Checkered Rooster

Chicken update

2008-01-06T20:48:00.001-06:00

My chickens have really gotten big...they weigh four or five pounds now, and the roosters have started crowing, mostly between midnight and 5 a.m. I have put quite a few in the freezer the last few weeks, and I sold a bunch on craigslist.com. I got $75 for fourteen hens, and I threw in four roosters for free, just to save the trouble of butchering them. My flock is down to three Sussex pullets (one red, two light); four Sussex cockerels (three light, one red); and two random cockerels--a black Wyandotte, and that nasty Naked Neck. One of these days I guess I need to put those two in the freezer.
I am also getting a few eggs now. The rate of lay isn't even, but the three hens are laying two eggs every three days. I need to build some extra pens so that I can separate breeding pens, but I should be able to hatch some eggs this spring. I got an incubator for Christmas, so I should be able to have a nice hatch.

I'll post some pictures later this week, when I get a chance to take some.

It's been a while

2007-12-27T15:10:00.000-06:00

I've had a very, very busy fall, so the blog has kind of fallen by the wayside. On September 19, L delivered twins--fourteen weeks premature. Instead of growing / hunting / processing / cooking food, I spent most of the fall visiting the boys in the hospital. They came home just before Christmas, and are doing well. I'll have a little more time now to do fun things and post them to the blog (although twin babies take a lot of time, too).

Cantaloupe

2007-08-20T19:49:00.000-05:00

Dr. Bubba sent me a neat article about some folks growing cantaloupe in San Angelo.

I made some nice 'loupes this year, but none near 11 pounds. My biggest ones were the size (and shape) of a football, and mighty tasty.

I'm through with them now, though. I pulled the plants Saturday to make way for broccoli. I'm sure reading that will make everyone buy my niece sad.

My sad, sad lawn

2007-08-18T14:02:00.000-05:00

The garden has done pretty well this year, but I'm not so good at keeping up the lawn. It gets too tall, then I cut back too much and harm the grass. Also, it's mostly crabgrass, weeds, and grassburs.

I finally decided to start working on the grassburs, since I'll have little people with tender skin walking around the yard next year. I used a combination of a hoe, Roundup weed killer, and fire to clear out a pretty big patch (roughly 35 feet by 25 feet) that was about 80% burs, with some random weeds just to make it ugly.

I planted the area with a new variety of buffalo grass called "turffalo," which promises to be a dark green lawn that requires half the water and half the mowing of a regular lawn. I've got high hopes for it, since I rarely water and mow about half as often as I should.

The recommendation for planting this grass is to put in plugs (which are about the size of my thumb) 12" apart.

Here is a closeup of one plug:

I would have needed to buy three or four flats of grass to cover my patch at that density, at $50 per flat. Doing that would have provided me with a nice lawn in about a month.

I went the cheap route, buying one flat and planting the plugs between 30" and 36" apart.
Here is my "lawn" now:

The orange thing is a five-gallon bucket, for scale. There is grass in that bare patch, if you look hard enough.

Chicks

2007-08-18T11:15:00.000-05:00

Here are some chick pictures.

This is a Light Sussex at three and a half weeks old. You can see that the black is just starting to show in his wings, neck, and tail. These are the birds that I really wanted, but I've only got five.

This is just a crowd shot. You can really see the difference in the older and younger birds, even though the age difference is just two weeks.

This is the back of Monty Burns's neck; his head is turned away from the camera). This shot really emphasizes the boniness and scrawniness of his neck, and his generally evil appearance.

These two shots are mixed breeds at about a week old.

I've been asked via e-mail what I'm planning on doing with all these birds (37, at the moment). I'm planning on keeping some to start a little breeding flock. I've got five Light Sussex and three Red Sussex that will be evaluated for the breeding flock, based on body type and color. I'll also look pretty hard at the Buff Orpingtons to see if I'd rather keep them around. At any rate, six to nine of the birds will be preserved as breeding stock. The rest will join the turkeys in the freezer. I'll start working on that when the birds weigh three to four pounds. That's a little small for fryers, but I need to start reducing the numbers before the birds get too big.

Chicks

2007-08-08T14:23:00.000-05:00

I finally got some chicks two weeks ago, and some more today. I had ordered 10 Light Sussex and 15 Buff Orpingtons, to be delivered the first week of June. However, the hatchery has had trouble getting the Sussex to hatch, so the shipment was delayed. I got the first set two weeks ago: 11 Orpingtons, 3 Light Sussex, 4 Rhode Island Reds, and 4 Silver-Laced Wyandottes. 19 of the original 22 survived the trip; one more was lost to a copperhead(!) the next day. Today, I got 3 more Light Sussex, 3 Red Sussex, 3 Silver-Laced Wyandottes, 10 Red Leghorns, and one Red Naked-Neck. That one has been named "Monty Burns." (Click the links....do you see a resemblance?)

Anyway, I now have 38 chickens, in seven breeds / varieties. I've got an interesting-looking chicken house right now. I'll try to get some pictures up this weekend.

(By the way, all those breed pages are part of Feathersite, which is the best place to see all kinds of groovy-looking chickens on the web.)

Ham Hocks

2007-08-05T20:59:00.001-05:00

I've picked quite a few black-eyed peas lately (technically, I've had Mississippi purple-hulls, but they are both just different varieties of the same plant). Anyway, the best way to eat any of the "southern" pea varieties is boiled, with a smoked pork product. Accordingly, I picked up some ham hocks to go with my peas.

Ham hocks are the portion of the leg below the ham (or shoulder) that is to narrow and bony to be much good by itself. They are usually smoked and used to flavor soup. Here is a photo of three hocks sitting on the foam tray from the store:

The hocks are all more or less the size of my fist. They have been lightly salted and cured like ham, then smoked. There are a couple of tablespoons of meat on each one, along with a bit of fat for flavor. This is a very simple recipe: a couple of pounds of peas, a couple or three ham hocks, enough water to cover. Boil until the peas are tender--about 20 minutes for fresh peas, or an hour for dried peas.

This is what my peas looked like while I cooked them:

Mmm.....peas.

Here's Jasper (remember Jasper?) with his hocks marked out.

Odds and Ends

2007-07-30T18:58:00.000-05:00

Here are some recent pictures I've meant to post.

200 pounds of pumpkin. It just about killed me to drag that cart back up the hill from the garden to the house. There are 12 pumpkins in the cart; I've cooked and frozen five or six, and the rest are still sitting in the cart on the porch.

The pumpkin patch, on harvest day. The vines got pretty ratty before I picked the pumpkins. They have since been cleaned up an thrown into the compost pile.

The inside of a purple tomato. It's just a very deep red, instead of that purply-brown color the outside has.

Seeds

2007-07-29T21:34:00.000-05:00

If any of y'all want seeds from Homestead, Cherokee Purple, or Brandywine tomatoes, let me know. Those plants have been productive, and have high-quality fruit, so I'm saving the seeds.

Both the Cherokee Purples and Brandywines are beefsteak-type tomatoes, with fruit that ranges from large to extra-large; I've picked a couple of tomatoes off each of those plants that are bigger around than a hamburger bun. The brandywines are pinkish-red, with a nice acidity and good flavor. The cherokees have that great purple outside, with a very deep red inside. They are some of the best tasting tomatoes I've ever had. The homesteads are regular sized, with a very good tomato flavor. They are just a nice salad tomato, and they taste like a tomato should. All three of these varieties have lots of meat and very little pulp.

Anyway, if you want some seeds, just let me know.

Growing Things

2007-07-24T20:47:00.001-05:00

My garden is going stunningly well. In the last few days, I have picked:

a pound and a half of okra
two pounds of green beans
seven cantaloupes
a little watermelon about the size of a grapefruit
six and a half pounds of cucumbers
five pounds of tomatoes, in about six varieties
twelve pumpkins, weighing a combined 195 pounds. That's right, on Sunday I picked my weight in pumpkins. I'll have pics this weekend--Laura ran off with the camera, so I can't post the photos now.

