Lard

Thanks to my dear friend Robyn, I finally made a pie with lard.

 Or, partially lard. Also butter. And peaches.

We had company.

 And the pie crust turned out pretty good.

 Flakier. Prettier. But not tastier. So I'm sticking with butter-crust pies for now.

But a lard crust would do well for a meat-filled pie. And in case we haven't got time to run to the butcher, I know just what kind to make...

Fat is for summer too.

For my meat-focused friend's birthday, I got him this meat-filled book, which is connected to the Carcutepalooza Year of Meat challenge that he's been taking part in - albeit without blogging about it. Which means I get to.

His adventures have been hinted at before, but since I participated in this one, and because it was extra photogenic, and also because I've made sausage once before with another friend and thus was the resident expert, I thought it warranted its own post.

The project was also assisted by my lovely housemate's new grinder/stuffer attachment for the standing mixer. When I'm a big kid, with a real job and my own kitchen, I am getting a standing mixer and all its attachment. It's so dope. 

Also amazing: the pork shoulder butt and the fat back we got from Cannuli's. They are reliably awesome. And so was the freshly ground pork, which narrowly avoided getting completely eaten before stuffing only by a well-timed trip to the phở place down the street.

Cannuli's also sells casings, which are fun and gross. Raw pig intestine, as if you didn't know.

Stuffing the sausage is the most difficult part of the whole sausaging saga- tedious mostly, and prone to a lot of dick jokes. If I were getting a PhD in sociology, it would involve traveling the world, watching people from all cultures and walks of life stuff sausages, and cataloging their dick jokes. It would have a lot of graphs and sausage recipes.

Some of our links were pretty ugly and misshapen, but we did eventually get the hang of it. The ugly sausages were just cooked up for our post-stuffing lunch.

This is one of those perfect summer meals that make me thankful for the heat and the long hours and the asparagus.

I won't transcribe the recipe, because we took it verbatim out of the book, but we made a (not very) spicy Italian sausage. It was beautiful, once we worked out the kinks.

With all that said, it's a hell of a lot easier to buy it from the butcher.

The hare that lost.

Have you ever had an ex-boyfriend who, it turns out, was sort of an embarrassment, a less-informed decision than you thought at the time, perhaps missing some crucial traits that would be deal breakers now? And you're glad the relationship is over without much heartbreak on either side, and while it was a learning experience, you're not in a hurry to repeat it. Or even think much about it. But there's all these photographs lying around, and you don't want to get rid of them, because they show part of your life, and parts of it were really fun despite being sort of awkward, and some of them are really pretty, and you just don't know what exactly to do with them?

That's how I feel about the time I made rabbit.

I bought a beautiful, fresh, organic rabbit from one of my favorite butchers in the Italian Market to celebrate the year of the rabbit, and also to experiment a little bit. I was able to watch as he skinned and chopped the hare for me. To prepare, I looked up a lot of rabbit recipes in cookbooks and internets, and found that, while they differed a lot, most of them agreed that browning the rabbit and then slow-cooking it in liquid was the way to go. So I got together some wine and a small group of people that are particularly good-natured about my cooking experiments, and went to town on my rabbit pieces.

Using another purchase from the butcher's - a container of duck fat - I browned the rabbit nicely. It already smelled good (and the duck fat smelled excellent) and looked pretty.

 

I added shallots, fennel, herbs, wine, and rabbit broth, and slowly simmered the rabbit for forty minutes or so. It still smelled good. 

While it cooked, everyone relearned bridge.

We made roasted vegetables, mushroom gravy, and Barbara's fresh bread to accompany the rabbit.

And then we ate it. And it was way too dry. I'm not sure whether it should have been browned more, cooked less, or both, but something terrible had happened in the hour it took to cook. The gravy was the only redeeming factor at all.

It was sort of devastating. A disappointing end to a relationship I'd been a little wary about, but had had such high hopes for.

At least in the end, unlike ex-boyfriends, dry rabbit can be put to another use:

Epic Pig Roast: We Don't Know How to Do This. (Aftermath)

To recap: We bought this whole, uncooked pig and roasted it. Which was lovely and difficult and I'm so glad we did it and I'll never do it again, and everyone had a good time and ate lots of pork. And then, and you probably saw this coming, we had all this pig left over.

