A Meaty Week is Now Over

Poet's Walk

Did you notice I hike quite a bit? Do you hike? Walking is probably one of my favorite things, aside from eating, which is a darn good thing. Today was so beautiful that I went on two hikes. One alone in the morning, and one with the family later in the afternoon. I would have walked all day in between those two hikes, too, but alas I couldn't. As we drove home from the afternoon hike, I said to Steve, "I look forward to one day hiking for as long as I want without looking at the clock and rushing back home. Or going on a hike that I know is going to take me hours." I do look forward to that day, but I wonder if I will really do it once that day arrives. Do I really want to hike all day, or am I just saying that because I can't? I do that a lot, you know. Want to do a thing because it is beyond my reach. Do you do that, too? Good. I'm not alone.

Bacon, and yes, skin.

 Today I finished the week-long meat curing and smoking marathon. Things are all now tightly wrapped in freezer paper, and snug in their ziplocs. (I'm going to admit that I love ziplocs SO much. Do you?) I'm going to stop posting photographs of large chunks of meat, I promise. Now they're all little pieces of meat in my freezer. I almost made salt pork, but I ended up curing the skin-on fatback I had as for bacon, and smoking it alongside the bacon. Now I have cured, smoked fatback cut into convenient chunks for all sorts of things, like chowders and stews. What I love about using these fatty pieces is that they flavor a dish so intensely, but with the most minimal use of meat itself. It's very frugal, very tasty.

Strips of cured and smoked fatback.

That said, I honestly don't want to look at another piece of cured and smoked meat for a while. I smell like bacon, which I'm sure some people would be delighted by, but honestly I'd rather eat the huge knobby celery roots I bought today at the market instead. Even though I didn't "dispatch" or "harvest" (that means kill or slaughter, but you may know this) this pig myself, by doing all the curing and smoking, and having all the parts to look at--the jowl, the feet, the tail--I see what I am doing. I am preparing half of a large animal. At one point, when I wrote "skin" on a ziploc bag, I felt rather grisly. And then let's not talk about the liver. I don't often feel that way, but after this week I do.

Actually, for dinner tonight, I made my family ham steaks with mashed potatoes and steamed broccoli. I tasted the ham, which came out very good, not very salty at all, but instead I had a big bowl of red skin potatoes, cut in large chunks, cooked to perfection, soft and creamy, and doused them with rosemary olive oil. It was SO good.