Home    About me    Gainesville Cow Pool    Cow Pool FAQ    Gainesville Food Swap  

Charcuterie

Spicy Garlic & Sage Scotch Eggs

7 Jan 2013

0 Comment

Weekday breakfasts around here are tough. No one likes to eat first thing in the morning. My husband and I eat when we get to our offices, and often the kids don’t want breakfast at all. None of us work like sugary breakfasts. Now that we’re starting the paleo thing again, the semi-regular sausage biscuits are out. In the battle between cooking breakfast on a weekday morning and 15 more minutes of sleep, more sleep wins every time. So over the weekend I was brainstorming breakfasts that I could make ahead, store well in the fridge, portable, and paleo friendly. Then I remembered how quickly the kids devoured the last batch of scotch eggs my son made over the holiday break.

The most important part of scotch eggs is the sausage. Bad sausage=bad scotch eggs. Fortunately making your own breakfast sausage is quick and easy, and allows an infinite palate of flavors. This combination is deeply savory and a little spicy, a major improvement on grocery store breakfast sausage. Next time I’m going to try sneaking in some shredded zucchini or yellow squash to make them a little lighter. I love finding new ways to use the pork from our last pig share!

Spicy Garlic & Sage Scotch Eggs

3 lb ground pork, preferably local and free-range
2 tbl kosher salt
1 scant tbl chile flakes
1/2 tbl black pepper
10 cloves of fresh garlic, minced
3/4 oz package of fresh sage, stems removed and leaves minced
1/4 c white quinoa, uncooked (or oatmeal if you’re eating grains)
15 eggs, preferably free-range and a week+ old

Coarsely grind the quinoa in a spice grinder, mortar, or small food processor until “cracked” but not a powder. Place the meat in a large bowl and add all of the spices and the cracked quinoa. Knead with your hands until completely combined. If your ground pork is very sticky because of low fat content, you can dip your hands in a bowl of cold water to loosen the mixture a little. If the pork is very low in fat, add an egg. Place the fresh sausage back in the fridge to “marry” the flavors.

Hard boil your eggs by whichever method you prefer. I have a terrible time peeling hard boiled eggs, they never work right, no matter which method I use! Rinse the eggs and pat them dry once they’re peeled. It’s okay if they’re a little underdone since they’ll cook more in the oven.

Turn oven on to 350·. Carefully cover each egg with the pork sausage mixture. I don’t measure this part, I just eyeball it, and pinch some off the fat ones if I start running out towards the end. Place 15 cupcake papers on a rimmed baking sheet. Then carefully place each sausage-covered egg in a cupcake paper. Carefully slide the baking sheet into the oven and bake for 20 minutes. Check them at 20 minutes by looking for cracking and firmness. When they’re done they’ll be firm like a done hamburger and starting to lightly brown on the top. Some of them will crack, but it doesn’t affect the way they taste!

Let cool completely before eating. I think they’re better if you put them in the fridge overnight before eating. Eat with HP sauce or dijon mustard. They make an excellent breakfast or lunch.

By: Andi Houston Category: Charcuterie, Cow Pooling, Recipes! Tags: , , , ,

Home-Cured Sichuan Bacon & Cabbage

11 Dec 2012

6 Comments

A few months ago I set aside a big piece of pork belly in the chest freezer for making into homemade bacon, and then promptly forgot about it. When I was cleaning out the chest freezer for Friday’s pig pool I found it buried at the very bottom, and my husband and I decided that it was time for another bacon experiment. The last bacon experiment experienced some mishaps but ended with a few bites of very good bacon, and we wanted to try again. I had come across a mysterious cured pork product at the local Asian grocery store called “Chinese bacon” some time ago and tried cooking with it. It contained that chemical tang of nitrites and nitrates that only an Asian vacuum-sealed pork product can have, that smell that tells you “I am made of equal amount pork and preservatives to last through nuclear winter without giving you ptomaine poisoning”. While I appreciate not getting ptomaine poisoning, I was also quite curious whether I could make the original product, the Sichuan-style bacon the way little Sichuan grandmas make it, without the preservatives.

So when we dug out that slab of pork belly, I knew I had to try making my own Sichuan bacon.