Or, to be more precise, we had whole pig carcass with all the pork eaten off it.  The bones, the ribs, the head, the liver, the feet...those things we had. 

Well, and I guess there was some actual pork left too.

 

So, after weeks of planning a pig roast, we suddenly found ourselves with about twenty pounds (give or take ten pounds) of pig bits that needed to be dealt with.

First we cut up the pig carcass. After the roast, we'd just put the whole thing in a garbage bag and left it in the fridge, so there was quite a lot of cutting and sorting to do. I don't have any photos of that (lucky you), but it was a huge pain and took the two of us about two hours. As is true of this whole project, had we known what we were doing, it would have been a simple process and taken about twenty minutes.

After our carving ordeal we got hungry and ate liver, onions, and pig cheek for our afternoon tea. And, well, about the liver. It tasted wonderful on the day of the roast, covered in the citrus-y marinade, but most of the delicious seemed to have dissipated in the meantime. Liver is sort of gross, even when you're a grown-up.

With that, we'd gotten rid of the liver and the cheeks, which wasn't really making much of a dent in the huge pile of pig pieces. So we filled up a stock pot with meaty bones and feet, threw in some onions and bay leaves, and boiled the hell out of it.

The resulting stock was so thick (and the refrigerator so cold) that it congealed overnight. Which made bagging it for the freezer extra easy!














The thing about pork stock is that it really isn't a good soup stock. It's thick, it's overwhelmingly flavorful, and it's sort of... intensely porky. Extremely good for cooking beans. Not so good for a nice noodle soup. Luckily one of my favorite, freezable, hearty foodstuffs involves lots of pork and beans.


Feijoada is a Brazilian staple. Like all regional specialties, there's only one way to make it, and everyone in Brazil has their very own, totally authentic way of doing so. Luckily they do usually agree on two things: black beans and pork.

And onions, because everyone loves onions. We kept it real simple: Cook two pounds of black beans with some pork stock. Sauté all the onions left over from the pig roast, add a couple of pounds of chorizo that you picked up at the corner store and about an equivalent pile of pork that you just spend hours chopping off a pig carcass. Everything should be bite-sized pieces. Add it to the beans with some bay leaves. Cook for awhile.

After eating it in your Pre-Modern Europe class, decide it needs a salty/smoky flavor. Buy a package of bacon. Add it to the pot. Cook for awhile.

Now put it in your fridge, next the pot of pork stock, the tupperware of pork fat, and the bowl of pork pieces.

Come back next week for my exciting foray into a rigid kosher diet! This new religious adherence will be a desperate and terribly transparent ploy to avoid all the pork that's invaded my life.

Ruby Eats Real

Finally, as if you've all been waiting for it, my LONG overdue post about the most amazing food festival of the everything: Eat Real. All the commentary is going to boil down to "here are the amazing things I saw and ate."

(c) Eat Real and/or Robyn Johnson 2009

(c) Eat Real and/or Robyn Johnson 2009

This was the second annual Eat Real Festival, which is held in Oakland and is an offshoot of the Slow Food movement that focuses on local, sustainable street food. My lovely, talented, workaholic friend Robyn is one of the people whose sweat, blood, and tears goes into making it a reality, so I get an insider's perspective on the whole ordeal, minus the insider's stress and hard work. Last summer I was able to tag along on several expeditions to seek out delicious street food, justifying my presence by being willing to have photographs of me posted on Eat Real's site as a model consumer. I'm generous like that. And, um, one of the events required mustaches. First time in the Mission when the hombres didn't hit on us, but the dykes did. And that one drunk guy, who was all "nice beard!"

Anyway, this time around, I wasn't in California to take advantage of the fun food adventures (although I got lots of texts about them – a not-so-subtle ruse to convince me to move back), I did "help" by tweeting the event, averaging about one tweet every hour, when I stopped eating and remembered my job. So I'll put those in this post, so you can get an idea how big a slacker I was being. Also I managed to used the wrong tag for most of the time. Sorry, Robyn.

So mostly I was stuffing my face and wandering around with all the lovely people who showed up for the beautiful weather, exhibitions, and delicious food.

