Look, I don't eat meat ALL the time....

So, I'm a student now. And I still don't like spending money on crappy restaurant food (good restaurant food is another thing completely, although it is non-existent on campus).

My week-day schedule has been pretty crazy this term and it's taken a lot of planning to make sure I pack meals to eat between classes at school. I've scoped out all the public microwaves on campus, but sometimes it's nice to be able to nibble on your lunch while doing your studying in the library, (in one of the food approved areas, of course!)
I've been making this whole grain salad a lot this winter - it's yummy, it's filling, and I don't have to worry about keeping it refrigerated.

Plus - with this lunch, the campus vegans don't give me the stink-eye.

This is one of those salads where you don't really need a recipe, and I make it a little differently each time. Here's the basic idea, though:

1/2 cup wheat berries
1/2 cup of barley
1/2 cup of quinoa
1/2 cup of bulgar wheat
...or whatever grains, legumes or beans you have on hand.
I like wheat berries because they have a great chewy texture, but you need to soak them overnight before you cook them, and the cook time can be a good 40 minutes or so. Quinoa, barley and bulgar wheat take the same time to cook, so I mix them together in a pot with 3 cups of water, and cook for about 20 minutes.
Once your cooked grains have cooled, add some shredded carrots, minced onion, finely chopped kale or brussels sprouts. When I have some pickled peppers or capers, they taste pretty good in here too. I like my salad pretty heavy on the grains, so I usually use 1/2 a red onion, one carrot, and a few big leaves of kale.
I make a really strongly flavoured vinaigrette for this salad, and let the salad kind of marinate in it for a day or two. The salad keeps tasting better every day!

Mustardy Vinaigrette
1/4 cup white wine vinegar
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 tsp sugar
2 tsp ground mustard
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp sumac
1/2 tsp cayenne
Salt and pepper to taste.

This is a general idea only - like I said, it's more of a basic idea than a recipe.

Reason #387: Why preserving food is so awesome…

Reason #387: …Because you will fall down on your knees, weeping with pleasure, from the taste of last season’s tomatoes when early spring finally arrives. Your canned salsa will give you hope that summer will appear once again.

Ok, this is a little melodramatic… but homemade salsa does help when it comes time to eating leftovers. This afternoon I was looking at a pretty empty fridge – some leftover baked beans, eggs, sprouts, and the usual condiments – and inspiration hit!

I took the leftover beans and added some garlic-chili paste, and mashed them up a bit. I spread this on some warm corn tortilla, and topped it with some scrambled eggs, salsa, and sprouts.

Delicious!

Planet Haddock? Planet Lobster? Planet Fiddlehead?

The planet borscht took a bit of a slowdown and has found itself in a new setting. It's time for the planet to start turning again...



This time, there's some scallops next to the farmer sausage. Double the goodness.

Andalucian Eats

Spain has been a foodie destination for years. Some of the most exciting chefs in the world have been coming out of Madrid and Barcelona, exploring the outer reaches of molecular gastronomy with flavour infused foams and gases on their ironic food. Here's a quote by Ferran Adria about his food from his iconic restaurant, El Bulli just outside Barcelona:

"Decontextualisation, irony, spectacle and performance are completely legitimate, as long as they are not superficial but respond to, or are closely bound up with, a process of gastronomic reflection."

This concept, while interesting, has nothing to do with the food from Southern Spain, which is where we spent a week last spring. Food in Andalucia is very simple, very straightforward ,very traditional. And very lovely.

Our first meal in Spain was at a cafe across from the bus station in Alicante.

We had just arrived on a cheap flight from Germany (about 75 Euros for the two of us!) and had about two and a half hours to get from the airport located outside the city to the bus station downtown, where we would then hopefully be able to buy tickets to go to Granada, a four hour drive away. We took a transit bus from the airport which dropped us in downtown Alicante where we had a stressful time with our luggage on the steep cobblestone streets. We finally found the station, bought our tickets and still had an hour or so to find lunch.

This plate of tiny little fried sardines made everything better. We were now definitely back on holiday. I'm still a little unclear as to whether or not the heads were supposed to be eaten - Jeff ate his, but I left mine on my plate. The guys at the restaurant found us entertaining and gave us some complimentary cafe con leche at the end of the meal. All the stress melted away and everything seemed fun again. We caught our bus, had a lovely drive through the Sierra Mountains, and arrived in Granada without a hitch.

