Tag Archives: cooking

A Weekend Miscellany

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Dinner

  • Ham: cured under the stairs for 16 months. Two slices boiled for ten minutes, fried until crisp.
  • Turnip Greens: steamed in the ham water for a few minutes.
  • Corn: Cooked with honey from our hives.
  • Cornbread: Local cornmeal, eggs from our hens, fresh churned buttermilk from a local dairy.
  • Dessert: cornbread and butter, with Steen’s syrup for me and blackberry honey for Cindy.

 East Tennessee protocol for when to wave or honk

  • Women seldom wave while driving.
  • When standing alongside the road collecting mail or talking with a neighbor one always raises their hand in greeting to passing cars or trucks. But, one rarely looks up at the passing vehicle. Instead slightly incline your head in that direction and toss your whole hand up.
  • While driving your truck never wave at a car unless it is family or a neighbor. Car drivers do not wave.
  • When passing another truck on the road, grip the top of the steering wheel with your left hand and extend your forefinger to the horizontal. If you think you recognize the truck from your section of the valley then extend the forefinger finger to the 2 o’clock position. If it is a neighbor then toss up 2-3 fingers while still keeping your palm on the steering wheel.
  • Horn honking is reserved to two toots. Honking your horn when passing the person or persons by the road, when they have just casually thrown up their hand, says I’m your neighbor. Otherwise, a horizontal one fingered wave is appropriate after the honk, even though they are not looking.
  • Always toot twice when passing a tractor. People who honk once usually accompany the sound with a raised index finger. Be a good neighbor.

 

Top 3 signs your dog is coming into heat

  • The other dogs become aggressive.
  • The male dogs stop eating.
  • The male dog practices mounting Forsythia bushes, rocking chairs, bales of hay or if you are not careful….

 

Get Thee To A Pig

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We spent yesterday rendering out fat into lard for the coming year; a product of our recently butchered family hog. It reminded me of an older blog post of mine

Headcheese: made from our hogs.

Headcheese: made from our hogs.

: King of the Southern Table.

“Mogul of appetite, lord of misrule, the king who must die”: John Thorne, a favorite quote from a favorite author. More pork is butchered each year per pound than beef, lamb, goats or chickens and any other competing livestock. That is more pork around the world. Scratch the billion plus Muslims, scratch the kosher adherents of Judaism, pork is still tops.

The pig has been our constant companion for over ten thousand years. A fellow omnivore, a perfect companion, a domestic vacuum cleaner or gleaner of all things left over. The pig converts food into pounds at a ratio of 33%; a sheep does the next best at 13%, and a steer at a measly 7%. The hog plunges out of the starting gate at a couple of pounds and ends the first year at an easy 300 pounds. Take that you squalling human infant!

I have no books on my shelves celebrating the sheep or goat (excluding the instructional), only one on the steer, a handful on chickens and an even two dozen celebrating the hog: Serious Pig, Pork and Sons, Pig: King of the Southern Table, The Whole Hog, Pig Perfect and Everything but the Squeal, to name but six.

Pig meat: nothing is more communal than a pig roast. Next to it beef is positively boring. Pig meat is accessible and democratic. We all eat “high on the hog” with pork because pork is easily raised by one and all. In Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson, she speaks of how little kids gather choice thistle and grasses during the day to feed to the family pig: A year-long family project to fatten the pig so that all could enjoy the sausage, flitches of bacon, salted hams, head cheese, chops, loin, blood puddings.

Pigs are the meat of choice for the sustainability crowd. We can survive, do for ourselves, a pig in a paddock proclaims. Pull up an overturned bucket, hunker down and watch a cow eat hay and you feel nothing. Watch a pig tuck into a trough of steamed zucchini, corn and stale bread and you shout Comrade!

Tonight we dined on what Cindy referred to as a keeper: Lacon Con Grelos, A Galician dinner that could be ripped from the pages of any decent Southern cookbook. We physically restrained ourselves from eating until sick. Fix this immediately and restore your soul, find a new center for well-being, toss out the yoga class, deliver up your Lipitor to the porcelain god. Better to check out a few years early than to squander those extra years deprived of good eats.

Lacon Con Grelos: as adapted from The Food and Wines of Spain by Penelope Casas.
• 1 ½ pounds of smoked or salted pork. We used left over smoked shoulder
• Salt and fresh ground pepper
• 1 pound collard greens, rinsed and roughly chopped
• ½ pound Andouille sausage or other piquant cased meat
• 4 new potatoes
Place pork in pot and cover with water. Add salt and pepper. Bring to boil, cover and simmer for one hour. Add greens and sausage and potatoes. Simmer for another hour. Serve.

This dish is so elemental that it blew us away in its complexity. Get thee to a pig!

Reading this weekend: The Empty Throne by Bernard Cornwell. The master novelist of manly historical fiction has done it again. If you aren’t prepared to stand in the shield wall alongside Uhtred, then you better pass. Also, just started The Emergent Agriculture: farming, sustainability and the return of the local economy by Gary Kleppel.

 

The Taste of Fall

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This Farm Note is from the archives, before I began to regularly post on the blog. The Farm Notes began in 1999 and were shared for those years with a group of friends and family. Over the coming year I will post periodically from those archived “Notes.”

The first hint of fall shows in the valley with slightly cooler nighttime temperatures, lower humidity. The days have shortened and the leaves on the Tulip poplar begin to turn.

