this little piggy went to oven

So it's been a little while since I've posted. A lot has been going on and I haven't even had time to finish the fence that I started ages ago. But there are some things that are deserving of reminiscence. Suckling pig is one of those things.

Excuse the messy table

From everything I'd read, suckling pig is supposed to be delicious and nigh-impossible to mess up. It is definitely both of those things. (once you have a suckling pig ready for the oven that is.) Liberally season with salt and pepper inside and out, jam some smashed garlic cloves and onion chunks in the cavity, Cook at 300 degrees for 4 hours, then jack the heat to 500 until the skin is nice and crispy. Easy peasy.

This pig, which was about 20 lbs "hanging weight" which is the weight after it's been killed, drained of blood, viscera removed, and fur scrapped off. Hanging weight is what you would ask for if you called up a local butcher shop and asked for a suckling pig. If you have a small oven like my 27 incher, I wouldn't recommend going a whole lot bigger. As you can see below, it barely fits.

Sleep tight

Initially I cooked him on a pan but I finished him directly on the rack with a pan on the rack below  it. This let the dry heat of the oven get all the way around the pig resulting in nice crispy skin all over instead of half crispy, half soggy.

And the taste. Man oh man, it is by a mile the best tasting pork I've ever had.

When researching how to cook a suckler I read that they have a distinctly "porky" flavor that not everyone is so fond of. My guess is that the people that don't like it are those who are used to over cooked factory produced white meat pork chops. But if you're a person who prefers slow cooked shoulders, ribs, or chops with the darker meatie bits still attached, you'll be a fan of this.

The juices that you catch in the drip pan are delicious as well. we put a bowl at the table to dip our pork in which, while not totally necessary, took things to a whole new level of flavor and unctuous-ness.

Marian kept trying to use a fork but a whole roast animal is a call for less civilized tactics. Use your hands. They'll get sticky thanks to all of the juiciness of the meat and the ridiculous amount of collagen in the dipping juice (seriously a lot of collagen, the bowl set into pig jello once in the fridge) but who really cares. it's sure to be the best meal you've had in a while.

We're down to about half of the last litter of pigs and for a brief moment I thought about butchering the rest of them for sucklers. But that would be silly... right?

I'll leave you with a picture of the whole litter from a while ago on a sunny afternoon. In case you're wondering, the pig we ate is the black and white one in the back trying to climb over everyone else.

Rest in pieces Ms. Piggy

Stolen Sweetness

Why is it that honey tastes best when consumed from the plastic carcass of a woodland creature?

As you might know, I talked my wife into letting me get a beehive this year. We knew that it is very unlikely to get to harvest honey in your first year, so we decided rather than buying a small package of bees (the norm) we would invest a little extra in an established half-colony of bees, hoping that we would be able to harvest a decent amount of honey. Unfortunately, they were delivered about a month later than promised so our hive missed the main spring nectar flow. I was hopeful that they would catch up in late summer, but alas, I was only able to harvest about 1/10th of what I was hoping.

Hopefully they will survive the winter and then hopefully have a major head start next spring.

If you're getting the trend, there's a lot of hoping involved in beekeeping.

But hey, I was able to get SOME free honey, unless of course the bees die over winter, in which case it will be some very expensive honey.

So this is it, one frame out of the 10 or so they filled with honey. This is all I was comfortable in thieving. Hopefully, if I feed them a bunch of sugar syrup they'll be able to replace this and make it to spring. Hey, there's that word again.

I don't have a honey extractor and wasn't going through the trouble of reserving one through a beekeeping club for one frame, so I did it the old fashioned way. Little man was super into the process.

Cut, crush, strain, hang, bottle.

Oh and tasting.

Lots of tasting 

The final result, right around 3 lbs of really tasty honey. Which of course tastes best from the bear bottle.

Happy labor day! or an excuse to make sausage.

It is an indisputable fact that every holiday aside from Christmas and Easter must be celebrated by the consumption of ground animal meat stuffed inside the intestines of that (or really any other) animal. Today, our household proudly upheld that tradition by eating our home-killed, home-ground, home-stuffed Italian sausage.

A couple of evenings ago James and I sat down with a large pile of pork and a few tools. The pork was from the pig we recently slaughtered and split with another family. The meat is quality meat that came from trimmings from the belly, back, shoulder, ham, etc. It's not a bunch of scraps. No pig nipples, lips, rat feces, or spider legs. Good meat makes good sausage.

the first step is to chop up the trimmings into pieces your grinder can handle. mine can take about 1/2 inch to 1 inch chunks.  BE SURE TO REMOVE ANY LIGAMENTS, TENDONS, AND SILVER SKIN. Unless you have an industrial grinder it will just jam the thing up leading to repeated disassembly and cleaning of the machine. Ask me how I know. Also, use the coldest meat you can at all points in the process. partially frozen works well too. 

Next step, find a toddler and make him do the hard work. He'll think it's fun so it's ok. You'll want to grind it with coarsely first, mix in the spices (I used Alton Brown's Italian Sausage recipe with delicious results) then again with the fine plate that came with your rig. 

