My bacon has a first name. Actually, two.
/I love this time of year. This is the time of year that things like this start showing up in my mailbox.
We got our pigs a little early this year - they were born in early February, and we picked them up right around the first of March. So these little bacon seeds got to experience snow (it being Maine, which is about 3 miles from the North Pole, and snow being a thing that we can experience up through and sometimes into May.)
Oh how quickly they grow up. This year's pair of pigs were a Tamworth-Yorkshire cross. They were a nice, long 'bacon' pig.
I'm not making that up. There's math behind that truth. Long pigs == long belly. And pork belly is where they keep the bacon. This differs from our previous pigs, both sets of which were Gloucester Old Spots, which had a richer, thicker layer of fat, and were 'ham' pigs.
I mean, these also have hams. Just a little smaller by comparison.
In the end, I didn't really like these pigs. Not like the Gloucesters, which I'd gladly get again.
Beth (named by my 14 year old daughter who named her after the girl that dies in 'Little Women'), and Apples were constant rooters, and a fairly destructive. They tore the sill out of the back of the barn, pushed random boards in the walls until they cracked and broke, and pushed I'm not sure how many holes through their fencing. The never actually tried to escape, which makes them simultaneously a) idiots and b) far less work than our last set. But I kept having to patch the fence and generally grumble a lot more than I did in the past.
When I looked over at them a couple of weeks ago and sized up their hams by eye, I figured it was time enough for them to head to slaughter. It was not a tearful parting.
We had fed these on the same mix of peanuts and pig feed as we raised the previous sets. the peanuts are my American stand in for the acorns that the deliciously famous black Iberian pigs find in the oak scrub of northern Spain.
Another nice surprise about moving to Maine is that the peanuts in the shell are about a third cheaper than they are in the feed store in Massachusetts. I have no idea why that might be - I am left to assume that the Massachusetts state legislature has placed a stiff import tax on underground legumes and anything that goes by the common name of 'Goober'. Which is probably also why the Andy Griffith show never took off with the Boston crowd.
I called my buddy down the road and asked if he'd help me schelp the pigs to the slaughterhouse again this year. Actually, I was really hoping his wife would help. Joanna grew up on a local farm, and with their kids, she's a fixture at the local fairs, prepping and herding the animals for show. When she came, she pointed at Joe and myself and showed us where we could stand so we'd be more or less out of the way while she picked up each pig and threw them into the trailer with a gently frightening, backhanded toss of one wrist.
Or something like that. I've watched her in action twice now, and I still have no idea how that tiny little blonde woman gets them in there but they were loaded and ready to go in about 15 minutes.
I tried a new slaughterhouse this year - a local one just down the road in Windham, Maine. It was a self-service drop off on a Sunday morning: back the trailer up, pick a pen and settle them in. There's no staff around, you just fill out a form and fill out the instructions with a contact phone number. (Joanna showed me where the forms were. Of course).
The pigs were pretty much a perfect weight when we took them in - 241 and 242 pounds respectively. That's at the top end of where you want them, more or less. Though there were a pair of pigs in the pen next to these that must have been approaching 500 lbs. Not that I'm fat shaming. But anything north of 250, and you're pretty much just raising lard.
I was a little nervous about trying a new slaughter house. Most slaughterhouses will also butcher and package the meat - many (including this one) even offer smoking and curing. But the ones up here have a fairly limited selection of cutting skills.
I spoke to the owner when I called to schedule the slaughter and asked if he'd be able to cut prosciutto, and back bacon, and a few other traditional cuts. "Sure. We've done that a couple of times."
I mean, cutting a prosciutto isn't hard. It's actually easier than cutting, boning and trimming out your typical ham. Cut the leg off the body. That's pretty much it. So I figured I'd give it a try.
So I crossed out everything on the standard form (which pretty much consisted of "how thick do you like your pork chops" (no pork chops) and "would you like us to go ahead use Pappy's special cure on your sausage? (No). ) and wrote a paragraph or two of instructions on the back of the page. Which pretty much read like this:
"Hi. I make prosciuttos. DON'T CUT THE FEET OFF. Please cut the hip fairly high, because I will cure the whole leg. DON'T CUT THE FEET OFF. These will be things of beauty, which I will tenderly rub with salt and say nice things to. DON'T CUT THE FEET OFF. They will be hung in my basement and brought out to serve the most beloved of guests, to a kind of wordless, heavenly aria sung by small children garbed in white hired specially for the occasion. DON'T CUT THE FEET OFF. It will take two years, but that's ok. Because I believe in long term relationships. And also cuddles. DID I MENTION THE FEET? NOT OFF."
Guess what? They cut the feet off.
The rest of the meat was cut pretty well. The butcher was good, it's just that not a lot of people want to cure a whole ham. So they just instinctively reached for the feet chopper. And once they're off, there's no putting them back on.
I ended up with a lot of trim, and the butts were cut down a bit smaller than I would have liked (can't get coppa out of this). But the loins were handled perfectly - kept whole, with a bit of belly attached. Perfect for making English bacon. And the freezers are now crammed full in a sort of three dimensional meat jigsaw puzzle. And the meat overall looked lovely. Farm to table takes on a whole new meaning of delicious when the farm in question is your backyard.
