Once upon a time, driving across endless Nebraska in the 1980s, I picked up a cheap cassette by Santana entitled Havana Moon.The first song to catch my attention was one with the unmistakable voice of Willie Nelson singing They All Went To Mexico. This was pre-NAFTA, BTW, and the lyrics that I remember best are these:
Wheres my brown dog, where's my hound
He liked my truck he hung around
But he's a canine romeo
And I guess he went to Mexico
Where's that woman so sweet, so mean
Her heart was cautious her mind was keen
She was always looking for the peccadillo
I hope she went to Mexico
If you google peccadillo, half the hits on the first page will be links to dictionaries where you'll learn it's a "trivial or minor sin". You'll have to really dig to find the Cuban sandwich which might have been the predecessor of the Sloppy Joe. You can go to the NYT online and read An Ode to Sloppy Joe, a Delicious Mess and read about the Cuban connection, but nowhere will you see the word peccadillo, so you could say she committed one. You'll forgive her if you ever taste the real thing, a picadillo, with raisins, capers, and almonds. Makes me think of mince meat, and this recipe calls for 1 pound of lean beef mince. Minced beef is not ground beef.
Ground beef is closer to something pureed. It is a very bad thing, not a peccadillo. I don't want to describe the processes used to produce it because they are unappetizing. If you buy a whole piece of beef and grind it through a quarter-inch plate, you will have a good approximation of minced meat. If you partially freeze the beef after cubing it, you'll have a better approximation because the meat it less likely to get squished up and mashed behind the grinder's knives. If the grinder slows down, it's because tendons are wrapping around the shank behind the knives. That's bad because the edges of the knives will keep chopping the beef until they turn it into hamburger. It will be forced though the holes at the outside of the grinder plate into skinny little spirals when this is starting to happen. Stop immediately and clean the knives and plate. If that sounds like too much trouble, be assured it rarely happens when you're only grinding a pound or two.
As for meat grinders, the KitchenAid attachment for small amounts and a huge hand-cranked model for coarser grinds or larger amounts. The KitchenAid is fast to set up and clean (dishwasher-safe) and the big one is not - parts will rust unless you dry them all carefully, but grinding 25 pounds of venison for summer sausage will be done in 10 minutes. You also can cut larger cubes which makes the prep time much shorter. But that clean-up, oh my. These moderately inexpensive electric grinders look alright to me, but I've never used one. The professional strength electrics will really cost you. I've never needed a big electric because the #32 only comes out to party two or three times a year.
6:07:27 PM 
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