Because I work at home, I see a lot of TV with the sound off — Oprah had a family on a week ago or so who had a big pile of kids — sextuplets and twins? something like that. The mom was talking about her schedule and how she copes and she mentioned something about what my friend Nina calls “the witching hour” — that hour before dinner where all the kids seem to lose their minds at once. It took a while this mom-on-Oprah was saying, because she cooks “from scratch.” “You cook from scratch!?” Oprah said, as…
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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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Here it is, my first cheese. It’s a Queso Fresco — a very simple simple cheese made by heating the milk to between 185 and 190 degrees, then adding a little bit of apple cider vinegar and continuing to heat until the curd has precipitated out, and the whey is clear. Then you drain it into cheesecloth (I used a small-mesh coffee filter that I’ve used in the past to make yogurt cheese) and there it is. It took about twenty minutes total, and now I’ve got about 2/3 of a cup of crumbly, white, slightly sweet Queso Fresco to…
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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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Off to Billings today for some routine errands — so to keep you all entertained in the meantime, here are some links: Barbara Kingsolver on “Dirty Work” Tikkun tackles the spirituality of seed saving in Be Fruitful and Save Seeds Step-by-step directions for saving tomato seeds Michael Bauer blogs about chefs who grow their own produce (and the commenters get incredibly snotty about it.)
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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…
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For those of you coming in from Ethicurean … welcome, take a look around. For my regular readers, I have a guest post over there called “What’s in Your Freezer” (with an embarassing photo of my frosty freezer).
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Last spring, I was driving back from my morel bonanza, when I came across a small herd of buffalo. There were maybe twenty or thirty of them — cows with calves, a few bulls — enormous, shaggy beasts standing in a swale that green we only get in the spring, with the backside of the Absaroka range rising behind them. It gave you a sense of what it must have been like when this country sustained great herds of buffalo. It was at once an inspiring and disheartening sight. They were so lovely, and there were so few of them.…
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The San Franciso Chronicle has an article about companies that have instituted walking programs to improve employee health. The 10,000 steps concept is actually what spurred me to start walking the dogs to and from the dog park in the first place. I bought a two dollar pedometer, and discovered that adding that 2 miles to my day put me generally up in the 10,000 step zone. Discovering that the sound of running water, and the sight of a few birds in the morning helped with my general stress level was just a nice side effect. Powered by ScribeFire.