In Granada, we ate some more fried fish, or Pesca Frita, although we decided not to eat the head of this particular fishy monster.

A comment about eating in Spain - the food rhythm is very different from North America. They tend to have small breakfasts, huge lunches, and then EVERYTHING closes between 3:30 and 7:30. The streets are deserted, the windows of the restaurants are usually shuttered and there are few signs of life on the streets, apart from the other confused tourists. This particular meal was consumed in a completely empty restaurant - one of the few that we found open at 6:00. After we ordered our food our waiter went to the kitchen and soon we heard a woman yelling at him in an exasperated manner - I have a feeling she thought it would be another hour or two before she'd have to go back to work. Oops! I promise that the next time we'll train our stomachs to eat when the rest of the country eats.

Our favourite pesca frita experience was served in Tarifa a few days later. There were so many things on this plate - clams, shrimp, sardines, squid, chunks of cod and a few things we couldn't quite identify which were extremely tasty nonetheless. There were some roundish things (in the middle of the photo underneath the calimari) that were particularly tasty and particularly bewildering - they tasted like some kind of crab, or seafood pate of some kind in some kind of casing, mild and lemony. Underneath the breading there were tiny little veins running over the surface which made them look kind of like kidneys. We asked the waitress what they were in our broken Spanglish and she said something that sounded like huevos, which means eggs.

I thought I had misheard her but later we saw the same things in a tapas bar (pictured on the left) and confirmed that they were, in fact, marinated fish egg sacs. Cooked caviar! We also ate a lot of boquerones, tiny little anchovy fillets marinated in lemon, garlic and olive oil served with bread, (pictured on the right).

When we weren't in the mood for fish, jamon was definitely the way to go. These giant legs of air-cured, pressed ham were hanging in almost every bar we entered. In the picture above, we were in a bar in Granada where tapas are complimentary with a drink, and we got a few thick slices with some almonds and olives. One thing about this salty food - it gets you to drink more!

At breakfast, we'd try to find a churro stand where we got these amazing hot, unglazed spiral doughnuts that you'd dip in thick hot chocolate.

Piping hot!

Our best and worst meals in Spain were in the same city, about 8 hours apart on the second last day of our trip. We arrived in Cadiz quite hungry, and found a nearby restaurant in the square near our pension. The 'menu del dia' which included an appetizer, main, and dessert was really cheap, so we went for it. This soup pictured above was supposed to be chickpea stew. Sure, there were chickpeas, but there was a lot of gelatinous tripe and thick rinds of fat as well in a bland, greasy broth. Gross. I couldn't finish it. Jeff had a seafood soup that was just as bland and had almost no fish in it at all. How disappointing. Our second last day, and the food was awful!

We made up for it the same evening. Cadiz was kind of creepy during the dead hours of the afternoon, but everything came alive at night and was so beautiful. We found this little cafe down a little alley and shared this plate of pulpo. Lying on a bed of thinly sliced boiled potatoes, the octopus was tenderly cooked and topped with grainy mustard and olive oil. It was the most unexpected, rustic treatment of seafood I think I've ever had, and definitely was one of the best due to the freshness of the octopus.

After thinking about our culinary experiences in Southern Spain it's even more interesting that Spanish chefs are at the vanguard of the cutting-edge food world. The molecular gastronomists treat food as performance art and their four hour long tasting menus of 25 mouthful-size courses are meant to meant to confuse and inspire. This is so different than the food we experienced - everything was so connected to place, so connected to simple flavours rooted in the food's texture. Perhaps this simple food was the inspiration to explore the essence of pure flavour on a higher level. Whatever the connection, I dearly hope I'll get to experience it again.

Victuals of the Lowlands

I'm a lazy blogger. I have a full year's worth of food stories and photos that I just haven't gotten the kick in the pants to get them posted.

Ach, du lieber.

Without further ado, here are my tales of ...
Food of the Netherlands!

Last spring we went to Europe to celebrate Jeff's graduation and to visit some relatives. We landed in Amsterdam where we spent a week with my cousin Freek and the rest of the family acting as hosts and tour guides.

