What a more perfect time is there to reflect on what an ideal carnivore future might look like.

The typical carnivore line is “eat steaks!” and, let’s be real, steaks don’t have much complexity to them. Steak is delicious, but it’s simple. Cooking steak is a craft that can be honed, but it’s not the same as taking 3 days to prep for a feast. And so, with eating mostly meat, my kitchen skills have been put on the back burner.

Enter Tara at @slowdownfarmstead. She’s mostly carnivore, lives on a farm, and raises, hunts, or grows all her own food. Her freezers are full of grassfed, organic beef and lamb, venison and pork, ghee and all sorts of good things.

Tara has shown me that it is possible to be both a strict carnivore AND a good cook. Her diet is varied in a way that I’d like mine to be: fowl and swine and cow, juicy steak and pate and raw-milk cheese, homemade charcuterie and cultured buttermilk and stock.

I present lunch, hubby’s plate, mostly from our farm: grass fed and finished lamb chops cooked in homemade ghee and topped with a foraged and dehydrated wild mushroom salt, braunschweiger made with rabbit livers and heart, bacon and duck liver paté topped with ghee, dried mushrooms used as crackers, prosciutto, raw sheep cheese, a couple of cured egg yolks, and a cuppa’ lamb bone broth from yesterday’s lamb shank supper. @slowdownfarmstead

I mean…look at that plate. Look at it. Such a range of flavors and textures, of mildly processed foods (braunschweiger!) and straight-up meat.

I’m in love.

Tara also advocates fasting, based on the writings of Thomas Seyfried. She was not the only influence into my recent forays into fasting, but she certainly showed me that one can fast, still eat well in between, and heal from deep-seated chronic ailments.

It’s easy to romanticize the homestead life, Tara reminds us that life is still life, and that life on a farm is not as glamourous as we like to think.

It’s not all Martha Stewart sipping chai while she braids bacon over a terrine. It’s Tara, with goose poop in her hair, reminding herself to be a little more grateful than frantic. A little injection of reality lest my pretty IG pictures suggest I’ve got it all together.

Most of all, I’m inspired to dig out my copies of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I and Nourishing Traditions. Before I started weeding plants out of my diet, I loved cooking. For a long time, baking made me happy—but even after cutting grains and sugars out of my diet, I found joy in trying new dishes and inventing new, interesting ways to eat food.

Now, I mostly cook burgers and the occasional tuna steak (#currentfave). I had kind of given up on being a “cook” again, with the idea that once I fine-tuned how to cook a perfect steak, I’d have reached the end of what one can cook as a carnivore.

Oh, how wrong I was. And I’m happy to be wrong.

Now, I’m re-inspired to cure egg yolks, make my own sausage, and try frying up some pig’s ears. Experimenting with organ meats and offal. Cultivating relationships with local ranchers.

It’s gonna be a delicious year.