I'm about to get some chicks in the mail, finally. The original ship date was June 5th, but they have had some production problems--namely, the birds I want aren't laying.

Finally, if you are interested in growing babies, you should visit Laura's Cozy Cabin. Ultrasound photos are involved. By the way, we know that one twin is a boy, to be named Walton Lane after my dad and his dad. The other baby was shy, but Laura suspects that it is a boy, too.

There's only two things money can't buy....that's true love, and home-grown tomatoes.

2007-07-13T20:59:00.000-05:00

Texas singer-songwriter Guy Clark said that in a song about home-grown tomatoes (though that's not Guy singing in the link). Here's what I've picked in the last couple of days:

My favorites are an heirloom variety called "Cherokee Purple." They are as big as baseballs or softballs, don't have much pulp, and taste like heaven. Plus, they look really cool, with green tops and purpley-red bottoms.

We made some pesto the other day (from home-grown basil, of course), and topped it with warm cherry tomatoes. This variety is called "Sweet Millions," and the plants are really producing well.

Sadly, the neighborhood squirrels also like tomatoes. This one kind of survived, but I've thrown several away that weren't so good. I'm taking action to get those little suckers, though. I'll let you know how that goes.

I'm also growing green beans, okra, and Mississippi purple-hulled peas. (I guess I've got a thing for purple vegetables. Maybe because my high school colors were purple and white, or maybe because "purple" veggies are actually Aggie maroon.) Anyway, each of these crops is producing enough to give us a nice meal each week.

Here's the first pumpkin. It weighs 17 pounds, and I've got about a dozen more this size ripening. Interesting garden fact: you should plant pumpkins from mid-May to mid-June, instead of, say, early March before you go snowboarding. You should do that because you'll feel dumb if you pick pumpkins for Independence Day, before the watermelons get ripe. Pumpkins just belong to fall, not to summer. It's still a nice pumpkin, though.

Here's another panorama, with some handsome devil in an Aggie shirt, for scale. The purple tomatoes came from the big, bushy, dark-green plant at the back on the left. That plant likes my soil.

I'll be right back

2007-07-10T22:25:00.000-05:00

I've got a couple of garden things to post, but it will be the weekend before I put them up. I haven't been able to mow for about two weeks, so my yard is knee-deep. Furthermore, I've got LOTS of grassburs that are going to seed, and I want to get them chopped out of the yard before I mow. It's gonna be a couple of days before I have much time to post anything.

In the meantime, if anyone has good pumpkin recipes, post them in the comments or e-mail them to me. I picked a seventeen pound pumpkin the other day, and I've got about a dozen more that size that are ripening.

Mystery Meat

2007-07-08T21:21:00.000-05:00

The other day I had a craving for some real Mexican food, so we went to a little taqueria in town for burritos. I ordered my favorite, lengua. "Lengua" is Spanish for "tongue." I love tongue burritos--the tongue is rich and savory, and so tender it just melts in your mouth. Tongue burritos are the best.

When we got there, I saw a sign that read "Posole y Menudo--Sabado y Domingo." That translates to "Posole and Menudo--Saturday and Sunday." Since it was a gray and rainy (though not chilly) day, I ordered a bowl of posole. The waitress came back in a couple of minutes, and told me that they were out of posole, but that they still had menudo. I told her that menudo would be fine.

In case you don't know, this menudo isn't the boy band from Puerto Rico--it's stew made from tripe. It's alleged to be the best hangover cure in the world, although I can't testify to that use. It is good, though, so I asked for a bowl of that instead.

When it came out, there was (in addition to the delicious tripe), a bony chunk of mystery meat floating in the stew. It looked like this:

As I poked around in the stew, I noticed that the mystery meat had skin on it. Then I noticed the part where the hoof had been. Then I realized that there was a pig foot floating in my stew. Yum. Here it is, in all its rich, footy goodness:

Garden Photos

2007-06-29T08:16:00.000-05:00

Here are the pictures I promised earlier:

This is me with some tomato plants.

And me, planting those tomatoes. Now, you can't see the ground in this corner of the garden.

Here's Laura helping out.

The strawberry patch, in May. It's about three feet by six feet. Remember how this looks--you'll see this spot again. At the top of the photo is a watermelon plant that had just sprouted.

Some berries. These are soooooo good.

Mulching. I've moved two pickup loads down the hill, and have a third to go.

My peach tree broke because of all the peaches.

Green beans and cucumbers. I haven't gotten any cukes yet. The beans are producing enough for a nice meal for us each week.

Melons--canteloupe in the front, watermelon in the rear, tomatoes on the right. This is the same plant as that tiny thing in the strawberry picture.

Pumpkins. This picture doesn't really do them justice--there are three hills with two are three plants each. The vines are knee deep, and cover about 40% of the garden. In most of that area, the ground is invisible. They are really setting a lot of fruit, and I've got one pumpkin that is about twice as big as a basketball. I don't know what I'll do with all of them. In this photo, you can see some individual vines stretching out from the mass of pumpkin.

This is the same patch from the other side of the garden. The little stuff on the right is the strawberry patch--the pumpkins are trying to take over.

The view from the second story of our house. The bright green leaves on the left are the peach tree; the pumpkin is the big green mass just behind the fence; the beans and cukes are the tall thing on the right; the back row of the garden is tomato plants. I've got about twenty scattered through the garden, pluse about five more volunteer plants in the turkey pen.

If I can stay on top of the mowing, I'll keep you updated with some harvest pictures. I probably can't keep up with the mowing, though--we got NINE INCHES of rain this week.

I'm back

2007-06-28T21:52:00.000-05:00

Sorry I haven't posted anything in a while--it's been a crazy couple of months. I've been to two weddings (best wishes to all involved), three musicals (Chicago--great show; Wicked--still L's favorite; Spamalot--meh). My dad and I did some light renovation in a bathroom at L's request--new paint, countertop, fixtures, and accessories. I've signed on and twice visited a deer lease in west Texas. I rented a gigantic wood chipper (a Steve Buscemi special--12" intake with a big deisel engine--the kind you see the pros dragging around behind the bobtail trucks). The limiting factors on what it could grind were 1)how fast I could poke stuff into the spout, and 2)how big a log I could lift and jam in there. I ground a pile about 30 feet across and five feet high into three pickup loads of mulch for the garden. I've also moved 2/3 of the mulch from the pile to the garden, and spread about 1/3 onto the garden. I've cleaned out the turkey house, turned the soil in their pen and planted some forage, plugged some leaks in the house, and built good tight doors for the front. I did this because I was expecting some chicks June 5th. Or maybe the alternate date, June 19. Or possibly this week. If they don't come this week, I'll have to call the hatchery to see what the deal is.

Also, after three years of extreme drought, we've had a very wet May and June. We've gotten rain at least once a week, and the best(?) week featured about a foot of rain. That means I've spent lots of time mowing--I've probably averaged four or five hours a week, although it's been unevenly distributed--eight to ten hours one week, followed by none the next. We've gotten about seven inches this week, including five inches on Tuesday.

The big news is actually L's. She's pregnant. With twins. That has been a whole 'nother experience, which I won't recount here. She's thinking about starting her own blog; I'll give you a link when / if she does.

Finally, with all the rain, my garden has been growing. My strawberries have done incredibly well. They put on a few little berries in April (enough for a snack every three or four days). They went nuts in May--we picked a quart every two or three days in mid-May. They've marched gamely on through June, putting out about a pint every three days. We've gotten spoiled with fresh strawberries just coming out our ears for two months. Now, I just need to find some clotted cream....

Our peach tree put on gobs of fruit--so much, in fact, that it broke a huge branch out of the tree a couple of weeks ago. Also, I discovered that the peach life cycle--too hard, perfect, rotten--has about a fifteen minute picking window. The peaches weren't ready last Tuesday; on Saturday, half of them had fallen, and another quarter were rotting on the tree. From the branch-busting load of May, I actually harvested about four pounds of peaches. At least we don't have to chop and freeze a ton of peaches.

