October 21, 2009 at 1:34 pm (Cooking, Food origins, Food preservation, Food security, local food)
Naming our food is a long tradition in my family, starting with Boris the Bull, who I believed would cause my parents’ divorce (do YOU really understand how large a whole steer is? Yeah, us neither…). Last year we bought half a hog and named it Eric. This year’s participant has been dubbed Señor Porcus. No absent referent here!
We picked up our 1/2 hog from Old Pine Farm on Oct. 17th. They have a very nice farm – hogs are pastured with some supplemental feed, not confined to a muddy sty. They are slaughtered on-farm and then sent to the butcher, so there’s no travel stress for the pigs. I feel extremely grateful that we have such a farm near us, and that we can afford to buy our food from them.
Looks like we ended up with about 85 lb of meat (for $300, including cutting and smoking, so somewhere around $3.50/lb). Old Pine Farm is unusual in that they charge a flat price for your hog, no matter what size, and they do not charge extra for cutting and smoking. You get to pick how you’d like your meat cut up. Here’s what we got – showing our strong preference for sausage and pulled pork in this house! My only complaint so far is that the meat is wrapped in Saran Wrap, which I find hard to remove from the meat. Hopefully it will fend off freezer burn – since there’s no air inside the wrapping, it should do that. So long as the wrap is thick enough. We’ll see.
- Loin roast: 10lb in 3 large packages. Wonder if we should have gotten this sliced into chops?
- Shoulder roast: 20+lb in about 10 packages (will become pulled pork)
- Bulk Sausage: 18 one-pound packages
- Smoked kielbasa: 10 – two to four links per pkg
- Ground pork: 6 – 1.5 lb packs
- Bacon: 5 lb in one-pound blocks
- Smoked hocks: 8lb in 2 hocks
- Ribs, pork butt, other misc: 8lb
- Plus about 5 pounds of soup bones and 5 lb of fat for lard
- The tail, the bladder, and possibly the squeal for the Cooking with Laura Project, which I will get to in a few weeks
This filled 2 large coolers and a paper grocery bag; it takes up about 2/3 of our tiny 7cu ft chest freezer and close to half the space above the fridge.
I think this was a steal for $300. I think prices are going up for next year, and they will be worth it.
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August 15, 2009 at 9:48 am (Food preservation, recipes)
I’m starting to think that maybe – just perhaps – I have planted too many cucumbers this year. I’ve never grown them before, and I had no idea what kind of yields, I’d get, so I put 3 “tomato” cages in a 3′x6′ bed and planted 2 cucumber plants (var: Little Leaf from Johnny’s) on each side of the square cages. Not all 24 plants came up, but I’d guess 15 or so did.
We are now harvesting, on average, a quart of pickle-sized cucumbers a day. I only harvest every 2-3 days, so I’m usually getting at least 2 quarts every time I pick. We eat very few cukes fresh, so we’ve been making a LOT of pickles. Here are a few we’ve liked:
- Half-sours – probably our favorite, definitely our “go-to” pickle. Just cukes, garlic, bay, peppercorns, and dill, covered with salt brine and fermented.
- Hungarian summer pickles – not bad, once we added some garlic, but they often taste…fizzy. Literally like there’s carbonation inside the pickles.
- Vinegar garlic dills – first batch had a little too much vinegar and haven’t tasted the second batch yet, but these are closest to Scott’s favorite store-bought pickles
- Mustard/horseradish dills – FABULOUS. Maybe my new favorite pickle…my sweetie hasn’t tried them yet and I hope he hates them.
Weirdo pickles
The following were Pickles of Desperation, made when we just couldn’t think of what else to make. We actually haven’t tried most of these yet…I’ll let you know if they’re any good.
- Curry pickles – these were actually quite good. Fermented in salt brine, with a tablespoon of curry powder and a teaspoon each of whole corriander, cumin, and black pepper
- “Kitchen sink” pickles – faced with too much vinegar brine and too many jars with spices already in them and not enough cucumbers, we frantically searched the kitchen for anything we could pickle. The result? A pint of pickled kohlrabi, and two mixed pints of kohlrabi, cabbage, carrots, and apples. We plan to serve it with pork.
- “Thanksgiving” pickles – fermented with garlic, sage, rosemary, and chives.
- Thai basil-chili pickles – lots of Thai basil, 2 chili peppers, and garlic
Lessons learned
- Cherry tree leaves work better than grape leaves for keeping pickles crunchy
- We like them sized 2-3″ best. At 4″, they can’t keep their crunch, and larger than that, you really have to cut them into “coins.” (I do flavor experiments with these bigger pickles. If the flavor works out, we’ll do it again with tiny premium cukes.)
- If fermented pickles don’t taste fabulous after 3-4 days, just leave them out of the fridge another couple days. The flavors will continue to develop a *lot*.
- Wear sturdy gloves when picking cucumbers!
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December 18, 2008 at 2:10 pm (Cooking, Food preservation, local food, recipes)
My mom (hi, Mom!) had a great idea that one of the Grange food activities we could do is a make-and-take entree prep night. I’d put together a menu of three more or less complete meals, using complimentary ingredients, and do the shopping. People would sign up for the number of servings they’d like. We’d prep all the food together and assemble finished meals into our own containers, then take them home for use that week or to freeze.
It’s similar to what they do at Main Dish and other “build-an-entree” places, only we’d focus on using local, natural ingredients instead of ingredients like this.
I’ve worked up three sample “suites” of foods. They each work out to about $2/serving. What do you think of the idea? These menus? The price? Would you want more vegetarian options? Would you do this on a Sunday night in February?
