"Acorns were good until bread was found." -Francis Bacon

The secret to good bread - like so many other things - is listening.  

Acorns are alright for foraging pigs, but with an oven, or hearth, or access to fire in general, we must heed our obligation to bake our ground flours.

Lucy and Ethel, or Guanciale, Tesa, Salame, and Proscuitto

 

I've mentioned that we are raising pigs, but have not prior to now written about them exclusively.  Well, meet Lucy and Ethel - they're cute, but a little on the rude side so beware if you decide to pay them a visit. 

Traditionally pigs are raised through the spring and summer and butchered and preserved in the fall.  This makes sense for two principle reasons: First, pigs are cheaper to feed during the growing season due to the abundance of garden scraps, and secondly, the colder months provide ideal conditions for preserving their meat.  With the modern convenience of refrigeration, the latter is more or less a non-problem.  The first problem is simple to eradicate as well if you can cut a deal with a local restaurant.  

Working at a restaurant affords us the ability to keep pigs through the winter.  While we still have to purchase some pig feed for Lucy and Ethel, we are able to supplement that grainy diet with a diverse blend of pasta, bread, vegetables, and so on.  If I were a little more pursuant, and I intend on being just that, we could easily feed them on kitchen scraps from restaurants around town.  For the time being however, the pigs are still on a grain subsidized diet.  But, Lucy and Ethel know when its time for the good stuff  - just look at them beaming with appreciation. 

In the spring, I will be the ecstatic one.  Just as the girls snort and hop around in anticipation of their daily slop, I will jump around like a kiddie on Christmas as I turn their bellies into an unfurled pancetta known as Tesa, their cheeks and jowls into Guanciale, and, if our pigs get large enough and our butcher is capable and willing to remove those large legs properly, the granddaddy of cured meats, Proscuitto.  Needing nearly 400 days to mature and skills I don't yet possess to do so without welcoming unwanted bacteria, the Proscuitto will certainly test my patience and culinary aptitude.  Fortunately, we will have plenty to enjoy while we wait.

Until that fateful day, I will haul water and food scraps the hundred yards through knee deep snow to make sure our girls are as happy as pigs in shit - which of course, they are!  Stay tuned for more porcine news and eventually tales of my experiments in charcuterie. 

Ethel digs pasta, old spinach and pizza dough!

Introducing, Bill McKerchie: Freelance Baker

I have officially joined the fringe economy!  You know, bottle collectors, scrap metal collectors, ebay sellers, donors of sperm, freelance bakers – contemporary members of that strange informal economy, descendants of night soil men and rag collectors, surviving on the periphery of society somewhere between legitimate and its antonym?

I've been selling pies and baked goods out of my kitchen for a couple of years while baking for a coffee shop, but now I'm straight out on my own.  Thanks to Tamara's brother, Eli, I'm doing it with a brand new, super-radical business card.  Check out his design manufactory.

Armed with my new card and some new tartlet pans, I baked up some goodies for my first gig this weekend.  It is a poor substitute for tasting them, but eyeball these pictures to get an idea.  And, if you have any bread, pie, cookie, pastry - or any other baking needs (and are local to Skaneateles/Syracuse) - shoot me an email.  Otherwise, feast your eyes.

Skaneateles' finest eggs

Homemade fig and whiskey jam ready to be rolled into my Rustic Fig Bars

Chocolate Hazelnut Tart Dough, Sweet Tart Dough, and Chocolate and Vanilla Shortbread Doughs

Chocolate Hazelnut Ganache Tartlets topped with sea salt

Rustic Fig Bars

Pumpkin-Buttermilk Tartlets (made with our own Pumpkin)

Chocolate Tartlets with Chocolate Nut Dough and Chocolate topped Shortbreads with a cookie crumble

Shortbreads: Chocolate and Vanilla Chessboards and Vanilla just

Wrapped up and ready to go

Thanksgiving of Us - a photographic rendering

Rosen Thanksgiving is potluck style - with all participants sharing the kitchen, the cooking duties, and the eating.  Once again it was a delicious celebration of the harvest.

Parsnips await being chopped for Seth's mash

Celeriac, fried

Kale for Eli's Ribolitta - a Tuscan Bean Soup

Carrots, onion, and - below - leeks for the Ribolitta

Golden, chioggia and bull's blood beets with goat cheese and walnuts top Tamara's mesclun mix salad

Romanesco cauliflower and carrots for my heavy harvest pizza.  Below, the same, now pan-fried

Jo and Anna's butternut squash with asiago and cream

Mark's Brussels sprouts and shallots

A look at Eli's ribolitta before it actualizes its' potential - of being the most delicious soup in my stomach

Pumpkin Pie ... with pumpkin from our great pumpkin processing project

My harvest pizza pie with pumpkin sauce, beets, fried celeriac, turnip chips, romanesco, carrots, parsnips, kale ...

