kimchi smelled like spicy rotten seaweed.  Bubbles rose up out of the jar, which the label assured me was normal.  I felt reluctant to put some on this beautiful Korean taco, but decided that if I’m going to sing along to the radio, I’ve got to sing the whole song through.  I topped the taco with the kimchi, chopped scallions and sharp cheddar.  
      I wrapped up the tortilla and brought it to my mouth.  It smelt like the sweet and savory Asian take-out of your dreams.  I bit in.  The sour of the kimchi perfectly counterbalanced the sweetness of the meat.  I stood in the kitchen perplexed on how something so simple could taste so complex, but decided to enjoy the creation and ate another taco.  It felt good to make something delicious, even if I was merely following someone else’s lead.  
      “You need to try some,” I said to my wife.
      “Will you make me some beef?” she asked.
      “Try some first.”  
      She took a forkful of the meat.
      “Oh wow!” she said.  “If you make stuff like that I’d eat elk everyday.”
      Hopefully she meant that.