The Butcher

Hello everyone and welcome back to EnglishPod.
My name is Marco.
And my name is Catherine.
And today we're going to be visiting one of my favorite places, I must say.
Really?
So you're a big meat eater?
I am.
I have to have meat every day, so that's why I usually go to the butcher.
All right.
So vegetarians be warned, today's dialogue is all about eating meat and where to go to
get meat.
So as Marco said, that place is called the butcher's.
So we're going to be visiting the butcher and we're going to learn all the different
types of meat you can find there.
Great.
So we don't have anything to preview, but before we get started, just like to mention
that you're going to hear a lot of different kinds of words and we'll be back in a minute
to talk about what they mean.
Hi, what can I get for you?
I'd like half pound of ground beef, please.
Good choice.
Our ground beef is extra lean, if you know what I mean.
Could I also have half a dozen pork chops and two pounds of boneless chicken breast?
No, no, no chicken breasts at the moment.
But we have some nice chicken thighs.
No, that won't do.
I'll take this smoked ham you have here.
Sorry, is there anything else?
Is this salami and bologna you have here?
Yes, it's very fine meat.
Made it myself.
Sounds good.
Okay, that's it.
Wait, we have T-bone, rib eye and sirloin steaks.
They are very fresh.
Just came from the slaughterhouse.
No, that's okay.
Really, I think that's all for today.
Okay, that'll be $34.50.
All right, we're back.
So this butcher was kind of creepy in the beginning.
Very creepy in the beginning.
I think that's usually the conception that you have of butchers because they always have
a knife and they're always covered in blood, but it's not human blood.
Right, like the movie Sweeney Todd.
Did you see that?
Yeah, like Sweeney Todd.
The butcher of Fleet Street.
But we actually took a look at a lot of different types of meat that the woman was ordering.
So why don't we take a look at these now in Language Takeaway.
Language Takeaway.
Okay, so the first is a classic cut.
This is something that we had at my house about once a week growing up.
It's called a pork chop.
Pork chop.
So a pork chop comes from the animal, the pork or pig.
Yeah, we actually don't say pork to mean the animal.
Pork just means the kind of meat that comes from a pig.
So big difference there when we're talking about food, we say pork.
Oh, wow.
And what about a pork chop?
So what exactly is that?
Chop is usually just on the bone and oftentimes it's fried or baked, I guess, but it's just
a piece of pork on the bone and a chop, you just imagine a knife chopping something.
All right, so a pork chop, very good.
And after pork chops, we were ordering some ground beef.
All right, so ground beef is another important one.
Ground beef is beef that's been chopped up and pushed through a machine that kind of
pushes it out in very, very small bits and pieces.
There's no bones.
So ground comes from the verb to grind.
So to grind up meat, to make it very, very small pieces.
Right, so if you want to make a spaghetti bolognese, the kind of beef you use is ground
beef or even hamburgers.
Oh, yeah, exactly.
So ground beef, you ground up beef.
What other things would you grind?
You could grind your teeth.
Some people do that when they're sleeping, they grind their teeth.
You can grind, you have pepper grinders.
You know, peppers sometimes come in balls and you have to grind them to make them smaller
and broken down.
Very good.
So that's ground beef and from the verb to grind.
Now we are buying some boneless chicken breasts.
All right, so boneless, as you have guessed, means without bones.
And chicken breasts are usually just a really nice, juicy, kind of tender cut of meat from
the chicken, from the underside of the chicken where obviously, yeah, they have it.
It's not a wing, it's not a leg, it's just a chicken breast.
All right, so boneless chicken breast.
Now usually it is boneless, right, when you buy it at the supermarket.
Yeah, yeah.
Next up, we've got some classic deli counter favorites.
These are our cold cuts.
All right, so cold cuts.
Now this means that they are cold?
Oh, well, yeah, they're cold.
But I think cold cuts, the most important thing to remember here is that they're mostly
like kinds of salami or cured meats.
So these are salt cured or they're dried meats.
And you usually have them on sandwiches, so like a salami sandwich.
So like cured meat, you mean that meat hasn't been cooked?
Oh, no, it's not been cooked, but it's treated in a way that allows it to last for a very
long time.