The most typically Dutch food I can think of has got to be fresh herring. When I was a teenager my uncle Peter tried to get me to eat herring and I absolutely refused since I was a pathetic wuss with a fearful palate.
This trip - I couldn't get enough of this stuff. So lovely. For a euro or two you could get a few chunks of raw herring covered in raw onions at little vendors on the street. Tasty, even though it did leave you with pretty skanky breath.

FYI, Eating it on the street with a toothpick is a good idea. Taking it on the train and eating it in a closed compartment is a BAD idea. Live and learn, people.

Another typical Dutch eating experience - Indonesian Rijstaffel.
Dutch food is very simple, but they've held on to yummy things from their colonial history like the Rijstaffel, which is a huge selection of little dishes of curries and stirfies and crazy spiced hard boiled eggs and other delicious things.
This is celebration food - the occasion here was my cousin Christa's 30th birthday. It was so great to get to share this day with the family!

One of the funnest discoveries was on a chilly day in Rotterdam. We were walking down the street and saw a guy outside a little restaurant with this giant cast-iron grill with little indentations. About 40 seconds after pouring the batter, he flipped them over with a fork to cook the other side. Another 40 seconds, and he would whip them out of the grill onto a waiting plate which would then be covered in slices of butter and mounds of icing sugar. They were like hot little puffy, eggy pancakes. Poffertjes! So good!

Not too much explanation required here - this is a piece of bread covered in butter and chocolate sprinkles. For some reason, chocolate sprinkles or hagelslag is a standard bread topping often eaten at breakfast. I remember being VERY impressed with this as a 10 year old visiting the Netherlands for the first time... It was like having Easter paska every day. Jeff liked it too.

And the best is saved for last....

Vla.

Pudding in a carton. Lots of flavours. Good for breakfast, good for dessert. Enough said.

Treats from the Teutons

... Otherwise known as food from Germany.

After leaving the Netherlands, we headed over to my lovely cousin Lina's place near Stuttgart in Germany where we spent a few days visiting her family and exploring the old Schwabische towns and castles. Lina fed us incredibly well at her place, but apparently I actually showed some restraint in keeping my camera in its bag instead of introducing it to her family's dinner table.

This post reflects our eating on one particular day visiting the town of Bietigheim-Bissingen close to Lina's place.


Breakfasts were amazing in Germany. There were always mounds of meats, cured sausage, cheese, breads... I would normally consider these dinner food but they were a yummy way to start the day.
The top photo was Jeff's brekky - four different cheeses and four different meats. I think he also got some eggs - hardboiled, maybe. My breakfast consisted of mounds of prosciutto with sliced tomatoes smothered in pesto topped off with mini bocconcini balls. There was also a basket of assorted breads on the table with a half dozen different types of breads. This was also the kind of thing that Lina served us at home -this wasn't just a restaurant experience.



After several hours of walking around and exploring the town on very full stomachs, it started pouring rain. Although we still weren't too hungry after the enormous breakfast, we popped into this place called Brauerei zum Rossknecht.
(wanna see the menu? http://www.rossknecht.net/upload/226588_rk_speisekarte_web.pdf)

Jeff had schnitzel, I had the kasespaetzel and the micro-bier. We shared the salad.

This kasespaetzel was basically a high-end version of mac and cheese - lots of green onions and ham, topped with loads of carmelized onions and sooooo cheesy. Just thinking about it is making me drool. Even though I wasn't too hungry after the breakfast we had eaten, I still ate every single bite of this stuff.
This food is RICH food. I think I may have felt like dying later in the evening... a glutton's life is not always a comfortable one.

Manitoba Quinoa

As I was perusing the offerings of my favourite plant and seed store last spring, I discovered some seed packages for Cherry Vanilla Quinoa. http://www.herbs.mb.ca/en/on-line-shopping/seeds/all-seeds/quinoa_cherry_vanilla_seeds.html

Quinoa seeds! How preposterous! I want some!

Somehow I assumed that quinoa would be an exotic warm weather plant like everything else that's tasty in the world, but it was first domesticated up in the alpine plains of the Andes. It doesn't like weather much above 30 degrees and it prefers cooler nights. It's actually currently being grown commercially in Saskatchewan, so I figured it should do just fine in downtown Winnipeg.


