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…
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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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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…
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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…