Anna's chocolate pecan pie

Etta's cranberry-tequila cream cheese tart

Heirloom Pumpkins and the Processing Project

 

Just after Halloween, Tamara had the good fortune to inherit about a dozen heirloom pumpkins.  This of course left us with the tasks of cutting, scooping, roasting, freezing, and lastly devising enough recipes to use all that pumpkin flesh.  Slowly, we packed all the pumpkins away in the basement freezer and began some creative efforts.  In the ensuing weeks we've made cookies, a cream cheese tart, and a loaf of bread, all with varying success.  More recently however, chipotle pumpkin soup and a pumpkin and venison sausage lasagna have stolen the show.

The soup was pretty straight forward and a few different recipes can be found with a simple google search.  Just don't make the one supposedly created - minimally endorsed by - Rachel Ray, she's a talentless hack, a tumor on culinary creativity, and annoying to boot.  I almost decided against making this soup altogether when I discovered her recipe, but opted to take it upon myself to right the injustice suffered by pumpkins, chipotle peppers, and diary everywhere at the hands of Ms. Ray and her numb, senseless followers who complacently insist on following her down the rabbit-hole of disrespecting the culinary arts and eating in general (sorry, for that ad hominem diatribe).

Alas, when the time came to eat the soup, I was glad to have pushed my pride aside and forged ahead making a soup, similar in name alone, to one advocated by Rachel Ray?  At least it wasn't a Sandra Lee recipe, right?

So, for our soup, I pureed two medium sized dry chilies with two or three cloves of roasted garlic, making a smoky, red paste.  Meanwhile I sauteed a good sized storage onion with olive oil and a sizable pinch of dried sage leaves in a heavy caste-iron pot.  The chipotle-garlic paste went in next with half a stick of butter, some fresh ground pepper and a good pinch of salt.     

For the pumpkin we used a Jarrahdale - a slate-gray skinned, cantaloupe-orange fleshed, ancient Native American variety, great for soups and baking alike.   I combined the entire flesh of our roasted pumpkin to the pot and mixed it in adding about a cup of water - just until it looked like it wouldn't stick to the pot.  

A bit of brown sugar, a decent amount of cumin, a dash of coriander and cinnamon, and nice sprinkle of our accidentally combined garlic and ginger powders - easy mistake - and I turned the range down and let the flavors cook together for a half-hour or so, stirring occasionally to avoid any sticking.

When everything had cooked together nicely I added a couple cups of heavy cream and simmered another 10 minutes, finishing it up with some salt and pepper to taste.  The pumpkin cooked down well enough for our tastes, but an immersion blender or trip to the food processor might be called for if you want a more homogeneous texture - which, had I been cooking for others, or a paying customer, I certainly would have gone for.

We topped our soup with some Wake Robin yogurt and a swirl of balsamic reduction.  We usually have a loaf of bread in the oven or freshly out, so some impromptu croutons made an appearance as well.

tasted better than it looks ...

The lasagna was - as it should be - pretty simple as well.  We made the lasagna noodles with the pasta roller, but that was by far the most labor intensive aspect of the preparation.  Everything was done in stages.  First the ricotta.  Ricotta is extremely simple to make, easier to buy obviously, but let's allow that scratch cooking has some certain intrinsic value that trumps ease.  

Simply heat a gallon milk - or an appropriate fraction - slowly to a very gentle boil, stirring constantly to avoid scalding.  When it reaches a boil curdle the milk with 1/3 cup of white vinegar (I've used our accidental hard cider turned apple cider vinegar and that worked great too) and let drip through some cheesecloth or a muslin bag.  A few healthy pinches of salt will help draw out the whey, but use more or less depending on what you are going to use it for.  It is best to give it a night to drip, but a half hour will do in a pinch.  This is perhaps better called farmer's cheese but for our intents and purposes it makes little difference.  I've also seen it done with a cup of yogurt in the milk, which makes for a great texture.  You can even put everything right in the pot in the beginning and bring it to a boil together - either way you get the idea, lot's of alternatives.  Again, if you are going to make your own, and you should, just google up some recipes.  

While the cheese drained, I cooked up 1 and 1/2 pounds of hot venison sausage with a small onion.  I set it aside in a bowl and moved on to the pumpkin which I pureed in the food processor with a little butter and brown sugar - that's all.

