Beef

If there is anything good about winter - this particular, terrible winter - it is that hot, hearty food, cooked slowly and smelling wonderful, provides a feeling of warm comfort. Simple roast beef, in its own spicy sauce, is the centerpiece of our current seasonal menu, and it is complemented by basic, nutritious dishes that round out this four-person repast. All shopping can be done in local supermarkets, at a bargain price of less than $13, and preparation is as painless as the cost.

That little old lady who used to shill for Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers wasn't the last person to ask "Where's the beef?" Yesterday, Licenses and Inspections Commissioner Bennett Levin asked it of Wendy's itself, and, when the answer came up short, he seized almost a thousand burgers for being just a small bite or two under their advertised weight - and distributed them throughout the city to homeless shelters and an emergency foster-care center....

A laboratory analysis of raw beef, conducted by federal researchers, found that 5 percent of the red meat sampled contained Listeria monocytogenes, potentially fatal bacteria, according to a top official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The pathogen was extracted from 319 randomly selected pieces of beef in January; then the original findings were confirmed. "You cannot take comfort in these contamination percentage figures," Lester Crawford, administrator of the USDA's food safety and inspection service, said in Palm Springs, Calif.

If you're not aware of the hottest, healthiest food trend in the Delaware Valley, you've had your head in the sand, and that's the last cheap ostrich joke you'll read here. That's right, ostrich. Big, gawky bird. You've seen its feathers on Mummers' costumes, you've seen its hide in boots and purses. And now, you're seeing its meat on menus from Tony Luke's to Tony Clark's. Red meat. Looks like beef, tastes like beef. With fewer calories and less fat than beef, turkey or chicken.

One thing that surprises me about vegetarians is their ferocity. I would have thought that people who nibble at buds and plants would be more doe-like. But to my chagrin, I have recently learned otherwise. Not long ago, I noted that anti-beef vegetarians were waging a crusade against McDonald's because that company does not offer a veggie burger. This struck me as illogical. If I wanted a glass of buttermilk, I wouldn't go to a tavern for it. And I wouldn't picket the tavern for not keeping some on hand.

Sixth grade was a dark year for Jerry Crafts. He weighed 190 pounds and wasn't particularly athletic. When girls noticed him at all, it was to look at him and move away as quickly as possible. Bullies picked on him, called him Orca, after the whale. "I was short and real fat. It was taking me a long time to blossom," said Crafts, 31, laughing a bit sarcastically in reflection. He was leaning on a tree - or was that tree leaning on him? - after morning practice at the Eagles training camp as the team prepped for tonight's preseason game at Veterans Stadium.

The beef comes and goes, at the rate of 1.5 million pounds a week at the Devault Foods processing plant here in Charlestown Township. Bins and boxes of boned beef from the Midwest are chopped and formed, weighed and tested, sliced and shaped into hamburgers, Philly steaks, meatballs and sausages, and shipped across the country. About 52 million hamburgers a year are sold to Wendy's and Burger King by the family-owned Chester County company, started by Thomas DiFillippo as a butcher shop in 1949.

It's a little bit hard to drag a steer across the field, slap a price tag on its backside, and get a passerby to shove the braying beast into a hatchback. Robert Rzucidlo comes close. Sells his own beef, off his own steers, off his own fields. "What we do is breed for freezer beef, then sell to customers in halves or quarters. " Quarters. As in: Saw the beast straight down the backbone, then split the halves where the beast's belly button would be. So, they drive up, point out the cringing cow that they want slaughtered, then wait around until it's been whacked senseless, then slit and split?

In this age of low-cholesterol, calorie- counting, salt-free, fat-free, eat 'n' run eating, Christmas dinner stands alone, resounding a mighty "Bah! Humbug!" to all our gastronomic Scroogery. Tradition dictates that a Christmas feast has to show a little bit of excess. Choices include roasted ribs of beef dripping juice over Yorkshire pudding; a goose big enough to dwarf Santa, and stuffed with sauerkraut and caraway; or a loin of pork decorated with fruit and a crackling crust of rosemary, sage and garlic.

Things western, from wearing apparel to dancing, are pretty hot these days, fueled by the American spirit of freedom, the love of wide-open spaces and Garth Brooks. To capture the essence of the Old West, today's urban cowboys need only put on some Rocky Mountain jeans and a John Wayne cavalry bib shirt, and rustle up some western-style grub - good, slow-cooking, full-flavored and thoroughly American food. Back in the old days, when the cowpokes rode the range, there always seemed to be an aging cowboy with a limp in his swagger and frying grease on his chaps who cooked the food on the cattle drives.