Sichuan (Szechuan) Bacon

This recipe is exactly how I made the bacon, which is a combination of this recipe from Hunter Angler Gardener Cook and the “American Style Bacon” from Charcuterie, with no preservatives. If you’re unfamilar with black cardamom, here are some pictures and details. You can also often find black cardamom pods at Chinese grocery stores called “tsaoko” or “tsaoko cardamom”.

3 lb slab of raw pork belly, trimmed to fit neatly in a 10×14 glass baking pan
1/2 c Fujian cooking wine
1/4 c gallberry (medium dark) honey
1/2 c kosher salt
1 tbl ground Sichuan pepper
1 tbl ground cinnamon, the best quality you can get
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp whole cloves
1 tsp whole peppercorns
2 whole black cardamom pods, cracked open

Combine the whole cloves, peppercorns, and black cardamom pods in either a sturdy mortar and pestle or in an electric spice grinder. Grind until coarsely powdered. Combine wine, honey, salt, and all the spices in a bowl and stir until thoroughly combined. Rinse the pork belly and pat dry with paper towels. Pour half the cure in the bottom of a 9×13 or 10×14 glass or ceramic baking dish. Lay the pork belly on top, and then pour the rest of the marinade over the top. Rub the marinade over the meat with your hands until every inch is covered. Wrap securely with plastic wrap (not aluminum foil!) and place in the bottom of your fridge.

Turn the bacon in the marinade every day for five days.

On the sixth day, take the bacon out of the marinade. Poke it with your finger. It should feel much firmer, and there should be more liquid in the bottom of the pan than you started with. This is from the salt drawing moisture out of the meat. Heat your grill or smoker to 200-225. Rinse the marinade off the meat, but don’t get fussy about it, then pat it dry. Some of the spices will stick to the meat, and that’s okay. Smoke the bacon at 200 degrees for one hour with hickory wood chips, then check the temperature of the meat. You can’t smoke the meat too long or it will get bitter, so pull the meat when either the internal temperature reaches 150 or the smoker drops below 175, whichever comes first. We pulled the bacon after 1 hour and then roasted it in a 200 degree oven for another hour until the internal temp reached 155.

Cool the bacon until you can handle it. Carefully, using a long sharp knife, slice off the skin, leaving a good layer of fat underneath. Discard the skin, or make cracklings with it. Then cut the bacon into 1/2 pound pieces, wrap each piece individually or place in a small freezer bag, label them, and put in the freezer. Since this bacon does not contain preservatives, the safest way to keep it is in the freezer, only taking out as much as you can use in a few days.

Home-Cured Sichuan Bacon & Cabbage

1/2 pound chunk of Sichuan bacon, diced
1 medium Savoy or Napa cabbage, rinsed and coarsely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1″ fresh gnger, peeled and minced
1/2 tsp Sichuan pepper
1 tsp chile flakes
2 tbl Fujian cooking wine
1 tbl coconut aminos (or soy sauce)

Heat a large pan or wok over medium heat. Add the bacon to the pan and cook until there’s a good amount of fat rendered. Add the garlic, ginger, Sichuan pepper, and chile flakes. Fry the spices gently in the pork fat just until they are good and sizzling and the garlic turns golden. Then add the cabbage, still damp from rinsing. Turn the cabbage in the pan until liberally coated with the spices and pork fat. Fry until the cabbage is limp and starting to get golden around the edges. Add the cooking wine and the coconut aminos (or soy sauce) and stir constantly until the liquids have reduced to a glaze on the cabbage and the bacon is crispy.

Serve immediately over hot cooked rice with chopped Sichuan preserved mustard leaves or any preserved vegetables you have lying around. This cabbage also makes a spectacular base for fried rice, just add cold cooked rice to the pan before adding the wine and aminos, fry the rice until hot and starting to brown, then add the sauces and serve with a soft-fried egg on top.

By: Andi Houston Category: Charcuterie, Recipes! Tags: , , , , , ,

Alligator and Andouille Jambalaya

5 Dec 2012

0 Comment

The menu board for tonight read “Very Special Jambalaya!!!” in big letters, with “greens” written in small, almost embarrassed, writing underneath. My daughter wrote the menu on the board this week.

Special jambalaya is special tonight because I made it with the only three links of homemade andouille that survived the sausage-making experiments a few weeks ago. My husband smoked the links along with the ham for Thanksgiving, and then I stuck it in the freezer for jambalaya. The alligator was saved from a catering job, also tucked away in the freezer. I used less than a pound of it tonight, at least half of that gator meat is also bound for the sausage-grinder, along with some of the pig fat I’m picking up Friday.

