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…
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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…
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I realized the other day while making paté that my KitchenAid mixer turned 35 this year — thirty five years this yellow baby has been churning out egg whites and cookie dough and cake batter. The last couple of years it’s repetoire has expanded to include pasta dough and grinding meat — it’s a very talented machine. The KitchenAid belonged to my mother. She ordered it, with every attachment, the afternoon my father walked out. The story she tells is that she’d been wanting it, but he thought it was too expensive — so when he finally decided that he…
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Look what I made this morning — ricotta cheese! On toast, with a little parsley/basil oil I put up this summer, some salt, some pepper — yum. My milk delivery is on Tuesdays, so it looks like Wednesdays are becoming Cheese Day. I like to let the gallon jar sit in the fridge overnight so the cream will separate out, but the gallon jar takes up too much room. So Wednesday mornings I skim off the cream (this week I mixed last week’s leftover cream with the leftover Créme Fraiche I made a couple of weeks ago and set it…
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Ever since I bought Pork and Sons last spring, I’ve been wanting to make the Terrine Jacquy — whenever I’ve been in France I’ve been fascinated by the sheer variety of potted terrines — they’re everywhere in a million variations. The last couple of years I’ve been doing food baskets for Christmas presents — trying to share the fruits of my garden and wildcrafted finds like dried morels — so I saw the Terrine Jacquy and thought how cool — those would be great in Christmas baskets — The original recipe is pretty simple — 5.5 pounds of pork belly,…
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It was a gorgeous weekend here — blue skies, yellow leaves falling off trees, sunshine, snow on the peaks. It was so gorgeous that even though we’d done a nice hike early in the day, I couldn’t stay home yesterday afternoon so I took Raymond for a little bike ride. It’s our newest trick — I get on the Happy Bike with Ray on the leash and off we go. He runs alongside with that rocking-horse run that really happy dogs get. The trick though, is that I need to keep reminding him to “be careful” and to “watch out”…
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I don’t have any photos because my little camera isn’t really good enough to show the progress of the pancetta, but I can assure you that it is a much happier piece of raw meat since I’ve been running the swamp cooler to up the humidity down there. Ruhlman’s recipe says that the drying pancetta should be “firm and pliable but not hard” — before I upped the humidity, it was getting a little hard. Now it seems happier somehow, can’t really explain it but it isn’t drying out at quite the rate it was, and where early last week…
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What a surprise — I know she’s been shortlisted forever, but it never occurred to me that they’d actually give it to her — but then again, the Nobel committee seems to like decidedly odd writers — and Lessing is certainly odd. I can’t overstate how important The Golden Notebook was to me in my twenties when I was trying to figure out how to be a writer, trying to figure out how to build what Anna Wulf describes as a “free” life. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be a wife and a mother, but I didn’t want…
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The Ameya Preserve folks have done it again — they’ve listed property in their development in the Fantasy Gifts section of the 2007 Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog. I can’t get a direct link to the page, but if you scroll through, you’ll find it — there’s a photo from the Ameya website on page 126, that same photo that looks like it must have all the color values punched up — it’s too green for that time of year, and the sunrise (?) seems improbably purple considering how much light is on the hillsides. The Neiman Marcus people have also…
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There it is — five pounds of cured, rolled, raw pork belly hanging in my basement — it’s a tiny bit freaky, but three days into it, I’m sort of used to my little meat project. The basement smells lovely — all that nutmeg in Ruhlman’s cure plus a nice porky smell. My big worry is that the recipe says the pancetta should cure in a cool place with humidity of about 60% — I don’t think my house in the high desert of Montana has *every* had a humidity reading that high. So I’m keeping an eye on it…