PORK.
Our entire house smells like bacon. We spent two days rendering lard - ending up with almost 2 gallons. There is a gigantic ham hanging underneath the stairs, and we've got four huge slabs of bacon curing in a couple of makeshift salt boxes (bee hive supers) by the back door where it stays cool. We have been eating sausage, chops, shoulder, or some other such pork product almost every day for the past two months. It is hard work and emotionally difficult, but this kind of abundance is why we raise pigs. They helped us to better our land, and now they are nourishing our family. Thank you, pigs.- Hannah.
(For more of our thoughts on eating animals, check out this post.)
SCENES FROM A MESSY KITCHEN.
ALL CURRENTLY HAPPENING IN THE KITCHEN: five pounds of pork fat being rendered into lard, two heads of red cabbage sliced and soaking for kraut, dough being rolled out for pasta/spilled on the floor. When you are living on a farm and food is your life, this is how it is pretty much all the time. Lots of cooking, lots of fermenting, lots of cleaning only to be replaced by lots more mess. And isn't that how it should be?- Hannah.
LARD LOVE.
Yesterday we headed over to the Porter Road Butcher in Nashville to see what we could find in the way of lard. Lard is quite possibly the most important food product in our diet––almost every meal begins with lard. Google "the health benefits of lard" and you will be fully supplied with enough enthusiastic and favorable sources to write a small dissertation on why everyone should hop back on the lard wagon. For me it's about flavor and cooking, but could just as easily be about health. High in monounsaturated fat, the kind which actually improves blood cholesterol levels, lard is not only tasty but a nutritious alternative to products like butter, and definitely to things like margarine.You don't want to get your lard from just any source though: it's buying meat and you should know the animal was raised humanely on a natural diet. The butchers didn't have any lard rendered at the time, but kindly offered to sell us some pork fat to render ourselves. I love rendering lard, admittedly because I enjoy eating the resulting pork cracklings––like fatty pork rinds––but also because we prefer to be involved in the process of everything we eat as much as possible.The process of rendering is essentially cutting the fat into small pieces and putting it in a large pot with some water and letting it cook on medium heat for around an hour until the cracklings are a nice brown. Then strain and let cool. Et voila!––lard! It keeps really well and we'll probably get roughly half a gallon of lard from 5 1/2 pounds of fat at $11. And, since you use less lard, that amount will last us longer––several weeks cooking three meals a day––than the equivalent in olive oil or butter. Plus, we'll save at least $10, not to mention all the fossil fuels, etc., involved with the olive oil process. Hopefully, next year we will have our own pigs....one step closer to sustainability!- Jesse.