I’ve already posted the recipe for jambalaya, which is simple and infinitely variable. Tonight’s version included a mix of red and green peppers and a bunch of green onions because that’s I brought home from the farmer’s market, an extra teaspoon or so of fresh thyme, and alligator instead of duck. If you’ve never cooked with alligator, give it a try in this recipe. Alligator can be dry and tough because it’s lean like chicken breast meat but comes from parts of the animal that get real work. It works well in recipes that are either quick-fried, or cooked with plenty of fat and moisture like this one.

The real secret though to Cajun jambalaya is the browned bits at the bottom of the pot- in French cooking, that thin layer of oil and browned meat and vegetable juices at the bottom of the pot is called the fond, and that’s the concentrated flavor of the dish. Carefully browning the meats and vegetables adds to it, and then the chicken stock dissolves the fond and incorporates it. If you burn the fond, you might as well wash the pot and start over.

Every charcuterie experiment teaches me something new. The andouille had a slight metallic flavor that seemed to disappear after cooking (we may have just over-smoked it) and the texture was too fine from being ground twice, but overall I was happy with the flavor of the sausage, I know what not to do next time, and the jambalaya turned out excellent. I served this with lacinato kale, sauteed in garlic and olive oil, and then braised with more rich chicken broth while the jambalaya was cooking.

By: Andi Houston Category: Charcuterie, Recipes! Tags: , , , , ,

Adventures in Andouille

20 Nov 2012

2 Comments

I am finally back! I took some time off for a big catering project and then my best friend Beth was here for a whole week, so I took some vacation time from the J.O.B. and we had a blast. What did we do for vacation? What do any two foodies do? Ate at great restaurants, drank too much, played in the kitchen, ate at more great restaurants, and talked and talked.

An older Oster electric sausage grinder/stuffer came with the new house but I hadn’t broken it out yet. Beth has done much more charcuterie than I have.  I have made several kinds of fresh sausage in the past few years- but only on industrial equipment under the watchful eye of my favorite butcher.  While she was here I wanted to make sausage so she could teach me what she’s learned doing it at home. So we went to Ward’s and bought a beautiful 5 pound pork butt and some fresh pig’s tails for extra fat. (Never again. Fresh pig’s tails look disturbingly like fat human fingers when you’re cutting them up.) We went and bought a food scale, too.

Then it was time to decide on a recipe. We had been considering Spanish-style chorizo, but my family doesn’t eat much chorizo and I already had some Mexican-style chorizo in the freezer. I went immediately to Hunter. Angler. Gardener. Cook for inspiration. I want to try everything on his website after making 50 pounds of this for a catering project. What would my family like? Andouille! Even better, I had almost all the ingredients. Beth put all the pieces to the grinder together, cut up, ground the pork, and put it into the freezer to chill while I gathered, ground, measured, and weighed the rest of the ingredients. Then I dug in with bare (clean!) hands and mixed the seasonings into the cold ground pork, pausing frequently to warm my hands under the faucet.

Stuffing the casings started the next afternoon. Beth showed me how to untangle and rinse the fresh casings. We puzzled out switching the hardware on the grinder. Double-grinding the meat might make the texture weird, but we weren’t sure. Then we realized… the medium stuffing tube was missing from the box. The one piece that is absolutely required for what we wanted to do was missing.

We tried using the small tube, meant for breakfast sausage. No. Then we tried the large tube, meant for summer sausage, wider than natural casing. That was hysterically bad. Gathering the fresh casing (which, in case you didn’t know, is a pig’s intestinal lining) onto the tip of a too-large tube was just too reminiscent of… well, I’m sure you can picture it from there. It is just impossible to stuff sausage without making penis jokes, and drinking the beer left over from the sausage recipe just made it worse. Or better. (Waste not, want not! Right?) . I would pay a great deal of money to have a video recording of the whole process, even though I would never be able to show it to my children, but alas we don’t even have photos. Stuffing sausage takes 4 hands. (See what I mean?)

So after several hours of bawdy jokes, pig fat, and vibrating machinery, we announced surrender with 3 beautiful links of andouille (bound for the smoker and then a very special jambalaya) and several pounds of loose andouille sausage. I weighed out the loose andouille and froze it in 1-pound packages, I think it’ll make excellent sausage gravy.