As for the rest of the garden, I picked some nice collards and broccoli. I dug fifteen pounds of potatoes from a patch about as big as a desk. I planted a few ("few" = 20 plants, in 11 varieties) tomatoes. I'm also starting to get some okra, green beans, and purple-hull peas. I've got about a dozen pictures to post later.

I've been lonely

2007-04-26T22:05:00.000-05:00

I thought everyone had stopped coming by my blog this week. When I changed the template, I also accidentally killed the code that lets me track visitors. As a result, it looked like I hadn't had any visitors at all for about ten day. That was more than a little discouraging--I thought that even my mom had stopped coming by (Hi, Mom!).

I want to thank Linda for leaving a comment--that let me know that someone had read the blog but not been counted, so I noticed the problem. Now that I know that at least three people are reading the blog (Hi, Dad!) I'll work a little harder at adding content. I've got a couple of things stewing to write about.

Let's all point and laugh

2007-04-23T19:44:00.000-05:00

I'm from Texas. In Texas, we make fun of all places that aren't Texas, but there's one that holds a special place in our hearts: Oklahoma.

Rather than telling you how bad Oklahoma is, I'll just give you a recent example.

The new state vegetable of Oklahoma is............

Watermelon.

Organic Gardening How-To

2007-04-19T21:10:00.000-05:00

A nice article from an Irish paper describes some organic gardening basics. It's good advice, although I'd add getting a soil test to the list. My garden is never very good (especially broccoli and its relatives), so I've decided to send some dirt to the state lab for a test. If anything interesting comes of the test, I'll keep you informed.

Going too far

2007-04-18T20:42:00.000-05:00

This whole hog bit is like a dumb joke at a party--everybody plays along, everybody adds just a little bit to it. Then That Guy goes and does it--he goes too far. That's where I am right now.
Look closely at the picture of Jasper I posted on Monday. Notice what I haven't eaten: the back half of the hog, and the insides. I've eaten most of the parts of the pig that are served fresh and are easy to find. The project is kind of stalled right now, because I'm not quite ready to take the next steps, although I'm thinking about it.

I'm thinking about finding a Meat Guy--a guy who can hook me up with feet and hearts and livers and heads and the like. I've got a few leads, but I need to start making some calls.

I'm thinking about making ham and bacon, too. Not buying packaged stuff at the store and heating it, but curing and cold-smoking meats. I've got some fresh ham in the freezer, and I'm already thinking about what to do next. I've discovered that Morton Salt sells pre-mixed meat cures that include nitrates and nitrites. I'm starting to price cold-smokers, and contemplating plans for building one. (Note: the last time I tried to build a meat-smoking device, it turned out poorly. So poorly, in fact, that L wouldn't let me watch Alton Brown for about a year afterwards.)

I'm about to go too far.

Ribs and Mystery Meat

2007-04-16T20:42:00.000-05:00

Moving right down the hog, I cooked up a couple of racks of ribs this weekend. I just dry-rubbed them (with a commercial product--I don't have a secret rib rub recipe), then put them in the smoker for about five hours. They turned out wonderfully--BBQ is, at its core, a simple process. Combine a tough cut of meat, low heat, and smoke. Wait a long time. Eat.

Here's how the ribs went into the smoker:

Here's your host playing with fire:

And here's Jasper, with ribs marked off:

I didn't get a photo of the final product, because the camera batteries died and I was hungry. You've all seen ribs, though--they were black from the smoke, and shiny from the grease and sauce--a vision of smoky goodness.

Also, I cooked up some salt pork. I sometimes use it for cooking greens instead of jowls. It's quite salty, and you can see that it's clearly pork. Beyond that, I'm at a loss as to just where this little square of meat comes from. It cooked up well, and made the collards taste good, and that's all that matters. I didn't mark it on Jasper because it's kind of a mystery.

The Organic Police

2007-04-16T20:17:00.000-05:00

There have been some incidents of organic food "counterfeiting," where non-organic produce has been intentionally mislabeled so that it can be sold for the higher prices that organic products command.

But no more! Those clever Brits have developed a test for organic produce. They can distinguish between the atmospheric nitrogen that is used to make industrial fertilizers and the isotopes that are more prevalent in manure and other organic fertilizers.

Local is the New Organic

2007-04-13T16:54:00.000-05:00

First, a discussion of food production in China. The key facts from the article:

We import lots of food from China.
They treat pretty much everything they grow like they treat the wheat for pet food.

Country of origin labeling ("COOL") isn't currently required on most foods, so you can't know whether it came from your area, or across the country, or China.

That leads to people pushing for tighter labeling laws. There is a demand for laws that disclose not only where food came from, but also how it was produced. Of course, you can get all of that at the local farmer's market, just by asking the farmer.

Pork Chops

2007-04-09T20:10:00.000-05:00

We had pork chops tonight for dinner. I forgot to take pictures, so you will have to take my word for it. I got a recipe from "New Best Recipe," a compendium of recipes from Cook's Illustrated. (Have I mentioned that Cook's Illustrated is the best food magazine ever, and that "New Best Recipe" may well be the best cookbook ever?)

Anyway, I cooked rib chops tonight. They are cut from the big roll of muscle on either side of the spine just above the rib cage. For some reason, they are often cut super-thin, and are easy to over-cook and dry out. To keep the chops from drying out too much, CI recommends low heat--they actually started the chops in a cold pan. To develop some nice brown color and rich flavors, they called for sprinkling a little sugar on one side of each chop--this would become the "presentation" side. The sprinkled side did develop some nice browning, and looked very tasty. The other side stayed pasty white. This was a quick, easy recipe--just sprinkle some sugar, cook for six to nine minutes, flip, and cook for a couple more minutes. The chops cooked through, the sugared side looked pretty, and they tasted fine. The recipe title was "quick week-night pork chops," and they lived up to their billing.

Here's Jasper with this cut marked:
I bought a ham this weekend--a fresh ham. That means that I'll be trying to cure ten pounds of meat pretty soon. Stay tuned for rich salty goodness! Maybe I'll make wonderful ham! Maybe I'll make myself sick! We'll just have to wait and see.....

Boston Butt

2007-04-03T19:34:00.000-05:00

I have slowed down a little on the whole-pig eating lately, mainly because I've been too busy with other stuff to do anything interesting in the kitchen. I finally got back to the program on Sunday with a Boston Butt. I've blogged about cooking a pork butt before, when I made posole. That was before I started my mission, so I decided to cook another one.

I'm not sure why this cut is called "Boston butt," because it doesn't come from that end of the hog. It's the name for the top section of the hog's shoulder, just above the picnic shoulder. (Folks who make BBQ in mass quantities often use the whole pork shoulder, which is a 12 to 15 pound hunk of meat consisting of both the picnic and butt sections.) Since the shoulder is a support muscle, it gets worked hard. Hard work means lots of connective tissue, which means tough meat. These tough cuts benefit greatly from long cooking times at low temperatures that eventually break down the connective tissue and tenderize the meat. The classic methods are smoking (like I did with the picnic shoulder), stewing (as with the posole), and braising. I decided to braise this roast, since I haven't blogged about anything like that.

My recipe came from Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, although I don't think anyone would ever guess this recipe was Italian when they saw the ingredients or the result. (I was reminded of this recipe a few months ago when Biggles at Meathenge used a similar recipe for pork chops). It is called "pork roast cooked in the classic Bolognese style."

This is one of those simple recipes that doesn't rely on fancy techniques or a variety of ingredients, yet produces almost magical results. There are four ingredients, and only a handful steps. All it takes is four hours of sporadic attention. The ingredients are:

Our star--a boston butt.

Whole milk--two cups or more.

And a little fat to keep things from sticking. In keeping with the theme (sampling a every part of a pig), I used lard, with a little butter for flavoring. I didn't get a good picture of the lard, since it's just some white stuff in a bucket, but it is real lard.