Menu 1:
- Roast chicken w/mashed potatoes
- Chicken enchilada bake
- Lentil-veggie “pie” topped with mashed potatoes
Menu 2:
- Pork and veggie stir fry w/rice
- Saag dal over rice
- Coconut curry (with rice, or prep rice noodles at home)
Menu 3:
- Meatballs
- Kale balls
- Kale, bean, and meatball soup
- Lasagna
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December 16, 2008 at 1:26 pm (Cooking, Food preservation, Food security)
At lunch, I met with Robin, the president of the Pittsfield Grange. It was a very cool meeting! They are excited to partner with us on the as-yet unnamed community food venture. The kitchen is large, and if the workflow layout isn’t ideal, there is at least a lot of counter space, big sinks, and two stoves. Plus dishes, punch bowls, chafing racks, etc. It will be a fine space for most activities.
The hall rental deal is, if we have more than 6 events a year, we can rent it all day Sunday for $80 a pop (or, I think, the afternoon/evening for $40, but I’d need to check). But, if a few of us join the Grange and it becomes a Grange-sponsored event, there is no rental fee. I think he also alluded to being able to have a treasury for this project, specifically, as opposed to having any money we make go into the general Grange fund.
Next steps: attend a Grange meeting (end of January) and decide if our first event will be in January or February. I don’t want to join until I’ve been to at least one meeting, but I don’t want to wait until Feb to do an event, so I think I’ll schedule 6 events at the $80 rate, starting in January, and if I join in Feb or so, they can just waive the fee for those.
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December 15, 2008 at 1:16 pm (Cooking, Food preservation, Food security, Preserving Traditions, green living, local food)
So I’ve been wanting to “do something with local food” for a good long while now. This blog started as part of that desire. I’ve probably spent a couple years thinking about what I might do and trying to join in various existing efforts. None of it felt like “enough,” and none of it felt like what I really wanted to do.
I’ve thought a lot about self-sufficiency in the last year, and the most important thing I’ve learned is that self-sufficiency is not a worthwhile goal. It’s fricken’ hard, for one thing; it’s not an efficient use of human energy; and, if my household is flush and my neighbors are starving, I’m not going to be self-sufficient for long, anyway. What I’d rather strive for is community sufficiency, where we’re less dependent on produce from China but we don’t each have to have our own wheat field.
That idea and some inspiration from a whole lot of folks (for example) have gotten me thinking about starting some kind of community kitchen where we could get together, share equipment and knowledge, and build a community around good food. And I’ve decided it’s time to move forward and try to bring this around.
I’m starting small, and I’m trying to keep my expectations reasonable and flexible. Here’s what I’ve got so far, and a call for your creative brainpower, after the break: Read the rest of this entry »
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December 4, 2008 at 11:51 am (Food preservation, Musings)
Tags: crows
I finally finished the turkey stock from our feast bird – froze the stock, stripped the meat off the carcass, washed the huge pots – and then I dumped the bones, gristle, and such (plus some kraut that had gone bad) out back.
When I woke up this morning, dozens of crows were enjoying a feast and calling their brethren in from half the county! My pics didn’t come out because I scared them away when I opened the door. 
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November 8, 2008 at 8:09 pm (Energy, Food preservation, Musings)
Tags: freezer, pork
*sigh* I wrangled long and hard over my decision not to purchase a freezer earlier this year. My main reasons were that I wanted to save energy and to force myself to preserve food in other ways, like root cellaring.
Then the folks I slaughtered chickens with asked if I’d like to split a hog with them – pasture-raised and apple-fed by a neighbor and due to be processed within the week. The price seemed astoundingly cheap: about $2/lb, I calculated, after processing and smoking. For pasture-raised happy pig. Shoot – we pay $5/lb for the cheap happy sausage and $8/lb for bacon. I scrambled to figure out approximately how much meat is in a pig, and how much of what cuts.
And I realized suddenly, you can’t root cellar a pig. Oh, you can smoke and cure some of it – but what we really love is sausage, and I just don’t have the skills or desire to dry-cure and eat half a pig’s worth of pepperoni. So all my calculations before were really just taking veggies into account and not the fact that I could never get half a hog, a lamb, or a deer without a standalone freezer. Suddenly, it seemed perfectly logical to buy. Read on… Read the rest of this entry »
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October 8, 2008 at 2:34 pm (Cooking, Energy, Food preservation)
Tags: dehydrator, dried fruit
So I read about Alton Brown’s box fan food dehydrator and decided to try it with some apples I’d gleaned from local parking lots. I actually like it better than my food dehydrator!
I peeled, cored, and sliced the apples with one of these, then spread them out on furnace filters. I actually put the box fan on its back, blowing upward, on top of a wooden crate so plenty of air could get underneath. Stacked the filters on top of the fan, turned the fan on medium, and 12 hours later – perfect dried apple slices!
They tasted much more like the apple slices I get from the co-op than ones I’ve dried with heat. Anything I’ve dried in the typical hot-blowing-air kind of dehydrator came out with some too raw and some crispy. They always had a weird taste that might have been related to the heat, or might have been from previous exposure to Grandad’s Secret Jerky Marinade.
I’m still experimenting with how dry they need to be…are these going to get moldy? They feel like the ones from the store, so I’m hoping they’ll be good. It’s sure easier than the other one, quieter, uses less electricity, and with better results, so I’m sold!
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I’m doing my first workshop on stocking a pantry to live out of! This workshop aims to appeal to a variety of folks: those who want to save money, those who want quick meal prep, and those who think the economy is going to collapse but aren’t quite ready to join a peak oil group or move to a commune. Here’s the announcement: [EDIT 8-13 4:30pm - revised location]
