Hello to any of you who came in via yesterday’s piece in the Livingston Enterprise — and please know, it’s not a “pig stomach” I cured in my basement, but a regular-old pork belly. I might be odd, but I’m not that odd!
Out here in Montana we don’t have the deciduous tree display like they do back east — we do have surprising splashes of gold aspens on mountainsides dark with conifers — last week I took the dogs up to Pine Creek for a hike and as we were driving into the trailhead there were two yellow aspens, halfway up the mountain, illuminated by the sunlight streaking down the canyon — just two, glowing like candles. One of the many reasons to live here.
Anyhow, we don’t have the gorgeous red and gold and orange displays of the east, but what we do have is fall veggies, roasted hot until they’re slightly caramelized. I have a bumper crop of beets this year, and although I didn’t grow as many carrots as I now wish I had, I have a solid stash of carrots. Deep Creek Green, our local source of fabulous veggies, let most of their fields go fallow this year but they still seem to have come up with a crop of their delicious garlic, and Mark Rehder who is farming both in town and on a 10-acre parcel just outside of town has some beautiful pumpkins and squash.
Because I’ve been trying to pay more attention to my energy consumption, and because I’m really kind of lazy, I’ve started ganging up my cooking. If I’m doing a chicken, I’ll throw in two or three dishes of veggies to roast — and so now I have a refrigerator full of roasted carrots and beets, some squash puree, and leftover roast chicken (I have written before about my near-religious devotion to the powers of a roast chicken).
So, yesterday, trying to decide what to eat for lunch, I pulled out the leftover squash and smooshed some onto a tortilla. Then I added some of the gorgeous beet salsa I made with roasted beets, a chopped shallot from the garden (shallots are easy to grow and expensive to buy), some green tomato salsa, a little leftover chicken and some of last week’s ricotta. Plus a little Herdez Ranchera sauce to perk things up — and there you have it — a sort of swanky “gourmet” lunch made with all local ingredients in five minutes (well, fifteen if you count the time to heat it up in my cast iron pan). With a glass of my delicious local milk — what more could a girl want?
One thing I like about having a lot of stuff in the fridge like that is the way it allows you to keep making up new combos. I’m not one of those people who is good at following recipes — I wind up improvising — so a fridge full of lovely, pre-roasted veggies and chicken or some pork shoulder looks to me like a fun palette of flavors that I can keep combining and recombining all week.
And they’re beautiful. Orange squash. Beets like jewels. My own carrots which are so much better than any carrot I can find in a store. Bright green chard that was growing in my backyard five minutes ago.
Over at Ethicurean. The good folks over there are helping me get the word out by posting Strange bedfellows: Why is Alice Waters involved with the Ameya Preserve in Montana?
Here it is … the pancetta — finished and cut. This was SO easy. It takes three weeks, but other than that, the actual preparation was a cinch. All I did was rub the cure on the pork belly and let it sit in the fridge for a week (flipping it every day or so). Then I rolled it and hung it in the basement. You’re supposed to let it hang for 2 weeks, but since even with the humidifier going I couldn’t get the humidity above 20%, and the pancetta looked like it was both getting “hard” (to quote the recipe) and starting to get little mold specks on it, I took it down after 8 days and let it sit, loosely wrapped in the fridge for the next week or so.
Saturday I pulled it out and cut it into chunks, which I sealed with my FoodSaver machine (love my seal-a-meal), and froze. Of course, I fried up a little chunk to see how it tasted (unlike Bob over at Hunger Artist, mine was not heirloom pork raised by someone I know, and I am not trying it raw) — it was delicious — the texture was different than the commercial pancetta I’ve been buying these last few weeks. It’s drier, and the meaty part was almost ham-like — probably because it was the end piece, so it was a little drier anyway.
I’d do this again in a flash — and next time I’ll definitely spring for the organic pork — if you look at Bob’s pancetta compared to mine it’s much more meaty. For now, this is still better than commercial, and since I’m lobbying my milk and egg lady for one of her pigs next year, that gives me plenty of time to plan.
I’d like to try some other cured meats — I’m particularly interested in doing some dried sausages, but I have to figure out a solution to the humidity problem first. There’s a used appliance place just across my back alley, I might have to look into getting a small used fridge so I can control the temps and humidity better — basically, we live in the high desert out here, and the humidity is almost never more than about 30%. I’ll have to think about it.
In the meantime, I was out in the garden pulling up the last of the tomatoes this weekend, and I noticed I have some beautiful frisee out there — I’m thinking lunch might have to be frisee salad with pancetta and a poached egg — yum yum.
Last night my friend Bill Campbell’s documentary, Wolves In Paradise: Ranchers and Wolves in the New West had its premiere at the Bozeman Bioneers conference. It’s a terrific production — keep an eye out for it on your local PBS stations (or better yet, call and ask for it).
Bill followed two different ranches who are dealing with the burden of ranching in wolf country. The margins for any of our small farmers or ranchers are so small that the losses caused by wolves killing or harrassing one’s cattle are substantial. Ranchers live or die by the amount of weight they can get on their stock over the summer, and wolves running your cattle doesn’t help them keep weight on. Bill chose to focus on the Davis family, three generations ranching in the Paradise Valley just south of Livingston, and on the Sun Ranch over south of Ennis which is run by Roger Lang, who made his fortune in Silicon Valley. Both ranchers are trying to keep ranching alive, are trying to preserve open space from development, and are trying to preserve a way of life that is slipping away. It’s been ten years since wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, and while they’re here to stay, the question is how to manage wild predators in close proximity to domestic livestock. There are no final answers, but the documentary shows lots of people asking interesting questions, and doing their best to work things out.
The documentary is also beautifully shot — Bill has a gorgeous eye and a marvelous talent for making even the most mundane aspects of ranch life visually fascinating. Keep an eye out for it, and push your local stations to carry it.