After that's done, attach the sausage stuffer tube and load your sausage casings. Yes, they are what you think they are. There are other options but why mess with success. My grinder does a really good job at grinding but as a stuffer you really need an extra set of hands. At this point my helper had lost interest so it was kind of difficult to get a consistent fill and size for the sausages. Maybe I'll be able to rig up a better stuffer in the future. But for now, we made do. 

Fill the casings leaving as little air pockets as possible

twist into links and refrigerate for a couple hours before using. We waited a couple of days. To freeze for long term storage, lay on a baking sheet and freeze then vacuum seal and return to freezer.

To cook, poach/simmer in water, beer, or sauce until mostly cooked through. I cooked mine in water and (I think it took about 7 min.

Brown in a little olive oil

Add sauce and green peppers.

Serve with piled high with a side of garlic bread or on buns and you WILL have a great holiday.

Later I'll be trying my hand at NY style hot dogs, andouille sausage, and possibly brats. I'll be sure to post links to the recipies I like. 

Vintage meat slicer. homemade deli roast beef. delicious.

So my big post on how to make bacon is still forthcoming because I have pictures on my phone, my wife's phone, and my tablet (battery dead at the moment) and I don't feel like taking the time to consolidate them all. For now I want to tell you about the best $25 I've spent in a while.

Behold the glory of my 60 year old meat slicer.

(please excuse the blurriness and quality of some of the pictures. I've broken 2 phones in the last couple of months and am now using a pretty old phone my mom was kind enough to let me borrow which doesn't take the best pictures.)

This is Daisy. Daisy is a Rival brand slicer from the 50's (or so I'm guessing by what I can find online). I found Daisy on Craigslist from someone's estate sale. Daisy is beautiful. Chrome. Stainless steel. Durable. Sharp.

A while ago I was thinking about buying a meat slicer from Rural King. If you don't know what Rural King is, think about if wal-mart and tractor supply company had a baby and then sent it to school at a bass pro shop that also sold hand guns.. That's rural king. Unfortunately, the cheapest slicer there was about 80 bucks. I also read a lot of negative reviews of non-commercial meat slicers.

When I saw this baby online for $25, I figured it was worth the gamble. And it paid off.

One of the chief complaints that I read about home meat slicers was that the motors have a lot of plastic gears. Well, if weight is any indication, there isn't a piece of plastic in the motor of this thing. Pair that with the fact that it has lasted twice as long as I have and I'd say it's going to be a pretty solid product. And if the motor does happen to break, because the motor is in a separate housing attached by a shaft, I should be able to rig my drill to drive the blade. I've seen hand crank attachments online (which would come in extra handy if the zombie apocalypse people are right.)

Below are a couple shots of Daisy in action.

Homemade deli-style roast beef

Pork Jowl Bacon - known in my house as "face bacon"

I decided to give making deli style meat at home a shot because we're always looking for something easy to make when we're in a hurry. After reading a few recipes online, roast beef seemed to be the easiest, which is fine, because we like roast beef. So I bought a 5lb eye of round roast (5.99/lb) and brined it over night using this recipe (though the measuring units seem to be written in some strange foreign language). A relatively quick hour of roasting at 300 degrees and a ride on the meat slicer and bipity boppity boo - roast beef sandwich!

I was a little skeptical of the recipe at first because it used a lot of what I call "cookie spices" but it actually came out tasting fantastic. 

I figure I saved almost $5/lb compared to deli priced roast beef. Multiply that by 5lbs and Daisy pretty much paid for herself on the first day. Oh, plus I'm sure this is a lot healthier than most of the stuff on the kroger shelves. 

I vacuum packed these in 1lb packages in my food saver. They should keep at least a few months in the freezer (much longer than they'll last) and about a week once the're thawed in the fridge. I've got a ham curing right now which I'll probably cut into deli meat as well because we're not big on the Christmas-ham-style ham. 

To sum it up, if you ever see one of these antique rival slicers at a garage sale or on craigslist, I say buy it. You won't be sorry. Plus you'll get to look down your nose at those suckers in line at the deli counter paying $11/lb for inferior meat.  

Geez, doesn't anyone read my blog?

As I write the first entry in my blog my house is filled with a light fragrance of applewood and oak smoke with just a hint of vanilla from the Jack Daniels whiskey barrel wood chips that lie under the pork belly smoking its way into baconhood in an aluminum foil cocoon inside my oven - all of which I will get to in greater detail in another post. But for now, as I wait the six hours for my belly to become bacon, I want to write a post about this blog.

I doubt many people will read the words I write. If they do, great. The reason I want to write this blog is to chronicle some of my successes (and a few of my failures) as a father, husband, minister, and beginner homesteader. If you know me very well, you know I tend to forget a lot of things. I hope that I stick with this blog so that some day I can go back and read it and say, "Oh yeah, I completely forgot about the time the pig ate our garage!" (true story)

I've been extremely blessed to have a beautiful wife who supports my crazy desire to become a small scale farmer and an amazing two year old who seems to get a kick out of it as well. Though I don't say it nearly enough, I'm truly grateful.