And beer.

Get ready Oakland, it's the last day of #erf2010 and word is there's still some beer left from yesterday. Help us drink all those taps dry! Sun Aug 29 13:06:28 2010 via mobile web

The happiest dogs are the ones hanging out near the Eat Real Ranch. they just love learning about urban goat farming! #erf2010 Sat Aug 28 19:03:10 2010 via mobile web

There was a moment of calm and linelessness up by the Creme Brulee Cart and Raw Daddy Foods. An oddly successful combination! #erf2010

Just learned that the massive pans used by Gerard's Paella are called paella - that's where the name comes from! #erf2010 Sat Aug 28 20:16:51 2010 via mobile web

The paella was by far the most photographed and discussed thing at Eat Real. (And rightly so! Do you see the rake? They need to RAKE the paella.) After the first day, I went home and told my dad about it. The next day I got a call from him, that went something like this: 
"hey hon, i just got to Eat Real."
"oh! great! where are you? I'll come find you!"
"actually, all I want to know is the way to the paella tent."

 When I finally found him, he'd gotten both kinds of paella (and some sliced mango) and was quite contentedly consuming it all. 

One of the best parts of my time at Eat Real was finally getting to try Black Pig Meat Company's bacon, which I'd heard legendary things about. The things I heard were under-exaggerated. The bacon smell aroused my senses, and the friendly people cooking it up noticed my photographic excitement and helpfully stuck a huge pan out the tent window. And then they sold us a BLT. And then I was completely sold on their bacon. 

 Seriously, that was some good stuff. I wonder if they'd ship it to Philadelphia?

The lunch lines have formed, but they're moving quickly and there's so many fantastic choices! Eat well and keep it Real! #erfest2010 Sun Aug 29 16:14:02 2010 via mobile web

 And, hey, it's Oakland. The people were almost as awesome as the food!

And that was Eat Real. 

Most of the goats are in the pen, but one just tried to join the throngs of Eat Realers. He just wants some tacos! #erf2010 Sat Aug 28 19:47:11 2010 via mobile web 

In addition to all the wonderful vendors and lovely people and cute animals and yummy foodstuffs, there were some demonstrations. The ones I attended all involved large slabs of meat. If you aren't into that, pretend this post ended here, and just listen to Carne Cruda, whose lovely performance was the only one I managed to catch:

• Oakland's Tight by Carne Cruda

Stand in the very short beer line and listen to Carne Cruda wax poetic on Oakland's tightness. #erfest2010 Sun Aug 29 16:36:12 2010 via mobile web 

 

For the rest of you, here's some sweet butchery action:

♥ saw ♥

 This was the steer butchery competition. I want one of those bones! For soups! This lady told me so:

All the competitions were announced by the lovely Eat Real founder, Anya Fernald, who this photograph does not do justice to. She's beautiful, smart, and has lots of advice on how to purchase, process, and prepare lots of different meats. And other things. But particularly meats.

On red pork: "For some reason America decided to like its pork white. Probably around the same time it started to like suburbs." #erf2010 Sun Aug 29 18:13:49 2010 via Twitter for BlackBerry®  

 

Pig butchers share a jar of moonshine before the competition! #erf2010 Sun Aug 29 18:06:00 2010 via Twitter for BlackBerry® 

 

 "Anytime someone's using a ham, I am a happy man." -Max Stepanian, pig butchery judge. #erf2010 Sun Aug 29 18:35:43 2010 via mobile web  

  
(Max is the guy on the right, with the thick curly hair pumping his fist at the sight of the big piece of pork.)

 That's Dave the Butcher, with my new favorite kitchen utensil – the meat saw. Once the pig butchery contest was over, the butchers carried the pork belly to another stage and taught everyone how to make bacon. Except that they'd already had some moonshine at the beginning of the butchery segment, and they were drinking beer during the presentation, so by the end, all the bacon-making directions were rather vague and tangential. Which only made the entire thing better, really.

"Bacon fat is not bad for you...I don't think." -Dave the Butcher #erf2010 Sun Aug 29 19:31:53 2010 via mobile web

Eat Real's main stage mascot – a stuffed chicken.

And that was Eat Real 2010. I'll be back next year. And maybe before then.