Here are the steps.

1. In a big dutch oven or stew pot, heat up three tablespoons of fat over medium-high heat. Drop in the roast and brown all sides. This step will help you develop a rich, full, meaty flavor in the final dish. Here's my browned butt:

2. Pour in two cups of milk, and reduce heat to a very low simmer. Partially cover, and go do something else for half an hour. This is what the milk looked like after I put it in the pot:

(This is a really bad picture. In real life, it doesn't look this nasty--it looks good, and smells better.)

3. Turn the roast every half hour or so, keep the dish partially covered, and keep the heat very, very low.

4. Add milk as needed, to keep a low level of liquid in the pot. Keep cooking 'till the meat hits the magical 200 degree mark.

5. Wrap the meat tightly in foil and put it in the oven for a half hour or so to steam and tenderize a little more.

6. Pour the sauce into a wide-mouthed bowl to sit. Skim off the fat once it rises to the top.

Here's the finished product. The low, gentle heat of braising makes the pork melt-in-your mouth tender, and it turns the milk into a magical sauce--golden brown clusters with a roasty, nutty flavor and a chewy texture. You'd never know it was made from milk if you weren't told. I don't make this recipe often enough, because L doesn't like it. She has a problem with the transformation of the milk into sauce. I don't understand that.

Finally, here's Jasper, with the updated parts (boston butt and lard) noted:

Fried Turkey

2007-04-02T19:49:00.000-05:00

Fried turkey is an almost mythical food--everybody has heard of people who deep-fry whole turkeys, and we've all seen the disaster videos. (You know the formula: too much oil + big, wet turkey + big flaming propane jet equals youtube hilarity!) However, most people have never actually eaten fried turkey or seen a turkey-frying, much less fried a turkey.

This weekend, I took the plunge. More precisely, I made a turkey take the plunge into about a gallon of 400 degree cooking oil. I didn't use a scary gas cooker, though. I received an electric fryer from the in-laws for Christmas. It's basically a great big fry daddy. This is what the machine itself looks like:

I decided to fire up that bad boy because we had company this weekend. My sister's family spent Saturday night with us, so I had to feed four adults and three kids (ages five, three, and one).

I dry-rubbed the bird with Adams Fajita Seasoning. It's mostly salt and pepper, with some kind of lemony acidic stuff mixed in. It is a good quick dry-rub for lots of meats, especially if you don't want any particular type of flavor (i.e., it doesn't make the meat taste like jerk meat, or BBQ, or garlic, or anything else. It just complements the meat). Anyway, I rubbed the bird and let her sit for about 24 hours for the salt to be absorbed. Here she is, ready for cooking:

(The string is a loop tied from leg to leg. There's another loop from wing to wing. I added them so I'd have something to grab if I needed to manipulate the bird in the pot. They were useful, and I'd highly recommend them to anyone who fries a turkey.)

I dumped the oil in, plugged in the fryer, set the thermostat, and waited. And waited. And waited. It took about an hour for the oil to heat up to 400 degrees. Once it hit the mark, I dropped in the bird and the show was on! This was a seven-pound bird, and she only took about half an hour to cook. That was actually a little too long--the bird got up to about 175 degrees, and I prefer poultry cooked to about 160. Here is the finished product:

The meat was tasty, although a little dry (that's what cooking to 175 will do for you). The skin was heavenly--crispy and salty and wonderful. I don't think I've ever had people actually ask to have pieces of skin with their meat before.

I also fried up a couple of other things Saturday while I had the oil hot. One was okra. It turned out well, although I didn't get a photo. The okra was generally well-received. The three-year-old didn't think much of it, although she loves vegetables (after supper, she kept coming back to the kitchen to grab broccoli out of the serving bowl). The one-year-old loved it, and mostly ate okra for supper.

I also cooked some hearts and turkey fries (e-mail me if you don't know what those are, and really want to). Here are the parts right out of the freezer:

I tried breading the parts before frying. I did a good job with the turkey fries, but not so much with the hearts. Here's step two:

Finally, the finished product:

I have had turkey fries before, and these were just as I remember them. Salty and crusty, and just a little bit savory. My only complaint is that the breading wasn't great, but I still ate all of them. The hearts tasted like crusty liver, but were tougher. I ate one, and put the rest with the liver in the fridge. I'm slowly using up the contents of that bowl as treats for dog training.

Overall, I would recommend turkey frying. Even including the time needed to heat the oil, the turkey cooked as fast or faster than oven-roasted bird. For Thanksgiving, this would be a great way to go, because you can cook the turkey elsewhere without tying up the oven. It also didn't heat up the house as much as the oven does. My only concern is clean-up, which I haven't started. I'm contemplating trying to salvage the oil for re-use, but I have to strain out the flotsam and jetsam (and cornmeal that fell off the okra) before I can put it away. I'll let you know how that process goes.

Where Food Comes From

2007-03-27T19:55:00.000-05:00

After I processed turkeys a couple of weeks ago, I roasted up a breast and sliced it to pack in my lunch at work. When people at work have found out that I'm eating a turkey I raised and butchered, the reaction has been the same:

"How mean!"

This bothers me a great deal. Have I done anything worse than what happened to the donor for your turkey (or ham, or roast beef) sandwich? Not really. I just happened to do it myself, at my house, rather than outsourcing it to Waco, or Guymon, or Dumas (to name the closest big turkey, hog, and beef slaughter plants I can think of).

Today, I came across this post at Offal Good about why people don't like offal. One reason is that they don't like to be reminded that their food came from a living animal. (Another, as I found out last week with the liver, is that it tastes bad. But I digress.)

Combine that with the opposition to foie gras, because it's mean. Putting aside the actual evidence of how cruel the treatment of these birds is (or isn't), I think that people don't like to be reminded that, every day of their lives, people are handling these birds with the express intent of making them taste better after death. I think that it's not just the feeding, it's the planning for death that is objectionable.

I find it sad, and frustrating, that "meat" in our culture has been divorced from living animals, and that products become objectionable not based on flavor or safety or actual cruelty, but rather on how much they remind us of our participation in this cycle.

Guess what I just ate?

2007-03-22T17:53:00.000-05:00

Fact 1: I processed turkeys on Saturday.
Fact 2: I was asking for liver recipes earlier this week.
Fact 3: I have shown a willingness to eat all kinds of offal.

That's right, I cooked liver yesterday. I fried up four turkey livers, tried some, then whipped up the livers in the food processor to make some pate.

The result: liver still tastes like liver. I couldn't find any reputable recipes, so I just sauteed it in some turkey fat. (Note: it was not the turkey fat that tasted bad, it was the liver). The product was dry and tasted like, well, liver. The pate wasn't smooth, since I used the food processor. It also tasted like liver.

In case you couldn't tell from the less-than-positive review, I don't liver. I tried a little of the fried liver and a little of the pate, and both were bad.

Recipe question

2007-03-20T22:25:00.000-05:00

Anybody out there got some good liver recipes?

I've got four turkey livers in the fridge, and I don't have any liver recipes.

Name that meat!

2007-03-20T20:39:00.000-05:00

We had tacos tonight, and this is the meat we put on them. It looks like hamburger, but it's not. It's not pork sausage, either--it's turkey!

I processed four of my turkeys on Saturday. One of the toms was much too big for just two people--seventeen pounds--so I parted him out. I ground up the legs and thighs; that's what we had tonight.

My turkeys are outside all the time, and they sleep on a roost that's about knee-high. They are literally always on their feet, and his legs showed it. They were the same dark red color as beef, and (as you can see) the muscle cooked up very beef-like. It had a strong flavor, as well. It wasn't necessarily beefy, or gamy, or anything specific, but it was strong enough to stand up to the tomatoes, salsa, sour cream, cheese, and avacadoes that went into the tacos.

