Okay — this one I really went off the reservation. I had some lamb shoulder that I needed to use up, especially since this year’s lamb should be ready soon (I need to check with my dog groomer/lamb rancher when I take the dogs for shots on Tuesday). And as I’ve noted, I have a glut of milk — especially since my first delivery was Thursday, but I’m going to be on the Tuesday delivery from now on — which means I didn’t have a lot of time to use up a gallon of milk over the weekend.

So, I was cruising my cookbooks trying to figure out what to cook — I’d seen recipes for pork braised in milk, but it wasn’t until I saw that Mario had one for lamb that it all kind of came together. Mario’s recipe, which I’m sure is totally authentic and delicious called for the lamb to be browned in a spice mixture of fennel seeds, garlic and parsley. Hmm. I’m not wild about fennel seeds. And Pork and Sons has a pork in milk recipe with garlic and sage that looked sort of good. And then I had a vague recollection of Adam at Amateur Gourmet doing a pork in milk that had lemon peel.

So, with apologies to Mario, I sort of used his process as a guide and experimented. I put some sage, rosemary, thyme, and parsley from my garden in the mini-chop with some good local garlic and whizzed it all up. Then I started to brown up the lamb in the spice mixture, but I decided I didn’t actually want too “brown” a flavor in this — one of the things that seems kind of interesting about the pork with milk recipe in Pork and Sons is that you just put it all in a casserole and cook it in the oven without browning. So — I pulled the plug on browning, and added half a cup of cream and a cup of milk from last week’s delivery, along with three or four nice strips of lemon rind, a generous handfull of coarse grey salt and put the whole thing in the oven at 300 for two hours.

On the side I roasted some local potatoes and some carrots from my garden, and then I sauteed up some Seeds of Italy mixed endives that were getting leggy (they were a little too bitter, but made a great cream soup the next day with the leftover carrots and potatoes).

This came out great — but Mario was right (duh), I should have browned off the meat in the first step. By the end the milk cooks down into this slighly odd, slightly cheesy, but delicious sauce. The meat was wonderfully tender, and all those herbs really worked. It also made a great pasta sauce the next night with a little homemade tomato sauce added and then gratined under the broiler for a few moments. It was an interesting way to cook meat and one I’ll probably do again — it’s delicious, easy to remember, and works even better as leftovers.

Here’s the beginning of the pancetta. I had to buy commercial pork, which is kind of a bummer, but our local organic pork people won’t have another pork belly until the next time they butcher (in about a month) and I wanted to get going. So, here it is, the five pound section of my whole commercial pork belly that seemed to have the most even thickness. It’s pretty thick — I think rolling it might be more of a challenge than I’d anticipated, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.

So far this was really easy. I mixed up the dry rub in a dish, then smooshed it all over the pork. I’ve been flipping it once a day (we’re on day 4 now) and it seems to be firming up nicely.

And it smells great — my fridge smells faintly of bay leaves (nice true bay leaves from my stepmother’s tree in Seattle), juniper berries, nutmeg, garlic, pepper, salt and brown sugar and pork. I added a little of this nice mild Aleppo pepper I bought at World Spice the last time I was in Seattle — I’m never very good at following recipes exactly and this all smelled like a tiny bit of chile would just be perfect.

So now we wait, and flip the pork, and wait a little more. Photos of the rolling to come. And I need to figure out where I’m going to hang it — my canning closet in the basement might be cool enough — I have to get new batteries for the remote thermometer and check (the one unit with batteries is doing important duty underneath the plastic covering the tomatoes — the min/max is invaluable this time of year when I’m trying to foil the frost.)

My mother was teasing me on the phone the other day about still liking to play with my food — guilty as charged. Between the game, pancetta and my adventures in real milk — there’s a lot of playing with food going on around here.