The only changes I made to the recipe:

No milk powder.
1/2 bottle of Abita Amber beer.
No Instacure/pink salt. We’ll be hot-smoking and eating this immediately, I’m not worried about long-term storing.
No onion. My husband is sensitive to onions, so we substituted chopped Chinese garlic chives.
No cloves. I don’t love the flavor of cloves, so I used 1/2 tsp total of allspice.

I cooked up a pound of this and threw in some thinly sliced kale, eggs, and cheese, and shoved it under the broiler. It was ridiculous.

What kind of sausage should I make next?

By: Andi Houston Category: Charcuterie Tags: , , ,

Homemade Chorizo

26 Sep 2012

8 Comments

One of the restrictions in this diet we’re trying is “no nitrates or nitrites”. When I read this recipe for a paleo breakfast casserole using chorizo I knew I wanted to try it, but every brand of chorizo I could find had nitrites added. So what’s a girl to do? Make her own chorizo, of course!

The first place I look for charcuterie recipes now is Punk Domestics. I read every recipe on there for making fresh chorizo and then combined them to use what I had on hand and our taste preferences (all the oregano!). Several recipes called for spices like cloves and cinnamon. I substituted allspice, which is native to the New World and goes very well with chiles and achiote.

Fresh chorizo was a revelation. I usually buy dried chorizo but the fresh is spicy and heady in a completely different way. My homemade chorizo has much less fat than store-bought, also. Usually recipes call for frying the chorizo and then using the fat rendered out of the sausage to cook the vegetables that come after. I actually had to add some home-rendered lard to the pan afterwards.

Fresh Chorizo

I can’t wait to make another, much larger batch of this to hoard in the freezer!

4 guajillo chiles
2 ancho chiles
1 fresh ripe (red) jalapeno
1 bunch of green onions, chopped
3 cloves of garlic
2 tbl fresh Mexican oregano, minced, or 2 tsp dried
1 heaping tsp black peppercorns
2 tsp roasted cumin seeds
1 tbl achiote seeds
1 heaping tsp whole allspice berries
1 tbl sea salt
1/2 c apple cider vinegar
1 pound of ground wild hog meat, or any ground pork

Bring 3 cups of water to a boil and set aside. Heat a cast iron skillet over medium-low. Toast the guajillo and ancho chiles until the skin is slightly darker and they are more pliable and maybe puff up a little. Put them into a jar or a glass bowl and pour the boiling water over them. Leave alone for 20-30 minutes.

Drain the chiles. (Chile soaking water is excellent for poaching chicken, if you’re feeling thrifty.) Lay them on a plate with a lip. Tear off the stems, then tear them open lengthwise. Scrape out the seeds with a butterknife and discard the seeds and stems. Put the cleaned chiles in a blender or food processor. Then clean the fresh jalapenos the same way. Add the jalapenos, onions, garlic and oregano to the blender with the rehydrated chiles. Add the 1/2 c apple cider vinegar and puree.

Put all of the dry spices in a spice grinder or mortar (or molcajete!) and grind until they form a coarse powder. Add to the blender with the salt and blend again. Put the mixture into the fridge for at least an hour or until cold. Taste and adjust any seasonings if necessary. Try not to eat it all.

Put the cold ground pork and the cold spice paste in a bowl and combine the mixture thoroughly by hand. Put the meat mixture back in the fridge in a non-reactive bowl and chill for at least 2 days before using. I split mine into small portions and froze the portions in waxed paper, but I think parchment paper would work better.

By: Andi Houston Category: Charcuterie, Cow Pooling, Recipes! Tags: , , ,

Molasses & Moonshine-Cured Ham

26 Jun 2012

7 Comments

The charcuterie bug has bitten me again, inspired by my friend Beth’s adventures in sausage-making and finding my copy of Charcuterie by Rulman & Poleyn after the move. I had this beautiful miniature wild-hog picnic ham and a couple of pork steaks in the deep freeze, just calling to me. The last ham was a partial success and I was itching to try it again. I made sure I had all the ingredients and just dived in.

This is my quick & dirty version of the Blackstrap Molasses Country Ham, page 198-199. I’m ashamed to say I’m just not comfortable hanging meat to cure outside of the fridge. My kitchen hovers around 82 degrees during the day and around 76 at night. The ideal temp for curing meat is 60. Until I can rig a special curing box, it’s fridge-curing for me. If you’re leery of hanging meat outside of the fridge to cure like I am, this isn’t a true “country” ham, but it’s damn tasty. It’s also a smaller piece of meat if you’re a little nervous buying a 15-pound fresh ham to try this for the first time.

