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…
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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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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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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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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…
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Yup — although it sounded like rain outside my window all night — look what I found when the sun came up this morning — let’s hope what’s left of the tomatoes are okay under that plastic. Oh, and maybe it’s time to put the folding chairs and the outdoor cushions away for the winter (except that it’ll be warm and sunny again in a couple of days and everything will need to dry out).
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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…
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I have another gallon of real milk coming today, and because a gallon of milk a week is really more than I can use, I ordered this nifty cheesemaking kit from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company. Last week I made yogurt from the fabulous unpasteurized milk and I was shocked at how fabulous it came out. I followed these terrific instructions and they worked like a dream. In three hours, as the instructions claimed, I had really great, thick yogurt. I’ve been eating it all week. A quart and a pint of milk, plus a cup of yogurt as…