I had planted a bunch of new things in this part of the garden so I wasn't sure which plants were weeds and which were my seedlings. The arugula was spindly, the frisee was non-existent for the first week or so and all I could see where I planted my quinoa was pigweed. On the other hand the spinach was gorgeous due to the colder weather.
After a little investigation online I found out that quinoa does, in fact, look exactly like pigweed which made it a little difficult to separate the good stuff from the bad stuff at first - but it kept getting taller and taller and taller...



This clump of greenness shows the garden at the end of August. At this point the tallest quinoa plant was about 5 foot 7 or so - definitely taller than me. Officially this stuff isn't supposed to grow this tall, but it seemed as though our weird weather last summer made it shoot straight up instead of staying shorter and producing big seed heads.


The plants started drying up mid-September, so I cut off the seed heads and left them to dry in a big vase on my kitchen table for the next few weeks.

Once they were dry, I had to figure out some way of removing the seeds from the chaff.
I thought of using screens, or of using a fan to blow away the undesirable stuff, but the seeds are just so small that I had to think of something else to try.


I started out by rubbing the seed clusters into a big bowl, and then painstakingly hand-picked all the green stuff out of the bowl. Because the flowers hadn't developed that well, there was a lot of fluffy stuff that kind of looked like it should have contained a seed but hadn't matured properly. After a bit of experimenting I found out that this fluffy stuff FLOATED.

So a routine developed... Add water to bowl, swish around vigourously, whisk away the stuff that floats to the top. Inspect the removed portion for errant seeds. Repeat.
I must have rinsed out that damn blue bowl a dozen times....
The good thing about this technique was that home-grown quinoa requires vigourous rinsing since it grows with a bitter coating which is usually already removed in commercially available stuff.

After all the rinsing, the quinoa was left to dry on a cookie sheet in my dining room. After about a week it was totally dry and it went into the jar pictured at the top of this post.

All this work created one cup of quinoa. ONE CUP!

How do you honour ONE MEASLY CUP of home-grown quinoa?

By making quinoa salad with oranges, mint and sun-dried black olives for all your friends at a potluck, that's how. I hope they enjoyed it.

More on growing quinoa in Canada: http://www.saltspringseeds.com/scoop/powerfood.htm

Happy New Year!

It's not really New Year's without portzelky.

After getting burnt out by a very Christmas season this year, I knew I had to take it easy on New Year's Eve. No parties, no fireworks, just staying at home and watching DVDs. (Run, Lola, Run and SCTV Christmas specials, for those who are interested) My plan was to do a lot of NOTHING.
However, my plans of decadent laziness were thwarted when a friend mentioned on Facebook that very afternoon that her mom had just brought her some Portzelky. I was immediately motivated to get going on a nice big batch, since MY mother was recovering in bed from back surgery and needed ME to bring HER some portzelky! Or perhaps I just wanted to eat some yummy dough deep fried in lard and then covered in sugar. (...And then could gather brownie points by bringing the leftovers to mom's the next morning!)

Portzelky are basically raisin fritters that are topped with copious amounts of icing sugar. The Dutch call them Oliebollen, my sister-in-law from Montreal said they were like tiny little Dutchies. Whatever you want to call them, they're YUMMY, and the Mennonites of Manitoba like to eat them on New Year's Day.

I used a yeast dough that was very hard to scoop up and even harder to place in the hot fat without splattering. I used lard for frying, which I don't think I've used before for these, but I think it worked out really well. I've never had such an easy time maintaining temperature on my crappy stove. These things can be a little tricky because if you have it too hot, the outside will get burnt while the inside will still be gooey. This time, all was golden.

I think the sticky dough is part of the magic of the misshapen ball - I think if these looked pretty, they'd somehow lose most of their charm. They're SUPPOSED to look irregular and misshapen.

Top warm portzelky with icing sugar with more on the side for dipping, and you've got yourself a fine way to start the new year.

Sometimes writing blogs feels like homework...

...And that has been the reason for my absence this year.

2009 has been a fantastic food year. Many photographs of delicious things have been tucked away on my hard drive, awaiting the dissipation of my laziness and antipathy, awaiting their chance to be shared with the world. And now that life is getting hectic with pre-Christmas nonsense, I finally have the get-up-and-go to start up again with exploring my adoration of food.