Molasses & Moonshine-Cured Ham

2 1/2 lb bone-in fresh “picnic ham” and 1 lb fresh ham steaks
1 1/2 c kosher salt
2 tbl pink salt/Insta-Cure #1
1/2 c raw sugar
3/4 c molasses, blackstrap if you have it
1/2 c Apple Pie Moonshine
1 tbl ground ginger
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp coriander seeds, toasted
1 tbl juniper berries

Combine salt, pink salt, sugar, and spices in the goblet of a sturdy blender. Add moonshine and molasses and puree until the mixture becomes a smooth paste. This method works very well if you don’t have a way to grind spices. Pour 1/4 of the mixture in the bottom of a glass dish, then add the meat, spooning more cure over and under each piece. The dish should be a fairly tight fit so the meat is mostly submerged in the cure paste. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and put in the back bottom shelf of your fridge. Leave for 2-3 days, turning the meat in the curing paste each day to make sure all surfaces are evenly coated.

On the 2nd or 3rd day remove the meat from the curing paste. Rinse off as much of the brine as you can. The meat should be firm to the touch. Cover the meat with cold water in a large glass or plastic container and soak for at least 6 hours. Then take the meat out and place it on a rack over a rimmed baking sheet and let it dry for another 4-6 hours in the fridge, or overnight.

Hot-smoke the meat for 3 hours at 200-250 degrees. I used applewood chips, but any fruit wood would be nice. At the end, the meat should have a strong smoky smell and be firm to the touch. Let cool all the way to room temperature, then wrap and freeze or refrigerate. To serve the picnic ham, let it come to room temperature, then braise the picnic gently in a small amount of water for an hour. You can do this on the stovetop on low or in the oven. Check the internal temperature before serving.

The ham steaks have the consistency of country ham and I’m using them like country ham, in small amounts for flavoring. The strong smoky-salty-sweet flavor is excellent for cooking with fresh lima beans.

Next up: More bacon! Happy curing!

By: Andi Houston Category: Charcuterie, Cow Pooling, Recipes! Tags: , , , ,

Quesadillas de la Lengua

23 Feb 2012

0 Comment

This is a story about making lemonade out of lemons. Art for the sake of art. The triumph of the human spirit, even.

Mostly it’s the story of a failed experiment.

I’m catering a medieval lunch in Mississippi in a few weeks and came across a recipe for salted and smoked tongue. I have cooked cow tongue before in the crockpot with white wine and various aromatics. I peeled the skin off, shredded the meat, and we ate it in burritos. It was delicious. Since my husband and I were already planning on making pastrami, I thought that maybe tongue, which after all is just another muscle, would taste like pastrami if given the same treatment. So we ventured forth. First we failed to find cow tongue so we bought a water buffalo tongue from Popenoe Ranch. I used the pastrami recipe from Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing with a few small changes- I cut the amount of sugar in the cure and forgot the coriander/peppercorn crust before smoking. We had a friend over for dinner that evening and I hesitantly sliced into this, well, giant tongue. Just another muscle, right?

Boy, was I wrong.

The taste testing of the tongue pastrami was interesting. The flavor was good… really good. It was nicely salty and smokey, maybe a little too sweet for us still with the reduced sugar, but the flavor was good.

The texture, on the other hand, was not. It was soft. Not raw-meat soft, more like raw-chicken soft. Squishy. The skin of the tongue had turned a weird rubbery texture and would no longer peel off. We decided to put the whole thing in the fridge for a few days and see what it was like cold.

Cold wasn’t much better.

Meat does not go to waste in this house, especially not $4 per pound water buffalo with hours of added labor. So what is the best way to use up leftover mystery meat? Chop it into little bits and hide it in Tex-Mex food, of course. And so was born Quesadillas de la Lengua.

If you remember the meal plan, the quesadillas were supposed to be made with the leftover pot roast from last night. Well the pot roast was such a hit that there was about 4 bites of meat left… and my husband claimed that for his lunch. So I sliced up the tongue and added it to shredded cheese and sauteed green peppers in the quesadillas.