For the sauce I got a little wonky.  In a small pot I warmed two cups of milk slowly.  Meanwhile, in another pan, I melted a half stick of butter, plus a little extra and tossed in a hand-full of coarsely chopped dates and a 3-4 tablespoons of flour and whisked it together into a date-butter paste.  Still whisking I added the milk a little at a time, creating a thick bechamel-date sauce.  I hit it with salt and a few very liberal grinds of pepper, tossed in a half cup of assorted Italian cheeses - asiago, parmesan, provolone, romano, you know the blend - and took it off the heat.

The final pre-assembly step was to mix the ricotta in with the sausage, leaving me with four dishes to work out of: one with the sausage and ricotta, another with pumpkin, one with a bunch of shredded mozzarella, and the pan with my delicious white sauce.

I rolled out about a pound worth of pasta (2 and 1/2 cups of flour, 3 eggs, dash of salt, tablespoon or two of olive oil, kneaded and allowed to rest for 10 minutes) and began assembling the lasagna.  

I won't bore you with this part, you know the drill - pasta, pumpkin, sausage, sauce, little cheese, pasta, again ... until the top layer where I finished with the remaining sauce and good amount of cheese.  Bake hot until it browns up.  

Oh yeah, I sporadically threw in some greens from the garden - kale, arugula, mizuna, etc.

 

Brussels Sprouts!

For those not in the know, Tamara and I are both fanatical about Brussels sprouts.  The reputation of these beautiful, tasty little cabbages suffers for a number of reasons.  How many television shows have used Brussels sprouts as 'the dreaded vegetable' that children refuse to eat at dinner?  I'm not going to go into it too much, but the fact is most people have not eaten  frost-sweetened Brussels sprouts - and no, the freezer doesn't count.  Most the sprouts people encounter are in fact frozen, but more crucial to the taste is that they are grown and harvested without their flavor being allowed to mature.  California simply cannot grow Brussels sprouts like we can in upstate New York - they need the cold, particularly the frost.  But, they also need an astronomically long time to grow.

With that in mind, the patience exhibited in our waiting to eat our only surviving stalk should be a point of admiration.  When it was finally time to harvest the excitement was palpable.   We both posed for pictures with our gigantic stalk of sprouts before chopping them off and deciding how to prepare them.    

She's got that maniacal look on her face again

A real beauty

 Fortunately there were enough for a couple of meals.  The first night we decided to pan-fry them in a bit of olive oil and serve them over some kale, arugula, mizuna, and mustard greens from the garden.  We accompanied the greenery with some Lebanese couscous and drizzling of brown sugar-balsamic reduction.  The result, a delicious warm salad.

mmm mmm mmmm mmmm

again, mmm mmm mmm mmm

The Relocation: a depth-lacking overview

When Tamara and I decided to relocate back to my hometown in the Finger Lakes, the decision hinged mainly on two potentials.  The first being that my parents own about 4 acres just outside of town, 1or 2 of which we could plant in vegetables.  A good chunk of the rest could easily be put to use without taking over my parents lives.  In short, we both have agricultural ambitions.  We both enjoy the labor involved with farming and believe strongly in growing our local food economy.  The sense of importance we feel in regards to eating locally results in a near inability to eat supermarket produce.  I would never admit so much to a dinner host and I am constantly aware of how pretentious such convictions can seem - regardless, that our caloric intake come primarily from our own food-shed is a core value of ours.  That said, it is a dream of ours to grow enough food for ourselves and have enough left over for a humble income through farmer's markets, restaurant sales, what have you.  While this might not be immediately in reach, we are determined to give it a go.  

The other reason for choosing our westward migration was the 100 year old barn dying for restoration.  While we briefly considered renting somewhere in town, the idea of converting the barn quickly became a more desirable choice. The space has a great deal of potential and the everyday small gains are encouraging.  We can't wait to get the siding up so we can really get to work on the inside. 

So, we've been preparing beds for next spring and slowly plugging along on the barn.  We built a nice compost bin and have inoculated logs with shitake and oyster mushroom spawn.  We also have a couple of pigs in the barn slowly transforming into bacon.   

That's enough for now, I'll let the pictures fill in the blanks.

Sod-busters

Sod-busting (next time I'll let the pigs do it)

Inoculating logs with mushroom spawn

Stacking the logs in the woods behind the barn.  They will sit here until next Spring, get soaked for 24 hours to force fruiting, then, hopefully start growing mushrooms - hopefully.

Our last tomatoes - we had a long lasting crop this year

Taking a break to attend Tamara's cousin's wedding in New York.