So they look like long, long tubes of meat.
They look very dry.
They look very dry, like beef jerky, for example.
All right, so cured meat.
Now, for example, we have salami and bologna.
Bologna.
Now, it's interesting because bologna is actually spelled B-O-L-O-G-N-A.
So you would say bologna or something like that.
Well, I think it comes from the Italian bologna.
But it's definitely a change that happened in the English language when it came over
from Italy.
But bologna is a kind of meat that's got a very funny looking name.
Yeah, see, you're more sophisticated than I am.
That's why you know this difference.
I just speak Italian.
All right, so you have salami, bologna, and...
Pastrami.
Pastrami.
What about ham?
Is that considered a cold cut?
You can have ham in the cold cut section because ham sometimes comes in tubes that you slice.
But ham is also just a normal kind of pork.
But ham is cured, you know.
Like a smoked ham.
Exactly.
Or smoked turkey, one of my favorites.
Very good.
And, well, now moving on from the cold cuts, we're going to concentrate on steaks.
Ooh, steaks.
So there are a thousand kinds of steaks in this world and every city seems to have its
own kind.
But here we're only looking at three, the first of which is the T-bone.
All right, the T-bone steak, I think, is one of the most popular ones.
Definitely.
It's a steak that's pretty big, right?
Yeah, well, yeah, it can be.
And it has a bone inside that looks like a T.
All right, so you're saying, Marco, that the T-bone is named after the shape and the look
of this steak.
Yeah, T-bone steak.
All right.
And as well as our next one is also a rib eye.
Okay, so the rib eye, I think, actually has a piece of the rib in it.
So the rib is the bone and there's a circle, which is kind of a, it's, it's a, the piece
of meat is sliced off the rib and the circle is actually part of that rib.
So there's a little bit of bone in it.
But it's not as bony as the T-bone.
Right.
So it does have one small bone that kind of looks like an eye because you can see through
it.
And our next steak has no bone and is the most tender and the best steak you can have,
sirloin steak.
So I think the, the sirloin is definitely the most expensive if you're in a restaurant.
Definitely the most tender, I think, of all those.
It's delicious.
And usually you can have like a big sirloin steak, like a half a kilo, like a 400 gram
sirloin steak.
I had a friend who ate a full kilo.
Really?
Sirloin steak.
Wow.
Is there a competition or?
No, there's a kind of steak called la bistecca alla fiorentina in Italy.
It's the Florentine beef steak and it is, it can be about a kilo of meat.
Wow.
Yeah.
I bet you can't even move after that.
No, you're, no, you fall asleep with your head in your soup on the table.
All right.
So that's all the meat related words that we have for you today.
So why don't we move on now to Fluency Builder where we're going to take a look at some of
the phrases in this dialogue.
Fluency Builder.
We're going to look at the phrases if you know what I mean.
If you know what I mean.
Now I love this phrase, if you know what I mean.
I do know what you mean.
Well, it's weird.
I like it too.
So you can use it for sarcasm.
Yeah.
Right.
Or you can use it to kind of insinuate something.
Right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So here's what you're saying.
You're saying there's a double meaning in what I want to say.
So there's two things I could say and I'm not going to say it outright, but you know,
this thing that we can't really say.
So for example, we can say she likes to go out if you know what I mean.
All right.
So you're insinuating that not only does she like to go out, but maybe, maybe she goes
out a lot, a lot, or maybe she gets drunk or something like that.
Yeah.
So it's kind of like a double meaning, but you're trying to be subtle.
Yeah.
But it's not so subtle because you're actually saying like, this is not what I mean.
Or she's eating for two if you know what I mean.
There we go.
So you're insinuating that, well, you're not really insinuating, you're telling me that.
She's pregnant.
Eating for two is a common idiom in English that means that a person, a woman has a, well,
is going to have a baby.
So here I'm saying, hey, do you know this idiom?
She's eating for two if you know what I mean.
Right.
Wink, wink, wink.
Wink, wink.
So now why don't we take a look at some other examples of how we could use if you know what
I mean in different circumstances when you're trying to insinuate something.
Example one.
