More Foodie Stuff

When I came to central PA, I have to admit that food was a major, major challenge. Sorry, Central PA, but your cuisine leaves much to be desired. I particularly missed hispanic cuisines and had issues with thai, chinese, and other ethnic cuisines. It just was not happening.

The bright side of this, though, is that we now get to cook at home a lot more, and one thing Central PA really does excel at is local food. We have a vibrant and active farming economy, a restaurant and market scene that supports it, and a wide, wide world of CSAs. We also have an informal system of your-friend-knows-my-friend-and-he-has-some-eggs. In this way we have now bought a quarter of a cow and agreed to split some produce with neighbors. But we also found a fantastic CSA.

For those who haven't tried it before, "CSA" stands for community-supported agriculture. Generally speaking, the consumers (us) eliminate the risk for the farmers by paying up front for produce and other farm products, and the farmers plant to the prepaid demand, providing to the consumers the fruits of that process. Generally speaking, it's a compact between the farmer and the consumer, to reduce risk and split the bounty of the harvest. If the harvest is poor, the share we receive is poor, and if the harvest is great we get inundated with vegetables. But, honestly, having participated in a few CSAs now, I've never really felt that I didn't get wildly more vegetables/products than I paid for.

Now, CSAs do vary quite a bit, depending on the strengths and inclinations of the farmers and market. I used to belong to the Roots Farm CSA in Athens, GA, and Roots had a work requirement and specialized in really gorgeous produce in immediately-usable quantities. That went so well that the head Rootster bought my house. Well, not really -- he did buy my house when I left A-Town, but the excellent quality of the vegetables and/or the fantasticness of myself as a member had very little to do with it. Anyway, I digress. I belonged to another CSA in Athens before that which specialized in giant quantities of a few crops, and quite honestly that was somewhat disastrous because those few crops included a bunch of crops that I would prefer not to eat -- but one of the charming things is how CSAs bring the community together, in that case by my donating huge quantities of turnips to my neighbors. Oh, something I liked a lot about Roots, and about my new CSA, is that both come with interpretive materials -- when you get artisanal/heirloom/unusual veggies, it helps to have an inventory and some recipes, and both supply them. Good stuff.

Anyway...I was beyond excited when I got an email a few weeks ago from Diane Cramer, who is one of the leaders of the Bellefonte Farmers Market and also the owner of a local farm with a CSA. She proposed that, for about $20 a week, she'd supply me with 20 weeks of produce, eggs, and mushrooms. And, key for lazy and busy people who also have meat on hand already, this should reduce or eliminate entirely my need to go buy things from the local supermarket for a while. So, that's a win-win. I wrote the check immediately.

So, this summer, there will be lots of delicious food at my house. Stop by!

Bacon! Today's Final Step

Proto-bacon on its way
Originally uploaded by Athens Nikita

Now, the hard part -- sticking the proto-bacon in a bag and stuffing it in the fridge.

See, this is where we basically will do nothing for the bacon for a few days. As the cure leaches into the meat, the meat will lose moisture, which will pool in the bottom of the bag. So each day we will simply remove the bacon from its resting place, drain off the collected moisture, flip the bacon over, and put it back where it belongs in the fridge.

Recipes I've read suggest that at day 5 or 7 you pull out the bacon and ready it for smoking, but I'm still researching that step. So, either December 28th or December 30th, we'll be moving on to the next step.

Meanwhile I've improvised in typical fashion to prepare for the curing process. I can't find my Sharpie, so an envelope with the recipes on it rests on top of the three segments. Beneath that are three 2-gallon freezer bags, each with a piece of meat in it. Beneath that is a turkey roasting rack and the ends of the bags, so that hopefully in between drainings the moisture will pool away from, rather than on, the meat.

Anyway, that's it for now. The whole thing took about 45 minutes. Easy peasy.

Bacon!

Bacon!
Originally uploaded by Athens Nikita

So, this morning I got started on 2010: A Bacon Odyssey

I started by acquiring the bacon-making meat at a place called Nittany Meats, which is a butcher shop in Zion. The guys at Nittany Meats tell me that the pig I bought came from somewhere near Indiana, PA. They stock meat from local and regional sources, but apparently most of the pork comes from Western PA during this season. What I got is called a "pork belly," and is the strip of meat that runs in front of the ribs.

(For the record, "bacon" doesn't have to be pork.  But in this case, and usually, it is.)

The photo is of my ingredients and tools laid out for bacon-making.

Left to right, there's:

1. The dish in which I will be curing everything (I promise to get that back to you soon, Aunt Linda)
2. Morton's Salt
3. Pepper Mill -- when we used the fresh-ground stuff, it's an international mix from Williams-Sonoma.
4. The red mixing bowl in which I mix up the cure.
5. Two Sisters gourmet -- "peppery mix"
6. The salt mill -- about half of the salt used is sea salt that I hand ground.
7. Two knives. I'm embarrassed to admit that my swanky Henckels santuko is awfully dull, and I had to bring in the bonus Cutco knife to finish the job.
8. Paper towels.
9. Freezer-sized Ziplock bags.

As you can see, I've split one pork belly into three slabs. We'll be trying three different cures.

2010: A Bacon Odyssey

So, you might ask, what's this I hear about homemade bacon?

Well, it's almost the holidays. And as a university employee I get a little more time off than the average bear -- in fact, I get about a week off, which gives me time I don't usually have to tackle projects that require more time or diligence.

And we're into local and slow food to the extent that we can work it into our lifestyles. We bought a 1/4th cow from a local farmer this year, and our grass-fed buddy has been nutritious, inexpensive, and delicious. We made beer and it was thirst-quenching and tasty. But we haven't made anything like bacon since...well, we did make gravlax once, but it didn't involve smoking. Now that we have a nice grill and someone who likes to use it, I thought we might try something related.

So...bacon. This afternoon, I'll stop in at a place called Nittany Meats and pick up a 7ish-pound slab of pork belly. And I'll blog it from there -- come back for more info on what happens next.

FTR, there are quite a few fairly good pictorials online detailing the attempts of others to do the same. Here's one.