Hog Jowls

2007-03-19T21:06:00.000-05:00

Jowls are the meat and fat from the cheek area. Jasper will illustrate, here:

They are very fatty, and not very meaty. They are usually salt-cured, and sometimes smoked. Jowls make a good seasoning in other dishes. I like them with strong greens like collards, mustard, or turnip. Here's my recipe for hog jowls and greens. Make sure you have plenty of time, because it takes lots of time to get the jowls ready.

1 cured hog jowl, about 12 oz.
2 bunches of leafy greens like collards
1 medium onion
dash of hot sauce (optional)

Here's how the jowls look to start with:

Yummy?

Soak the jowl in about four quarts of water for three or four hours. (The jowls have to be soaked to cut back the salt content--otherwise, they leave the dish waaaaay too salty).

Roast the jowls at about 350 for a couple of hours in a deep pan. The cooked jowls look like this:

And the fat that cooks out in the oven looks like this:

That's why I roast the jowls--it renders out all that fat. Of course, I cook other stuff with the fat, but at least I don't load it all into the greens.

Dice the onion and the jowls. Saute them together in a big pot.

While the onion and jowls cook, stem the greens and chop them coarsely. Rinse the greens in a colander, but don't let them drain too much. The retained water will be enough to steam the greens and make a little bit of juice in the pot.

When the onions are soft, put the greens in the pot and cover tightly. Add the hot sauce if you like a little heat in the greens.

Cook for 15 minutes, stirring every five minutes or so to evenly coat the greens with the fat and hot sauce.

Serve with cornbread and something southern, like fried catfish.

Saturday is Judgement Day

2007-03-15T19:53:00.000-05:00

I'm going to try to wrap up the turkey project on Saturday. That means lots of work for me, and an even worse day for the birds.

Since I'm about to find myself with upwards of 150 pounds of turkey to eat (and feed to L), I'd like to hear your suggestions on what to do with the birds. Smoking is one of my favorite ways to cook turkey, and I got a great big fryer for Christmas, so I'll be doing that, too. We'll probably have some turkey burgers, and maybe sausage.

What else can I do?

I'm back

2007-03-14T21:25:00.000-05:00

I haven't been posting this week because we went to Santa Fe, NM for a few days on L's spring break. I had some traditional New Mexico-style Mexican foods (mediocre and good, respectively), sushi (remarkably good for the high desert), and pulled pork (never bad--thanks for the tip, Dr. Bubba).

Also, I went snowboarding for the first time. I did OK--no broken bones, and not too much soreness--but I do have nice big bruise on one knee.

Anyway, I'll resume my semi-regular posting in a day or two.

Wow

2007-03-09T20:53:00.000-06:00

Deep-fried rabbit ears. This dish is exactly what it sounds like.

I don't know what to say.

Some random food links

2007-03-08T19:02:00.000-06:00

I just stumbled across some good stuff tonight while surfing the web. First, The Great Big Veggie Challenge It's about a mom's quest to find ways to prepare vegetables ("veg," since they're Brits) that appeal to her seven-year-old son.

Tips for cooking fish. I was complaining about this the other day. I've both catfish and trout in the freezer, but I haven't gotten around to doing anything with them. I should try one of these.

Bacon Popcorn It's popcorn, with bacon in it. Much like chicken-fried bacon, this one needs no comment, just a Homer Simpson imitation: mmmmmmmm......bacon-popcorn.

By the way, Dr. Bubba....brisket does need sauce, since it's so dry. It's pork that doesn't require sauce, because it's fatty and juicy. Fill in the blank: "fat as a _____" (hint" it's not "cow").

Healthy Sodas

2007-03-07T20:39:00.000-06:00

Coke and Pepsi are going to introduce vitamin-fortified "healthy sodas" this summer.

I guess a coke with vitamins is better than a regular coke, but you could still probably do better. This is one of those items that falls into the "don't eat food that makes health claims" category: while fortified industrial products are better for you than regular industrial products, you'd probably do better to drink a glass of milk or fresh juice. Or, if you want something fizzy, a nice traditional beer. Mmmm...beer.

As Shakespeare said, "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Foods are the same way....there are hundreds or even thousands of different compounds in real foods. Some of them may well be good (or bad) for you, but it's hard to isolate those effects. Some of them are also probably only good for you in concert with other compounds in the food, so isolating just one or two doesn't help all that much.

The key to good eating is to be conservative (or maybe "traditionalist," if the other term offends your sensibilities). Stick with what has worked for thousands of years, and you won't go far wrong. Food isn't new, but widespread obesity, heart disease, and diabetes are. So are refined sugar, processed flour, and the idea that we can improve on food with the Awesome Power of Science.

Garden Update

2007-03-06T20:06:00.000-06:00

I realized today that I haven't talked about anything but meat for a couple of weeks, so I decided to get crazy and talk about the veggies in my garden. I spent a couple of hours a week ago Sunday putting stuff out. I tried hard to space everything appropriately, so maybe I'll get better growth this year.

I set out nine each of broccoli and collard greens. One broccoli plant has been eaten (by a rabbit?), but the rest are still there, and not dying. I also planted seeds for lettuce, radishes, kohlrabi, carrots, and potato slips. I think the lettuce is sprouting now (something is growing about where I put the seeds), and I should see radishes soon, too. Lettuce and radishes have been my best crops the last couple of years, mostly because they produce in a month or so, and they are hard to screw up. Actually, the only way to mess them up is for them to get too hot, and I really can't control the weather, so I expect good results from these two.

I'm not holding my breath for the carrots or potatoes, because they take forever to sprout. It takes three weeks to get carrot seedlings up, and it takes about a month for potato plants to start poking up. We'll just have to see how these things come along.

I enjoy seeing something happen in the garden, even if things happen slowly. Once again, I'm hopeful that I'll get some nice food from the garden. Right now, things are on schedule--the seeds have been planted, and some of them are sprouting. It's a nice time of year to have a garden.

Monday Links

2007-03-05T20:01:00.000-06:00

Offal Good--a blog dedicated to eating offal (you know, all the parts that are left after you take all the tasty meat.)

An essay from Time Magazine debates the merits of organic versus local food. He appears to have never heard of the concept of real food, because he frequently discusses products that, while organic, are highly processed and (I suspect) not all that good for your body or the planet.

A new term--culinary fundamentalism. It describes people (like me) who are focused on making great food themselves--often even difficult stuff that comes from a factory, like bacon and corned beef.

I'm not sure when I'll be able to put up some new pork recipes--I have actually cooked ham hocks and jowls, but the pictures (like the pork shoulder) didn't turn out. I've got some other stuff going next weekend, so I can't do it then. I'm sure I'll get the hocks and jowls up eventually, though. Hocks are a key ingredient to making good beans, and I like beans now and then. And I've found that hog jowls make eating leafy greens much, much easier. I'll be eating plenty of jowl in the future, along with the collards I'm growing in the garden now.

Yeah, I'm gonna do this

2007-02-28T19:39:00.000-06:00

How to make your own bacon.

How could you not want to do this?

Pulled Pork

2007-02-27T20:29:00.000-06:00

I continued the whole hog project last weekend with my favorite cut of pork, picnic shoulder. It's my favorite because it is used to make pulled pork, which is one of my all-time favorite foods.* I apologize for the lack of photos--about half of the pictures I took were terrible, and the other half didn't show up at all.

Picnic shoulder is the lower part of the pig's shoulder, along with the upper part of the leg. (The upper part of the shoulder is the Boston butt.) The muscles in the picnic shoulder are constantly in action, keeping the pig upright and helping it walk around. Because of this, it's a very tough cut of meat, and needs to be tenderized. The best way to do this is with long cooking times at relatively low temperatures, somewhere between 200 and 250. Barbecueing fits this cut perfectly. Shoulder meat is also good stewed (like for posole) and braised. Picnic shoulders usually have skin on the outside; I find that handy when smoking, because the skin acts as a shield against excessive heat, and gives you a little more margin of error when smoking.