A couple of days later, we had some guests over (for the Color Wars party), and I smoked up a shoulder to serve. Which was mouth watering.
"Hey kids! This pig was alive in our backyard a couple of days ago! Would you like a bit more Beth on your sandwich?"
I have learned a couple of things about early pigs. Mostly: early pigs get slaughtered early.
It turns out - there's a reason why pig slaughtering season is in the fall, when the air is cool. Because heat does bad things to pork, even with 40 pounds of salt spread over it.
The (footless) prosciuttos (above) went into my prosciutto salting boxes on a nice bed of kosher salt, and were liberally rubbed, coated and massaged with several dozen pounds of salt. And also: salt.
There are three things you can lose a prosciutto to, more or less. Bacteria, pests/insects, or fungus. Any or all is bad. I'd been working on my turning what used to be a dairy room in the basement into a curing room. The stone walls are still whitewashed, and I'd gotten the humidity pretty stable, hovering between 40-55%. I have been charting it out via a SmartThings monitor that would text my phone when it went outside of the range. Basically, I am turning my house into SkyNet in the quest for a good piece of prosciutto.
I visited my prosciutto often. I covered the boxes with a couple of layers of cheesecloth to ensure nothing would disturb them. I watched the humidity closely, and went to sleep each night feeling better that my basement was full of lovely pork.
Until my basement began to smell.
The cut feet not only made the potential-prosciutto harder to hang (you can cut a slit right behind the ankle tendon that makes a perfect place to thread a rope), and less lovely to present, but it doesn't actually affect the meat. So I went ahead with the cure. There's a formula about how long to salt the ham before hanging, based on weight and thickness, and how many letters from Leondardo da Vinci's name also appear in your name. But it is measured in weeks. The next step is to bag it (to keep the flies off for a while longer) and hang it to air dry until your 4th grader is ready for 6th grade.
Unfortunately, because our pigs were ready for slaughter so early in the year, I was starting the cure during the hottest week of the summer. It was in the 90's pretty much every day. And while the basement of this old farmhouse tends to stay a little cooler than that, it is not hermetically sealed. Or air conditioned. And that extra cut at the top of the leg with the bone sticking out provided for a difficult to seal entrance for more bacteria. It was kind of like a marquis board flashing: "HEY E.COLI! I GOT THE THING THAT YOU LIKE RIGHT HERE!" There's a reason that Pa Ingalls waited until the nights were cold and the leaves were falling to slaughter his pigs.
After ten days or so, my meat started to spontaneously juice.
Juiced meat is not a good sign. There's a book I read and keep handy on the shelf called "Ham: An obsession with the hindquarter". (I raise pigs in my backyard so that I can put their hindlegs in a box in my basement. Of course I own this book). In it, the author answers the question, "how do I know if my ham has gone bad" by explaining:
Trust me. You'll know.
He was right.
Sigh... ah well. The bacon's still good, and I have a two prosciuttos from past pigs that will soon be ready. Therefore, I hereby declare this the year of salami. I've got plenty of trim, and nothing but time to get it right.
Meanwhile, here's a picture of Apples, taking a leisurely soak.
Upta camp
/Since we're Mainers now (well.. as close as a non-native person 'from away' that doesn't have roots going back three-plus generations in the state can get, anyhow), we've been talking about Camp.
In Maine, going 'Upta Camp' is a tradition. Families have a cabin or a house on the beach, or even a stretch of land that buts up against a river or a lake that they can pull their camper onto or pitch a tent. There's a lot of water in Maine, and more than enough to go around. And failing that, then a Camp near to one of the ski resorts up in the mountains will do nicely.
There are lots of varieties of Camp. Many of which are as nice (or nicer) than the primary house, with all the amenities of home. Which to me, kind of seems like cheating.
I'd been planting the seeds of an idea with my Bride for a while. We were watching HGTV and some 'small homes' show, and saw a little log cabin.
"Ooh. That looks good. Look - they have a woodstove for heat. None of that sissified electric stuff"
Then I'd turn on an episode of 'Naked and Afraid'.
'Put a tent in there someplace, and that would make a nice Camp, doncha think?'
Somewhere in there, I got my Bride convinced that we should rent a place for a week this summer, and try out a Camp. I found a place someplace between Portland and the Canadian border (about 5 hours away), and showed her the cabin (above). 'That looks nice, doesn't it?'
After she said 'yes', I explained that while you could theoretically get there by car - on a logging road, and only if you had some serious 4 wheel drive, and still had to pack in the last mile by foot - it would be such an adventure to take the float plane in.
That's our ride. It wasn't big enough to carry us all at the same time. So we took a couple of trips, along with all our gear. It was loud, and it only flew about 600 feet off the ground. There were hills going by above eye level as we flew in.