So I'll start with something random from 2009. How about...

European Potato Chips!

This spring, we made a little trip out to Europe to celebrate Jeff finishing university. We had a fantastic time visiting family in the Netherlands and in Germany, and a great time exploring southern Spain on our own.

The chips definitely weren't the culinary highlight of the trip or anything, but they kind of signify the best thing about travel for me. You expect to see beautiful old buildings and lovely canals and attractive people on bicycles and bakeries on every street corner and cobblestone. The things that you don't expect are the things you usually take for granted so completely you stop noticing them anymore, and then when they're different,it's kind of a fun surprise. For example, I didn't see one door with a door knob. Bathrooms are also an adventure every time you walk in, considering the wide range of toilets out there. Traffic lights in Spain aren't on the other side of the intersection - they're right next to you. And you'd expect Netherlands TV to have a mix of local programming and dubbed North American shows, but somehow coming across Spongebob Squarepants in Dutch can be very, very surprising.

Obviously, the food of another culture is a big perk of travelling - for the two us it's sometimes the main reason for going somewhere. There'll be more posts on the highlights of our European food experiences, but here are a collection of chips that I found kind of surprising.

German Donair flavoured chips. 'Doner mit alles' - loaded donair.

Donair shops are pretty ubiquitous in the Netherlands and Germany - it's usually the best bet for a cheap but tasty lunch. I expected the shops, but not necessarily the chips. Did they taste like a donair - not at all, but it was an interesting bag.

Spanish 'Jamon' flavoured chips. Ham is BIG in Andalucia - in most bars and restaurants you'll see a whole cured leg (complete with hoof) hanging on a post behind the bar, ready to have a few paper-thin slices cut from the haunch for a tapas. I expected the ham, not necessarily the chips. Interesting note - these kind of tasted like Old Dutch BBQ chips. Kind of bacony. The real jamon was INFINITELY more worthy of snacking.

The surprise favourite of the trip? These Cream of Mushroom flavoured chips purchased in Spain. I've never been a huge fan of cream of mushroom soup, but these chips were really shockingly mushroom flavoured. And creamy. Very subtle, and I think these were a kettle-type chip as well, which is always a bonus for me. The bag was written in Spanish and in Portuguese.

Writing this post now, I find it a little depressing that I spent time eating chips when I could have been snacking on more exciting things, but I must acknowledge that they still have an important place in vacation eating.

(Plus I really love eating chips.)

Pure Lard Part Two: Soap

So what's a gal supposed to do with 15 lbs of lard, anyway? How much pie crust can you eat? A few weeks after rendering all my pig fat I was still trying to figure this out when I thought of making homemade soap. I remembered watching my Oma make soap when I was a little girl. It was really harsh, nasty stuff that was great for cleaning laundry - all that lye burned the stains right out of the clothes! I found the idea of using my nice organic, porky lard to wash my tender body quite delightful, so I started doing a little bit of research online. How hard could it be?

The internet is a wonderful thing. I found so much info - recipes, lye calculators, tips on what to do if your batch fails, and pictures of what each step is supposed to look like. I even found a local source of lye at http://www.dierbe.com/ . (Di Erbe actually just opened up shop at 1853 Main Street next to Don's Photo this last weekend! Funny that I had to find them by googling 'Winnipeg Lye' and they ended up being neighbours...) Anyway, I was glad to find them because lye is a little hard to find in retail stores these days - apparently it's also an ingredient in Crystal Meth.

There was also a ton of info on which oils and fats made the nicest soaps. Most recipes use a combination of tropical oils and almost every recipe included coconut oil, which is desirable due to its abundant lathering capabilities. It was pretty difficult to find information on lard as the main ingredient but I eventually discovered that soap made of pure lard is known to be slightly soft, quite moisturizing, but with meagre suds action. It was pretty universally recommended that you add beef tallow (or even better, coconut oil for hardness and bigger bubbles!) to lard soap to make sure you get nice soap.

I wasn't terribly interested in besmirching my 100-mile lard with mangrove-destroying, plantation-grown palm or coconut oils, so I started to look for tallow. However, it turned out that NO ONE in Winnipeg even knows what tallow is, let alone sells it. Only a handful of the dozen butchers I called even knew what suet was, let alone tallow. I finally found suet (from veal - yikes!) at DeLuca's. They gave me four pounds of it for free! Time for more rendering!

