Look at that picture! Hot damn do I love that picture. I had just gotten a new lens for my camera (If you have a Nikon camera this lens is the shit and it’s inexpensive.) and I needed some recipes so I could put it through it’s paces. Doing low carb at the time, I figured a homemade beef jerky recipe would be perfect. Not only could I put together a nice piece for the website, but I’d also end up with some delicious beef jerky.

Good intentions often end in miserable failure.

I decided to make a ground beef jerky as I’d made the simple dried jerky before and that’s a boring ass recipe. Things started out fine, I got that sexy shot of the meat all ground up in the food processor, added some seasonings and then I took this frankly, disgusting shot: 

Isn’t that appetizing? Mmmm, mish-mash meat. I’m salivating.

I should have stopped right there and given that to my dog. That would have been the wise thing to do. But I am a complete moron, this is well recorded. So I rolled this meat out between to sheets of wax paper until it was incredibly thin.

I figured that since the box of wax paper says all over the damn thing that’s it’s “great for baking” that it would be cool to just leave the meat on the wax paper while it cooked. It was at low temperatures, right?

Not right at all. By the time the jerky was done that wax paper had joined forces with the meat to combine one inseparable soul. So those people at Cut-Rite can kiss my big Irish ass.

Additionally, the meat had become very brittle and offered the most unpleasant texture to anyone daring enough to eat it. I still tried to force the issue by getting some showcase shots of the final product for the website, but that too, sucked:

If that doesn’t look like tree bark…and it didn’t taste much different than bark either, so it was the whole package.

What a waste.

In the end, my dog did get to eat the meat, or what was left of it, you certainly couldn’t call it meat.

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