She's eating for two now, if you know what I mean.
Example two.
Tim hit a home run today, if you know what I mean.
Example three.
Jim and Laura are going their separate ways, if you know what I mean.
All right.
We're back.
So now that that's clear, why don't we move on to our next phrase?
So this one is a counting phrase.
And for those of you who have heard the word dozen before, it might not be so new.
The phrase is half a dozen.
Half a dozen.
So that means half of 12.
12.
So a dozen is 12.
And it's, I'm not really sure when this started being used in English, but a dozen is 12 and
half a dozen is then six.
Now there's another phrase or another saying that's very common, a dime a dozen.
He's a dime a dozen.
So that means you can get 12 of the same type of guys for 10 cents.
Right.
So they're easy to find.
They're easy to find.
Yeah.
The dime a dozen.
All right.
Very good.
And moving on to our last one.
When they were talking, they said something about the meat being lean, extra lean.
Okay.
Lean, this does not mean lean on a door.
This is not like resting on something.
This is actually a kind of way to describe food.
And so food is lean if it's not got much fat, it's not fatty.
Okay.
So if it's lean, it doesn't have much fat.
Exactly.
So I prefer to eat lean meats.
So I often eat birds and poultry.
So chicken, I like it pretty lean.
And if it's got fat on it, I'll cut the fat off.
Oh, okay.
Like the skin.
The skin is fat, right?
Yeah.
All right.
So you can have lean beef.
It doesn't have much fat around it.
Yeah.
And actually on the packages at the supermarket, it often says the percentage of meat that
you have.
So it's 95% lean or 98% lean.
So that means you have 3% fat in there.
Exactly.
Or 2%.
My math skills are amazing.
All right.
So now that we've finished with all of these words on Fluency Builder, let's take a look
at our dialogue for the last time.
Hi, what can I get for you?
No, no, no chicken breasts at the moment, but we have some nice chicken thighs.
No that won't do.
I'll take this smoked ham you have here.
Okay.
Is there anything else?
Is this salami and bologna you have here?
Yes.
It's very fine meat.
Made it myself.
Sounds good.
Okay, that's it.
Great.
We have T-bone, rib eye, and sirloin steaks.
They are very fresh.
Just came from the slaughterhouse.
No, that's okay, really.
I think that's all for today.
Okay, that'll be $34.50.
Alright, we're back.
So Catherine, are you a big beef or meat eater?
Definitely am.
It helps that my partner in crime is from Kansas City and they have the best, among
the best steaks in our entire country in Kansas City.
Wow.
I actually miss, there was back in California, we had the $6 burger from Carl's Jr.
It was just basically beef, bacon, cheese, it was just like this huge burger full of
meat and obviously a lot of calories.
But it was delicious.
In Ecuador we are very used to having some meat product every day with our food.
Yeah, well it's the same in the Midwest actually from where we're from.
It's the same in the Midwest because people in the Midwest generally think that if you're
not eating meat then what are you eating?
Bread?
Right.
Corn?
Yeah.
So meat is considered a healthy part of the day and you definitely eat it with your meals.
Yeah, and I'm sure our vegetarian listeners might not appreciate this but it's just kind
of different diets.
Some people eat, for example, rice every day.
So where in other countries you wouldn't really have rice every day.
Or for example, when I was in Chile, I had a lot of potatoes.
Really?
A lot of potatoes.
Have you ever had an Argentine steak?
I hear they have the best beef in the world.
They are not only delicious but they are very inexpensive and it's amazing.
You can have a complete steak buffet for like, I don't know, I can't even remember but I
sat there for three hours and couldn't move and kept eating.
Is it true you can eat it with a spoon?
It's so soft?
Some of the meat is very, very tender.
Not if it's grilled, you can't really do that, but in other preparations it's almost like
that.
With a nice butter sauce.
Mmm, herbs.
Making me hungry.
I know, you've made me hungry.
I think we're going to take off and have some burgers.
If you have any questions, any comments, please come to our website at EnglishPod.com and
we're there to answer any doubts.
And we'd love to know what your favorite foods are, meat or otherwise, so post something
on our website.
Hope to see you there soon.
Bye.
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