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.
4 Comments
August 11, 2009 at 1:53 pm (Food origins)
Does anyone know where I can get about 1 gallon a month of goat’s milk (pasteurized or raw) in the Ann Arbor area? The goat shares I’ve found are too far away and give too much milk.
4 Comments
November 4, 2008 at 10:44 am (Food origins, Food security, Musings, local food)
The Crosby Mint Farm in St. Johns, Michigan, was founded in 1912 by J.E. Crosby Sr. on two acres. The now 140-acre farm has produced chemical-free spearmint and peppermint essential oils for 96 years. They are facing foreclosure, even though they have enough mint oil in stock to pay off their debt. So they’re having a mint oil sale! Pure, chemical-free, steam-distilled peppermint or spearmint oil is $5/dram (1/8 oz). Free shipping if you order 6 or more. Help a neighbor and local chem-free farm! Buy some mint oil!
7 Comments
October 3, 2008 at 12:06 pm (Food origins, Organic gardening)
Tags: turmeric
Anyone know where to buy fresh turmeric root? It looks a lot like gingerroot.
3 Comments
September 28, 2008 at 7:02 pm (Changing habits, Food origins, Musings)
Tags: butchering, chickens
For a long time, I’ve thought that if I’m going to eat meat, I should be able to kill the animal I’m eating. It just seems like the honorable thing to do. However, I don’t know how to hunt, and I don’t know anyone who raises livestock. This spring, however, my dear friend Suzie told me of a conversation she’d had with someone she’d met at a conference. This woman, Lori, and her husband, Floyd, and some neighbors raise about 75 chickens each year, then get together one day in the fall to butcher them. Lori graciously invited not only Suzie, but me to come out and help this year.
Chicken Day was yesterday, and I’d like to tell you about it. Some of the description will be a little graphic, but there are no pictures. Still, I’ll put it after a cut so you can skip this post if you want to. But really – I’ll be talking more about my thoughts about meat eating, so don’t be put off! (If you want a really nice photo essay of the process of slaughtering chickens, please see Angie’s excellent posts on prep, slaughter, dressing, and packaging chickens, plus her husband’s post on building a mechanical chicken plucker. I used the same methods, only varying a little bit in details like the wooden trough instead of a cone.)
Read the rest of this entry »
11 Comments
August 22, 2008 at 4:01 pm (Cooking, Food origins)
Tags: canning
Ok…I think this is the weekend I finally rev up the pressure canner for the first time! The sweet corn is coming in and the freezer space is running out.
Any words of wisdom or encouragement for a first-time pressure canner??
3 Comments
August 22, 2008 at 11:57 am (Food origins, Musings)
Tags: survey
Ok, I’ve finally gotten that food blog survey around! Please respond whether you write or just read blogs about food, gardening, etc. It’s only four questions – would you like to share your thoughts? I’ll share the results in about a week.
Take the survey! [closed]
See the results!
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August 17, 2008 at 4:16 pm (Changing habits, Food origins, Musings)
Do you ever sit down and realized just how much you’ve changed over time, even though you still feel like the same “you” you were fifteen years ago? And wait…fifteen years? Was I even alive then? Wait – I was not only alive, but I was doing something meaningful and being kind of an adult fifteen years ago?
Whoa.
Care to dive into my food habits over the last decade and a half? It’s really interesting to see how my definition of healthy eating has changed over time and paychecks. More after the cut… Read the rest of this entry »
4 Comments
August 15, 2008 at 11:35 am (Food origins, Musings)
Tags: blogging, Eat Local Eat Natural, jobs
So remember when I ooohed and aaaahed about Eat Local Eat Natural? And when I went to that township zoning board meeting to say “Hey, this business is awesome; you should let them build their distribution center”?
Well…they want to hire me to write for them! I will essentially be blogging for them. I’ll write stories about their farmers, featured chefs, and aspects of the business (like the delivery truck they’re currently converting to run on veggie oil/biodeisel).
On September 13th, I’ll be attending the Homegrown Festival in Ann Arbor’s Kerrytown and blogging from the scene. I know several of you are heavily involved in this festival…will I see you there? Any thoughts on aspects to cover, or niches that aren’t already being filled? Or should I just show up early to set up tables?
And everybody…what are your thoughts on personal vs. professional blogging? I don’t want to turn my blog into an advertisement, and I don’t want to abandon Eat Close to Home. I’m hoping to keep talking about my personal efforts to eat more sustainably, garden, cook at home, etc. on this blog. But where’s the line when it comes to talking about local food sources? Do you consider it a problem if I mention the same producers here and at the ELEN blog? Or does that sound too much like “a word from our sponsors”?
15 Comments
July 26, 2008 at 6:57 pm (Changing habits, Cooking, Energy, Food origins, Food preservation)
Man, it’s nuts how good I feel when I Get Stuff Done. Highlights from the last couple days:
- Strawberry and blueberry preserves (I wanted to crawl face first into the pint of strawberry)
- Chopped holes in clay and planted 5 tomatillos, 4 tomatoes, and 1 pepper plant that I got for free Friday at an end-of-season sale
- Good yard sale find: down/feather “mattress” or super-thick comforter
- Cut and burned all the Canada thistle that was going to seed in the back (witness the ten thousand minute puncture wounds on my forearms)
- Good-bye and good riddance to the hot tub, my most expensive mistake to date
- Great conversations toward some very interesting consulting work
- Started playing with the Kill-A-Watt and discovered that toasting my breakfast uses more power than leaving the fan running 18 hours straight
- Made sag daal for dinner…oh so tasty! And just for fun, figured out that it costs about 50 cents a serving, including rice. I think I paid $7 last time I had it at a restaurant.
In other news, he doesn’t know it yet, as he’s been out all afternoon, but my sweetie’s first batch of homemade yogurt came out really well. I bent the no-sugar rule to sample one spoonful topped with the cherry preserves I made last week. His assessment of “almost obscenely good” is pretty spot-on.
I did the math, and a quart of homemade yogurt comes to about $2.25 plus the price of homemade preserves. Enough to flavor a quart runs from 35 cents (blueberry) to 85 cents (organic strawberry). A quart of his old favorite yogurt – available only in 6-oz cups – would be $5.50; the price of my favorite just jumped to $6/quart. With the quantities of yogurt we eat in this house, we’ll easily save $20-25/month.
The homemade yogurt and preserves aren’t organic, but they are local (including the sugar) and made with essentially no waste. The milk even comes in glass bottles. The real impetus for doing this was to quit throwing out all those little plastic cups. In addition, his fave is trucked in from California and mine from Pennsylvania. By switching to homegrown, we’ve cut about 3000 food miles per quart.
9 Comments