The online soap calculators are really neat - you input exactly how much and what kind of oil or fat you have, and it will calculate exactly the amount of lye and water is required to saponify the amount of fat you have. I think this is why the old fashioned stuff was so harsh - people used to use a lot more lye than necessary.

My first batch of soap did turn out slightly harsh, due to my inexact and bouncy kitchen scale. Maybe I'll get a better one for Christmas, hey Santa? I made a bigger batch the second time around so I would be able to measure larger amounts at a time and therefore get slightly more accurate measurements.

Anyway, this is how you make soap.
1. Weigh your fat, and melt it.
2. Weigh your lye and your water, and then add the lye to the water in a WELL VENTILATED AREA. Lye fumes are pretty nasty - My Aunt Mary told me scary stories of damaging her respiratory system when making soap in her basement many years ago. It can also burn your skin, so you have to be careful with that, too. Wear your gloves and your gas mask!
3. Make sure your lye mixture (which gets really hot when you mix it together) and your fat are both around 100 degrees Fahrenheit, then mix them together.

4. And then mix together and mix together and mix together until the whole mess starts getting thicker, kinda like thin pudding. This is called 'trace'. It probably took about 15 or 20 minutes for my soap to trace. When your soap starts to trace, add your scented oil and colours (I used a vanilla pomegranate scent and a bit of paprika to add a bit of colour) and mix it up.

5. Pour the thickening soap into your primary mold and let it sit.

There was a lot of info online about how to primary molds, but I used the good old fashioned milk carton like Oma used to, which worked out well. The soap continues to heat up as it hardens - you want to keep it warm so it can finish going through the magical chemical process of saponification.

After a day or two, you can take it out of the mold and cut it into blocks and lay it out to cure a little longer. Apparently soap made from animal fat solidifies a little quicker than soap made from pure vegetable oil, which can take a little longer to harden properly. I let my soap dry out for a couple of weeks before I tried using it.

In the next few weeks while I was waiting for the soap to harden I read up on milling processes. Milled soap is basically regular soap that's shaved and then melted down and poured into molds. It's the FANCY stuff! I ended up melting down most of the first batch and about a third of the second batch to make some new exciting molded soaps. I made some lemon scrub soap with turmeric, lemon zest and cornmeal and a couple batches of cinnamon oatmeal soap.

EVERYBODY will get soap for Christmas this year. Make sure you look surprised when you open it up!

Pig's Head Soup (warning - graphic photos)

Like I mentioned in the previous post, when I purchased a butchered pig last month, I asked for the extra fat, the liver, the heart and the head to be delivered with my meat. When you buy meat directly from a farmer, you pay for the whole animal, even though you only get the nice bits of meat that the butcher wants you to have. I figured since I already paid for the weird parts, I should get them home and figure out what to do with them. I had a few plans - I had long wanted to try making liverwurst, and as for the head - I was interested in getting the jowls so I could smoke them or make Guanciale. When smoked, it's similar to bacon and guanciale is apparently kind of similar to pancetta.

Well, the idea of using up all the spare parts was a noble one. I didn't take any pictures of the liverwurst making process for some reason - I guess it was so intense and engrossing that I didn't pick up the camera. I ended up making two large liverwursts and about 10 small loaves of liver pate with bourbon. Pretty yummy stuff. I ended up giving the heart to my brother Carl, who always called dibs on the chicken hearts and gizzards any time Mom would roast a chicken when we were kids.

But the head.... Oh my God, the head nearly did me in. I don't think I was quite prepared to handle the huge hog's head that came wrapped in butcher paper. First of all, it was skinned. Do you know how gross a skinned pig's head is?

I'll show you how gross it is:



Not only was it gross, but the way that it was cut left very little meat in the jowl area, so I couldn't even make my hog jowls. Now what was I supposed to do? Make head cheese? Even I have my limits.
I found my way over to El Izalco that particular weekend, and the lovely Salvadorean woman who runs the place (and who I constantly forget the name of) suggested that I roast the head, make stock, and cook up some pozole. Pozole is a Mexican/Central American soup made with pork and hominy corn. Apparently it is served on special occasions because of the time it takes to prepare and it is a pretty big treat. I picked up a few pounds of dried hominy and lots of dried guajillo and chipotle chiles and went home with renewed excitement for my pig's head.