Dinner turned out delicious. I used up quite a few leftovers- a cup of cooked beans plus a can of chickpeas whirled in the food processor made tasty refried beans, and a smidge of spicy salsa ranchera added to the rice cooker with a bit of toasted cumin made quite passable Mexican-style red rice- and most importantly, used up the tongue in a way that everyone liked.

This weekend- ma’amoul and sauerkraut, finally.

By: Andi Houston Category: Charcuterie, Recipes! Tags: , , ,

February Sausage-Making Workshop

7 Feb 2012

0 Comment

Make your own homemade sausage!

Guess who has two pigs ready for slaughter!

Custom Sausage Workshop

Saturday, February 18, from noon to 2:30pm at Crawford’s Custom Meats in Worthington Springs/Lake Butler.

Registration is $45 per person. We will be observing the hog butchering process from carcass to sausage using a local hog, fattened by Mr. Bill himself. Each person will assist in cutting up the meat. You will bring home between five and ten pounds of your own custom sausage by the end of the workshop.

If you want to make your own custom sausage, bring enough seasonings for ten pounds of meat, already measured out if possible. There are several recipes in Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing by Ruhlman & Polcyn, and you can search online. If you do not want to bring your own seasonings there will be seasonings available for no extra charge.

The class is limited to 8 participants. Please email me ASAP to register.

By: Andi Houston Category: Charcuterie Tags: , , ,

Check out the new digs…

1 Feb 2012

0 Comment

I’m back! Okay, so it’s been a little more than the week I expected this to take (in fact, it’s been a little more than two weeks) but we’re almost done! Take a look at all the changes:

My own domain. This was the first step to the new Green Basket.

Cow Pool Gainesville now has its own listing on localharvest.org. This is a big deal for me! I’m hoping this will help the Cow Pool group grow and expand, as well as making more connections between producers and consumers.

Green Basket now has a Twitter account and a Facebook page. I went to a social media and marketing workshop through the Gainesville Chamber of Commerce a few months ago and I’m excited to finally apply what I learned there. Want to hear about an incredible deal at the Farmer’s Market or a great find at the Asian grocer? Follow me on Twitter. Want to see new posts, local “foodshed” news, photos, and the occasional re-posting of other great blogs and news sites I come across? Like my new Facebook page! It’s all about information and connecting.

The Coming of Bride by John Duncan

I have a bunch of new projects coming up in the garden, in the kitchen, and out in the community, not to mention a few kitchen successes from the past two weeks, but housekeeping must be finished first. Please let me know if you find any weird spots, dead links or something’s not quite right. You can comment here or email me directly.

Imbolg, the feast of Brigid, starts at sundown today. Since this is also my older son’s birthday, I’ll be celebrating with a slice of Leonardo’s Pizza and a heaping pile of our plentiful and gorgeous gardenias on her altar.  Happy Imbolg, everyone!

 

By: Andi Houston Category: Charcuterie, Cow Pooling, Current Fascination, Eat Local Challenge, Faith and food, Garden Updates, Politics and Movement, Recipes!, Weekly Meal Plans, What's in the Basket? Tags:

Exciting Goals for 2012

3 Jan 2012

11 Comments

It’s that time of year, and I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how I want to develop this space, what directions I want to go in, and how to reach more people in my area.

Cow Pool Gainesville is growing by leaps and bounds. I want to expand the group in 2012 by organizing more workshops and sourcing a wider variety of meat, like goat. And more farm visits!

We are planning on moving out of our apartment this summer so I’ll be leaving my beloved postage stamp garden. I am both sad and excited about the move but in the mean time I’ll be squeezing as much food as I can out of my raised beds.

Whether the official Charcutepalooza starts again in 2012 or not, I’ll be doing more charcuterie this year. My husband and I are both Officially Hooked. We already have plans for trying another ham, more sausages, more bacon, and trying out some new techniques like smoking fish and making our own chipotles. And there will be more canning, too!

I’m excited about all of my plans for this year but I also want to hear from you. Just like all bloggers- I love comments. Comments keep me going. Sharing my posts on Facebook, tweeting links to posts you like, and telling your friends about this site really means a lot to me. Thank you all for being here and sharing this wonderful crazy journey with me!

By: Andi Houston Category: Charcuterie, Cow Pooling, Current Fascination, Eat Local Challenge, Garden Updates, Politics and Movement, Recipes!, Weekly Meal Plans, What's in the Basket? Tags: , ,
1 2