But when we landed, we were in Maine heaven. Not another soul nearby. It's the only cabin on the lake. The sounds of the loons, and the fish jumping in the lake were amazing. The cabin was built of spruce felled and peeled on the property. All of the forest around us for miles was private timber land, and there were no neighbors for miles.
Of course, there was also no electricity. Or cell coverage. Or running water.
There was a fresh spring trickling out from underneath a rock about 200 yards through the woods down a trail.
('I see a bear!' The Boy shouted this at me as we unloaded the gear and waited on the girls to arrive on the second flight in. I laughed, but I looked rather carefully down the trail towards the spring - which we still had not yet walked. 'It's moving there!'
It was a log and some dappled sunlight waving through the trees. But I admit, it was an exciting few minutes while I tried to spot what the Boy was seeing.)
Despite the 'roughing' it - the cabin was amazingly well outfitted. There was a kitchen cabin with 4 beds, and a connected 'sleeping' cabin with another 5. (Overall the place could've slept 16 people). Both cabins had a woodstove - we kept one of them going all the time. There was a propane fueled refrigerator and a stove top, and inside 'camp' lights with gas mantles.
There were packs of cards and leftover spices. A few cribbage boards and a half dozen hunting and fishing magazines to read if the mood struck. There were 2 canoes and a 2 person kayak, and plenty of trees near the lake to string our little portable hammock up in. And a pair of adirondack chairs to laze in.
And we had the best outhouse I've ever had the pleasure to sit in.
It didn't take long to slow down once we settled in. It was quiet and peaceful, and the lake was gorgeous and welcome to swim in during the early afternoon hours when the temperature reached 80 degrees or so.
We all read a lot, and hiked a lot, napped frequently, and just enjoyed the pace of the woods. At night, we'd listen to the cries of the loons, and once to a pack of coyotes ranging through the woods near camp.
All of our meals were either cooked over the fire down next to the water, or in the woodstove in the cabin. Every meal tasted amazing, with that earthy, welcome tang of fire and smoke. My Bride had planned every meal (there were spreadsheets involved, and cryovac packaged portions), and we still ended up with more food than we needed. The first night was ribeye and asparagus. And that was just a sample of how well we ate while we were there.
The kids both took to the woods readily. The Critter was just back from 4 weeks of sleep-away camp in New Hampshire (and not exactly thrilled at the idea of another week without access to her phone and friends), but admitted that the quiet was welcome after living in a cabin full of chattering 14 year old girls for a month.
She didn't move too far from the lake for the duration of the week.
The Boy and I were the ones to explore. The cabin backed up onto a 700 foot high peak (see my earlier note about how high the plane flew), and he and I climbed up and around and through the woods, finding and forging trails, and peeking underneath rocks and fallen logs. He asked me a couple of times as we were out exploring if we could stay there for ever. I'm pretty sure this boy likes the woods.
He got his very own pocket knife for this trip (he turned 9 a week after we got back), and took to carving and whittling. Only cut himself once. And it didn't bleed too badly. So we're declaring victory.
The morning after we arrived, we were all hanging out near the lake, and the Boy shouts 'Hey! Moose!'
I had a moment of '...probably right next to the bear you spotted earlier' until I looked up, and saw a 7 foot bull moose standing in the water at the end of the lake. Sure as shit. Our first moose. (Not just this trip. This is our first moose spotting since moving to Maine).
The moose proceeded to calmly walk out into the water and graze on the lily pads and water grasses, and then did something I never would've imagined. It completely submerged itself, diving down beneath the water for several seconds. It would pop its head up every once in a while, and we could see the water flashing and cascading off its antlers. It did this for about half an hour, before it got back up and wandered into the woods. The entire time, I think the four of us sat slack-jawed in awe, watching this gigantic beast.
The next day, we saw a cow moose and two calves a little further around the corner of the lake - that was early in the morning, and I didn't have a camera with me. Because the Boy had woken me up at 5:30 am to go fishing.
He has been wanting to fish for years - since before we left Massachusetts. And I finally ran out of excuses on this trip, and broke down and bought him a pole. He was so excited about this - despite the fact that I hadn't been fishing in over 25 years. My Bride and I were you-tubing videos of how to clean a fish on the drive up, as neither one of us had any real idea anymore.
We didn't catch a thing all week. The lake is full of brook trout and land locked salmon, and we got several good bites. But our skill or luck wasn't there, and we couldn't reel any of it in. But he wasn't deterred. He'd spend an hour or more quietly casting out and slowly reeling in, or letting his line sit in the water as I paddled us out in the canoe. He found the zen of fishing immediately. It was the coolest thing I've probably ever done for that Boy, and I was beyond myself with joy at being around him while he was having so much fun. I was also huddled around the hottest, strongest coffee I could make. It was 5:30 in the morning, and we were out on the damn water in a canoe, after all.
On our last morning, we woke up to a pouring rain, and all of us decided to back up in our sleeping bags a little longer, and listened to the rain hit the roof of our cabin. The plane couldn't get there through the weather, and we waited a few extra, welcome hours before our return to civilization.
I don't know if we'll ever buy something like this on our own, but I'm pretty sure all of us would be up for going back to this little spot of magic.