I have some pretty large stockpots, but nothing really worked with this damn head. I had hoped to skip the roasting part of the stock making, but the skull just wouldn't fit in the pot in one piece. After it had roasted for an hour or so, it was easier to break up into parts.

Long story short -

I was victorious in my goal of not wasting the pig's head. It made a delicious, rich soup that tasted extra yummy with all the hominy corn and chiles. And triple yummy with a garnish of chopped up avocados, cilantro and lime juice.

Pure Lard

Let me preface this post by saying that I don't particularly care for pork. It's not really my favourite meat in and of itself - if I'd have my pick on a buffet table I would probably go for chicken or fish sooner than a big piece of pork. However, I seem to be drawn to the transformative nature of pork. You can do so many interesting things with pork - you can cure it, salt it, smoke it, age it, stuff it into sausage casings, and render it. I love what I can do with pork.

This year we purchased a whole pig from some organic farmers in La Broquerie, Manitoba. (Butchered, of course). I like buying meat directly from the farmer for a few reasons -

1. I like buying straight from the producer. The farmer gets all the profit - no money needs to go to a middle-man or shiny grocery store. They get to pocket all the money from the sale and thus actually afford to have a small-scale organic farm and be able to make a living doing so.
2. I like that organic meat is cheaper than in the grocery store. Not cheaper than the regular meat, but cheaper than the organic stuff. I really like the idea of eating organic, humanely raised meat, but I also cringe at the inflated prices on the freezer-burnt organic roasts I see in the supermarket freezer. I paid $1.95 per pound of live weight - around $300 for this batch of meat.
3. I like that I can decide how I get my meat cut up. Now this point is actually hypothetical, because I haven't ever received meat cut the way I requested it from the butcher. It seems that butchers are an obstinate bunch that like to do things the way they want to do them instead of how they were asked to do them. This time, I asked for large roasts, to have half the belly fresh so I could make pancetta, and half of it smoked into bacon, for lots of ground pork so I could make my own sausages and very few pork chops. I also wanted the head, the liver, and as much of the fat as possible. What I actually received was 3 measly pounds of ground pork, no fresh belly,12 rings of farmer sausage, 56 pork chops, a couple of large roasts.... and the head, the liver and 3 giant bags of fat. (At least they got that part right.) Apparently my ham and bacon is on its way this weekend - when it comes, I'm going to see if I can trade some of those pork chops for ground pork.

Anyway, the first weekend of the pig I was BUSY. The meat went straight into the freezer, and I started working on the weird stuff. The first job was rendering the lard.

Why do I need to render lard? I really have no idea.

I think the main problem with me is that I read Chowhound.com way too much and I pay too much attention to the crazy Mexican food aficionados that say that you gotta render your own lard to get the real, authentic good flavour you need for good Mexican food. I've been on a bit of a tortillas, beans and pork kick for the past year or so and so it made sense that I should ask for the fat from my pig so I could render my lard and have lots of exceptional flavour in my tortillas.

Rendering lard takes a long time. You have to chop up the hard fat into small pieces like the picture above, and then cook it for hours and hours until all the fat turns to liquid.

There will still be some solid pieces in all the liquid fat at this point. Strain the fat through a small-grain sieve to get all the chunks out of there and set the lard in a pan to cool and harden. I figure that I rendered about15 pounds of lard, when it was all said and done. When it solidified, I cut it into chunks, wrapped it in parchment paper and stuck them in the freezer.

The chunks that are left are crackles, or Jreewe, in Low German - the preferred way to die from cholesterol poisoning for every Mennonite girl worth her weight in grease.

You can still buy Crackles in Steinbach in big plastic tubs, smothered in lard. I was really grossed out by crackles when I was a kid - Mom would scoop up a big spoonful of what looked like dirty lard into the frying pan, and then it would melt to reveal these brown glossy lumps of... whatever the hell they are. I'm thinking it must be leftover collagen from within the fat structure of the fatback. Like... Grody to the Max.

But who am I to deny my heritage? They're still not my favourite, but once the extra fat is strained out of them, they tasted pretty fine with some fried potatoes.