Here's my recipe for smoking a pork shoulder. The measurements aren't that precise, and my recipe varies nearly every time I fire up the smoker. The important part is the technique rather than the ingredients.

1 pork shoulder, 7-8 pounds
1 cup kosher or pickling salt--these dissolve rapidly in water. (It just struck me that using kosher salt for pulled pork is somewhat ironic.)
1 cup brown sugar or molasses.
Lots of water.

Put the whole shoulder in a big bowl or pan. Put in the salt and sugar. Put in enough water to cover the pork; stir to dissolve the salt and sugar.

Let the meat sit in the brine overnight (or longer) in the fridge.

Pull the meat out, dump the brine, and let the meat drain while you get the cooker ready. Letting the meat warm up to room temperature cuts down the cooking time.

Pull out your smoker and start a fire. I used to use a water smoker, but I got a barrel smoker for Christmas (thanks Mom and Dad), and I like it better. You can use charcoal or any hardwood for fuel. I use oak, because it has a good "neutral" smoke flavor (not strong, not sweet, not too mile), and because I have lots of dead oak trees on my place (which means it's free).

Wait for the fire to burn down to white coals, put the meat in the smoker, close it up, and go away for a while. I check back every 30-60 minutes to make sure that the cooker is running around 200 degrees, and that there is enough fuel in the firebox.

After four hours or so, I start checking the meat temperature. You have to get the internal temperature of the meat above 200 (and hold it there for a little while) to liquefy the collagen. Collagen is what links the muscle fibers together and makes the meat tough; until you've dealt with it, the meat will never be tender. If you don't have a meat thermometer, get one. It's the very best way to figure out when meat is done.

Once the temperature reaches 200, the meat is done. (Another clue that it's done is that you stab it with a thermometer or fork, and can pull the point through the meat sideways. At this point, the meat should be close to falling apart. Pull it off the smoker, wrap it tightly in foil, and let it sit for at least an hour. The wrapped meat will steam itself, further dissolving the collagen.

Once the meat is well and truly falling apart, it's time to pull the pork. Stick a fork in the meat and pull off a hunk. Use another fork to pull shreds of meat away from the hunk. The final product should look like a mass of threads going every which way.

This meat is good on its own, and it's better with your favorite sauce. My very favorite dressing for pulled pork is lime juice--it gives it a nice tangy bite, but doesn't overshadow the natural flavor of the pig.

The picnic shoulder brings my whole hog project to two parts. Here's Jasper to show what parts I have tried:

*This makes me a bad Texan. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I prefer pulled pork with a vinegar sauce to brisket with a tomato-based sauce. I should probably suffer a stiff penalty for this offense, like spending 30 days in Oklahoma, but pulled pork is worth it.

Ahem....

2007-02-27T20:14:00.000-06:00

I have a small announcement. I've updated the links on the right side of the page. There are links to www.checkeredrooster.com, which is my (currently empty) web store, and my e-mail address. Feel free to poke around the store, or to e-mail me.

I'll let you know when it's time for the three of you to go back to the store and buy something.

Food News

2007-02-27T19:40:00.000-06:00

Since it's garden time, this is a vegetable-themed news day.

From the New York Times, an amusing tale of a chef trying to grow some special carrots. The growing doesn't go as expected, but he's a pro, and all's well that ends well. I can empathize--my garden never goes as planned, either.

A little article on container gardening. It's a sound concept, but it never works for me. I think Texas is too hot in the summer, and the plants cook in their pots.

Vegetables keep your brain from getting old. No really, they do. Especially leafy greens.

Food safety tips for vegetable eaters. Because I just can't resist bringing to your attention that food can make you sick.

Have I become a snob?

2007-02-23T21:29:00.000-06:00

Even just a couple of weeks ago, I would never have thought about eating pig's feet. I've seen where pigs walk, and I always thought that I'd never put those feet in my mouth.

However, in the last couple of weeks, I've set the goal of eating a whole pig part by part, and bought a cookbook with recipes for same. I decided to try cooking trotters in the upcoming week, so I put them on the grocery list tonight. They had feet at the store, and I looked them over, but I didn't buy any.

They were the wrong cut, you see.

In just a couple of weeks, I've gone from not wanting to eat trotters at all, to turning up my nose at trotters that just don't meet my high(?) standards. Weird.

More garden stuff

2007-02-22T20:59:00.000-06:00

The hardest part about gardening, for me, is thinning. I just can't bring myself to get rid of those cute little sprouts. Of course, not getting rid of the sprouts means that, in about a month, I'll have a bunch of scrawny, ugly plants jammed together. I think that's why I don't get better results.

Tonight I went out and bought some broccoli and collard greens. Each of those vegetables will get a three foot X six foot plot in the garden--eighteen square feet.

I bought nine of each plant. Just nine--this way, each plant will (I hope) have room to spread out and grow nice and big, and provide me with some tasty treats (or at least some strongly-flavored green stuff. I know that neither broccoli or collards are universally loved.)

My new cookbook

2007-02-20T19:39:00.000-06:00

Nose to Tail Eating finally arrived today. The recipes include pea and pig's ear soup; jellied tripe; a whole chapter on lamb's brains; crispy pig's tails (because they would be bad mushy?); and ham in hay (in which the hay isn't a vegetable acting as a metaphor, it's hay. Dried grass or alfalfa or something--the recipe doesn't specify).

There's a recipe for haggis. Here's what Groundskeeper Willie, the Scottish school janitor on The Simpsons said about haggis:

Haggis! Get your fresh, hot haggis! Rabbit blood and brains, boiled in a wee sheep's stomach! Tastes as good as it sounds!

It's probably harder to get the ingredients for haggis than it is to make it--you need pretty much everything that comes inside a sheep--but I really, really want to try this recipe.

On the other hand, the book offers this recipe for how to eat radishes at their peak:

Pile your intact radishes onto a plate and have beside them a bowl of coarse sea salt and the good butter. To eat, add a knob of butter to your radish with a knife and a sprinkle of salt, then eat....

You can't go too far wrong with buttered veggies, whatever you may think of crispy pig's tails and the like.

Garden time

2007-02-20T19:22:00.000-06:00

We've had nice weather here the last few days--today it was almost 80--and I've been getting the garden ready. I've cleared out the dead stuff from last year (actually, I just dropped the mower as low as it will go and ground that stuff into mulch), and I've put down fresh compost over my planting beds. I just need to put some fresh bark mulch in my walkways, and my garden will be ready. This is my favorite time of the garden year; my garden is neat and tidy, with fresh, dark compost in the beds set against the light mulch of the walkways. The dead plants are gone, and the weeds haven't come up. I'm still planning what to plant this year and dreaming of what it will look like. My garden is peaceful and clean, and I'm hopeful that I'll grow some good stuff.

Unfortunately, I'm much better at cleaning and tidying than I am at getting plants to grow. In two years, I've gotten half a dozen big tomatoes, two bowls of black-eyed peas, and no corn--not one ear. I did make a pumpkin vine that was about thirty yards long last year, but all it produced was a pair of volleyball-sized pumpkins, one of which grew with a big cone-shaped dent in the side. I always hope for a wonderful garden full of fresh veggies, so that I can come home from work and just pick some stuff for dinner. Sadly, I wind up going to the store for produce most of the summer.

Oh well--I'm hopeful that this year will be different, and that's why this is my favorite time of the garden year.

Blegging

2007-02-19T21:22:00.000-06:00

(That's blog-begging, if you haven't heard the term.)

Anyway, my last post reminded me that I want to eat more fish. The trouble is, I'm terrible at cooking fish. A couple of weeks ago, I managed to make catfish tough. How the hell do you make catfish tough?

Help me out--post your favorite fish recipes in the comments. Maybe there will be a prize for the best one.

Monday Food News

2007-02-19T20:51:00.000-06:00

The biggest food news this week is, of course, the peanut butter contaminated with salmonella. There are now almost 300 cases in 39 states that have been tied (via DNA analysis) to the bad peanut butter. More curious is the as-yet unknown source of the problem. The peanuts are cooked during processing, which kills all bacteria. The CDC can't figure out how the salmonella snuck in after that. It's not like they have legs to walk in.