The rhythms of our day change to match the dying summer. The final beans are harvested and stored in buckets waiting on Cindy and me to find the time to shell. The wire trellis supporting the beans, cucumbers and squash are rolled up. When the vines dry we will burn the trellises free and store for next year. The tomatoes are past their peak productivity. If nursed along we should be able to glean a few stunted fruit well into early October.

The muscadine vines are ripening signaling wine and jam making ahead in our future. The pear tree is weighed down, each branch holding an impossible large weight on slender support.

I planted the first of the fall garden last week, white egg turnips. That will be followed by kale and mustard. Greens are what we will crave when the mercury heads towards the bottom of the glass.

The weather continues a dry pattern leaving the pastures dry and brittle, the dirt blooms powder puffs as the hoe hits the ground. Only sporadic rain this summer leaves uncertain about how many cattle to carry over the winter months. Hay prices will rise.

Our friends, Melanie and Sara, were over last night for dinner: we provided the country fried steak, mashed potatoes and gravy. They brought squash casserole, crowder peas and some delicious blueberry crepes. It is a tired theme of these notes but all four of us delighted in eating a meal largely produced from our two farms.

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Reading this weekend: A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm by Edwin Way Teale

A Covenant Terrine

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This Farm Note is from the archives, before I began to regularly post on the blog. The Farm Notes began in 1999 and were shared for those years with a group of friends and family. Over the coming year I will post periodically from those archived “Notes.”

We speak today of jellied meatloaf. Terrines, that wonderful pressed meat dish that turns cast-off odd bits into tasty treats. Headcheese is a form of terrine. Basically any meat mixture that once cooked has a weight placed on it to compress the ingredients is a form of terrine. The recipes are numerous: pigs-feet terrines, foie gras terrines, lamb kidney terrines are just a few gleaned from a random perusal of our cookbooks.

Technically a terrine is the container in which the dish is cooked. But, over the years it has come to be synonymous with the end result. That is at least according to Elizabeth David in her classic French Provincial Cooking. Below is my version of a goose giblet and venison terrine.

Our roast goose at the New Year and the confit made with the legs and goose fat had been excellent. But, what to do with the giblets besides adding them to the gravy? A terrine, that French jellied style meatloaf served cold, was our answer.

I include this in the farm notes because it gets to the heart of one core value in farming: thrift. Making use of everything is not limited to farming, of course. But for us it seems to resonate more now that we live on a farm. Thrift is a more intimate trait, a principled outcome, to that process and work of growing food and raising animals.

And we feel that killing an animal for your own use establishes a covenant between you and that animal: a covenant to make use of every part. And making something wonderful to eat is the best way to honor that life.

Goose Giblet and Venison Terrine

Chop up some stock vegetables; add the goose neck (cut into a few pieces), the gizzard, heart and a bay leaf. Cover with water and bring to a boil. Simmer for 1.5 hours. Discard the veggies (our pigs loved them), save the stock for gravy, pick the meat off of the neck and roughly chop the gizzard and heart.

To this meat-mixture add the liver, finely chopped. Add a nice sized dollop of goose fat, fresh thyme and sage leaves (chopped), freshly grated nutmeg, 1-2 tablespoons of brandy, 1-2 tablespoons of bread crumbs and an egg. The recipe called for a ½ pound of sausage. Conveniently our friend Melanie had gifted us some of her homemade deer sausage. Toss it all together and mix well. Add plenty of salt and freshly ground pepper.

Place mixture in a terrine and cover with foil. Place the terrine in a water bath. Place all in a 330 degree oven for 1.5 hours. Remove and weight down with a heavy object that fits within the terrine until cool. Slice thick and serve cold with chutney and a pickle.

Pretty damn good, I must say.

 

Butcher’s Wife Pork-chops: a recipe

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After a late evening shearing sheep with the help of neighbors, we reentered our home with well-earned appetites. I had done the prep work on this recipe hours earlier. So it was the matter of about thirty minutes before we set down to a late meal.

This is a favorite recipe, using ingredients produced on our farm.

Season a couple of inch-thick pork chops with salt and pepper and any herbs you like. Heat up a cast iron skillet and throw a knob of butter into the pan. Cook the chops about ten minutes a side. I’ll usually throw more butter into the pan when I turn them over. When the chops are done put them into the oven to keep warm.

Fry a few strips of bacon in the same skillet. Remove the bacon and add one chopped onion, sauté until soft. Add two diced garden tomatoes, a bit of wine or balsamic vinegar and let cook for a few minutes. Add some chopped homemade dill pickles (capers or olives also work well) and a large bunch of greens (about a pound). We used turnip greens last night but any garden greens would work.

Cover your skillet; turn the heat down to simmer for about five minutes. The greens start out bulky and piled high but quickly lose their volume within a few minutes. Uncover, crumble the bacon into the mixture and toss the ingredients.  Spoon the ingredients over your pork chops so that it forms a nice pile on top. Make sure to spoon some of the pot liquor from the greens over the dish.

Before eating say a note of thanks to the pig (the one on your plate) and dig in. You might also thank me for turning you onto one of the best, and easiest, dinners in your repertoire.

Thanks to Mr. Reynaud for this recipe, from his French Feasts cookbook.

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Reading this weekend: Plato’s Revenge: politics in the age of ecology by William Ophuls. I should, however, be reading the manual on our ancient New Holland manure spreader. A tension bar broke and I’m not sure if that might not signify something more technically advanced than my duct tape approach to all things mechanical would solve.