Right now, I don't have much more to say about this, because I'm more interested in the process and what went wrong than the story.

A new study states that moms who eat more fish (12 ounces a week) while pregnant have smarter babies. That's not terribly surprising, because fish are high in omega-3 fatty acids, which make up a large percentage of the matter in our brains. Furthermore, fish are the only major source of omega-3 fatty acids--you just can't get them anywhere else. The trick becomes balancing the need to eat fish for the good stuff while avoiding the negatives from fish. Fish that live in polluted water concentrate those pollutants in their bodies; eating the fish introduces the pollutants in our bodies. The study's authors recommend avoiding large predatory fish (shark, mackerel, swordfish), and limiting tuna consumption. Other ocean fish are fine, and canned fish with bones (anchovies and sardines) also provide extra calcium. Freshwater fish are fine, and farm-raised catfish and tilapia are especially good, because farmers don't dump mercury and PCBs into their farm tanks. Finally, eat a mix of fish--that keeps you from getting a high dose of any individual pollutant.

Mmmmmmmm......chicharrones

2007-02-17T17:44:00.000-06:00

I started the whole hog project yesterday, with the most accessible part of the pig--the outside. I went to a panaderia--a Mexican bakery--and bought some chicharrones for lunch. I thought chicharrones were the same thing that we call pork rinds: deep-fried pig skin, but they are more than that. There is a lot of meat attached, and a little fat as well. I think that they are side meat (bacon) that has been sliced thick (about 3/4 inch) without skinning, then deep-fried. I'm not sure because they were very busy, so I didn't have a chance to ask. It's a little different than bacon, though, because it's fresh rather than cured meat.

The chicharrones were good, but not great. The skin was really crunchy, and much more flavorful than bagged pork rinds. The meat was good, but kind of dry. Additionally, they weren't super-hot, so the fat was congealing and they had kind of a greasy texture that hot fat doesn't have. The chicharrones had been fried earlier in the day, and they were just sitting under a heat lamp. I think that they would probably be better if they were fresh out of the cooking grease (I wonder if they used lard? They should have.) Overall, I give these chicharrones about a five out of ten--I'd eat them again if they were offered to me, but I probably won't go out of my way to get them. This is an item that I won't eat a whole pig-worth this year; I bought half a pound, and didn't finish them. The thought of eating an entire hide isn't appealing in the least.

I'm not going to post a Jasper pic right now, because there's not a good way to mark off "skin." I'll just note that on the picture that I post him.

Introducing Jasper

2007-02-17T14:32:00.001-06:00

This is Jasper, the Market Hog. He was the champion market hog at the Chicago International Livestock Exposition in the early 1970s. He was notable for being the first crossbred hog to win that title, and for having the perfect physique, at least by the standards of that time. Jasper had such a fine bod that they cut him into thin sections and preserved images of those slices (on slides? film? woodcuts?) for use as a teaching tool. I've had this model of Jasper since I was a kid,* and I've kept it by my computer since high school. Jasper is appearing here as a tracking device--every time I try a hog part, I'll mark the photo of Jasper so we can all keep track of which parts I have eaten.

*How many kids grew up with action figures of famous farm animals instead of sports stars or the like? And how many kids heard bed-time stories of farm animals that were famous for being meaty and tasty, instead of talking or hanging out with literary spiders and the like?

[EDIT--Sunday, 10:30 central: If you can't see Jasper, I don't know why. I didn't have any trouble seeing him all day Saturday and Sunday, then he disappeared Sunday night. I deleted the picture that kept disappearing and added a new copy of the picture in a new place, but I haven't the faintest idea why the picture would disappear, or whether the new photo will be more durable.]

More whole hog

2007-02-13T20:21:00.000-06:00

I'm getting ready to start eating the whole pig. My first step was to order a cookbook--Nose to Tail Eating, which should tell me how to cook all the delicious(?) interior bits of the pig. I've also looked up some of those tasty interior bits on the internet, here and here. I've actually eaten more of those items that I realized, especially the variety meats. At least, I've eaten similar cuts from other animals (chicken hearts, beef tongue, and beef stomach). I'm actually a big fan of pork rinds--especially microwave pork rinds (yes, really, they are very good). I've never tried chicharrones, which are Mexican pork rinds. I don't know what makes them particularly Mexican, except that they are highly visible in some of the little taquerias that cater to Spanish-speakers in this part of the world. (Note to adventurous readers: if you ever go to a restaurant that caters to Spanish speakers, and they ask if you want hot sauce on the dish, or on the side, take it on the side. Trust me on this.)

My challenge to all of you is go to out and try some microwave pork rinds. They probably don't qualify as "real food," but they are a nice guilty pleasure. I'll try to find some chicharrones, and report back in a little while.

Not-real foods

2007-02-12T17:31:00.000-06:00

Chinese Space Potatoes! The Chinese government has developed a new variety of potato by taking seeds into space and exposing them to cosmic radiation. You could do the same thing with an x-ray machine, or nuclear reactor, or just a bunch of radioactive material. But then they wouldn't have the name "Chinese Space Potatoes," which sounds like a second-rate garage band.

Monday Rant

2007-02-12T17:14:00.000-06:00

Bird flu has been found in a turkey flock in Britain, and may have gotten into the food supply. This touches on two hot-button issues for me. The first is food safety. Food safety (particularly meat safety) has become a problem in this country because of the way we produce meat. Meat animals are raised in tight quarters without adequate waste disposal, and fed a diet that they would never have eaten in the past. The un-natural diet promotes problems; for example, E.coli O157:H7 (the one that makes you sick) grows in the acidic stomachs of corn-fed cattle, but not in grass fed cattle. The crowding increases stress on the animals, lowering their immune responses and increasing their exposure to bacteria. The lack of sanitation guarantees that filthy animals enter the food stream, requiring later steps to clean off the bacteria. All of this drives safety issues like the bird-flu turkeys in Britain. And it's all a product of industrial agriculture--every case of bird-to-human transmission of bird flu has come to people who work closely with confined flocks. If we just let the animals be animals, living animal lives, lots of these problems would go away on their own.

The second issue, that comes from efforts to solve these contamination issues, is animal identification. Specifically, it's the National Animal Identification System that is in the works with the USDA. The original goal was to register every single animal on every single farm in the entire country. The system was, of course, mandatory--penalties were proposed for farmers who didn't comply. Fortunately, they have backed off of this a little, and will be allowing people to opt out. It is infuriating, though, that the proposal for dealing with the problems of concentrated industrial agriculture was a system that would have raised the costs of traditional farmers so high that only the factory farms would remain.

Going Whole Hog

2007-02-09T17:54:00.000-06:00

Wait a minute--are you saying that you're never going to eat another animal again?
Yes.
What about bacon?
No.
What about ham?
No!
What about pork chops?
Dad, those all come from the same animal!
Yeah, right, Lisa. A magical, wonderful, animal.

--From The Simpsons episode, "Lisa the Vegetarian."

Homer was right. The pig is a magical, wonderful animal. It's the most widely-distributed large farm animal. It eats the widest range of stuff, under the widest range of conditions. And it provides the widest range of cuts to eat, from nose to tail.

Pigs loom larger in my memory than other livestock. We lived on a hog farm until I was three. One of my earliest (and worst) memories is of using a stock trailer as a jungle gym, falling down into the trailer, and getting a mouthful of what the hogs left behind on the floor. I remember how cute baby pigs are, and how big adult pigs look to a toddler. I remember how cozy warm the farrowing (that's birthing) barn is in the winter, and the smell that it has. Later, we lived on a small acreage, and I raised at least a couple of hogs for 4-H every year from the time I was nine until I graduated from high school. We put a hog in the freezer every year, too, so I grew up eating lots of pork.

We had a neighbor who was an old rancher (as a kid, he learned to ride and rope from an old man who, in his youth, had driven cattle up the Chisholm Trail to Kansas--how cool is that). This rancher leased a small part of his ranch to a teacher who raised pigs as a hobby. Part of the lease payment was a fat hog, on the hoof, delivered after the first frost each fall. The rancher would butcher the hog there behind the house to have pork for the winter. One year, I rode my bike over and helped him out a little. That was the first time I ever saw an animal butchered and turned into food. Incidentally, this rancher was famous in our church for making wonderful rolls that no one could duplicate. He would freely give out the recipe (I wish I had a copy of it now), but no one could make rolls as good as his. The secret? He used lard instead of shortening, and it gave the rolls a lighter texture.

I've been around a lot of hogs in my life, and I've eaten a lot of pork. However, I realized today that my gustatory experiences with the pig are somewhat limited. Pigs are famous for being eminently edible--farmers tout that you can eat everything but the squeal--but I've only had a few of the big muscles. Today, I resolved to remedy that situation: I'm going to eat a whole hog, and post it all here for your enjoyment.

This is the part where I get all lawyer-ish, and set forth the terms and conditions that make up "eating a whole hog."

1. I'm going to eat a WHOLE hog, not A whole hog. That is, I'm going to eat each of the parts that make up a whole hog, rather than the parts of one single pig.

2. I'm not going to eat the whole thing by myself. I'm going to share with family, friends, guests, well-wishers, and food adventurers.

3. "Whole" is used here in the platonic sense, not the accounting sense. I'm going to cook and eat a meal made from every single part of a hog, but I'm not necessarily going to eat the entirety of each major muscle group. In other words, I'm not going to eat thirty pounds of pork chops, two entire hams, two entire shoulders (well, I may eat two shoulders, because I love pulled pork). I'll try every part, but the total of what I cook and eat probably won't total up to the 200 pound live weight of a hog.

4. Finally, though I'm going to try every part of the pig, I'm not going keep eating anything that's nasty. I reserve the right to stop eating any part after I've tried a bite. Some of the parts worry me--chitterlings and feet in particular--but I'll be a trooper and at least taste everything.

Keep checking back, and I'll give you a guided tour of Homer's magical, wonderful animal. And, as Homer has said so often:

Mmmmmmm......poooooooorrrrrrrkkkkk.........

Why I'm doing this

2007-02-08T20:15:00.000-06:00

Nazareth, Texas.

Nazareth is a little town (pop. 356) that's about an hour from where I grew up. Beyond farming, there's not much economic base to Nazareth. Beyond their stellar girls' basketball team (17 state titles, more than any other school in the country), there's not much holding Nazareth together.

Nazareth is worth saving, along with a thousand other little towns throughout the great plains. I'm hoping that, besides dishing out some great food, Checkered Rooster can give a boost to places like Nazareth, and keep that way of live around a little longer. So, one of these days, when the checkeredrooster.com e-commerce site is up and running, try to buy a little something from a town like Naz, and help the Swiftettes out.

I feel like cooking something scary

2007-02-06T17:37:00.000-06:00

I haven't had any real adventures in the kitchen for a while. In fact, I think the last really wacky thing I cooked the goat last summer. Does anybody have some suggestions of the strange or gross things I should try to cook and eat?

I've got a couple of ideas, but no idea where I might find sweetbreads or blood sausage. Maybe I could cook menudo. Not the Menudo, the Puerto Rican boy band from the 80s, but menudo, the soup. It's reputed to be the world's greatest hangover cure. In fact, lots of the little taquerias around here that make it have signs that say "Menudo--Sabados por la Manana." In English, that's "Menudo--Saturday Mornings." I'm not so sure that it would be a good hangover cure--it's made from tripe, which is beef stomach.

Anyway, lemme know if there is anything scary or wacky you think I should eat, and I'll try it.

Monday Food News

2007-02-05T19:34:00.000-06:00

This week, we have a couple of items related to last week's posts about nutritionism and real food.

First, a column from Orlando that cites studies that eating whole dairy products instead of reduced-fat versions leads to long-term weight loss, plus lots more flavor.

Second, we have an opinion column that takes some issue with Michael Pollan's nutritionism essay. The author cites statistics that show that both France and Japan have longer average lifespans, and lower rates of heart disease than the U.S. The kicker is that the French eat more protein, more animal protein, and more saturated fat than Americans, while the Japanese eat less protein, animal protein, and animal fat. Plus both nations collectively smoke like chimneys. His conclusion is that the key factor is not protein (especially animal protein), but carbohydrates--especially sugars. We eat almost twice as much sugar every day as the next closest country, France. Once more, we should try to cut the corn syrup and eat real food.

I'm sure I look like a nut in the grocery store when I buy canned sauces or soups, because I read the labels to find the ones without corn syrup. That can be harder than it looks--most spaghetti sauces have corn syrup. (Because you know that every Italian grandma keeps a huge bottle of corn syrup in the pantry.)

My turkeys are morons

2007-02-02T19:53:00.000-06:00

I know that they aren't very smart (I don't expect them to do tricks or anything), but geez--they won't go into the heated barn, even if it's 30 degrees and snowing. You'd think they would at least like to stay dry, but no. They prefer to stay outside under all conditions. Morons.

Real Food, the book

2007-02-02T19:45:00.000-06:00

I've just started reading the book Real Food, by Nina Planck. I'm only in the first chapter, but it's an interesting (and easy) read. It's about the benefits of eating real foods, and the pitfalls of eating industrial foods.

She's very high on fermented foods; I'm looking forward to reading those bits. Fermented foods fascinate me--you take some nice, normal food like milk, or cabbage, or barley, and you let it rot for a couple of weeks. Make one little mistake, and you've got garbage. But get things right, and the results are magical--cheese (or yogurt), sauerkraut, or beer. It will be interesting to find out how good these foods are for you.

I'll keep y'all posted on what else she has to say as I read.

Yeah, I changed my blog

2007-02-01T21:07:00.000-06:00

My sister changed hers, so the little brother had to keep up. I'm not sure the green was such a great idea, though. Maybe I'll try a new look in a few days.

I also added my e-mail address to my profile (over there on the right side of the screen). I'd love to hear from my readers, especially if you weren't invited to my high school graduation.

By the way, if you were invited to my high school graduation, and you haven't ever posted a comment (there is one person in that category--you know who you are), go ahead and try posting a comment. It'll be more fun than attending another meeting.

Real Food, Zoo-style

2007-02-01T20:57:00.000-06:00

A TV show in England decided to feed some volunteers (who had high cholesterol and blood pressure) the same diet that zoos feed apes. Of course, being TV, they also made them live in a cage in the zoo.

At any rate, they fed these folks real food--mostly raw fruits and vegetables. The cholesterol levels and blood pressures went down, spirits went up. It's an interesting example of eating real foods in action.

Nutritionism

2007-01-29T18:51:00.000-06:00

Michael Pollan (the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma) had a lengthy (and weighty) essay in yesterday's New York Times on "nutritionism" and his proposal for alternatives to nutritionism.

"Nutritionism*" is the notion that what's important to eating is not food, but nutrients. It's the kind of thinking that brings us vitamin pills (which are generally a good thing), but also encourages us to eat more or less of specific substances in food. Nutritionism tells us to eat less animal fat, and more oat bran; less cholesterol, and more omega-3 fatty acids. Nutritionism leads to foods with things added that don't belong, to make them better for us, or things taken away that make them worse. It brings us fat-free cookies, high-fiber yogurt, and egg substitutes with no cholesterol, but added omega-3 fatty acids.

It also brings us a high level of confusion. Is margerine better than butter because it doesn't contain animal fat? Or is it worse because it has trans fat? Or are they the same, because both are saturated? The idea that discrete substances within the food make it good are bad is the heart of nutritionism.

Pollan attacks that notion, pointing out that in many cases (like antioxidants), removing the substance from the food it comes in removes the effect the nutrient is believed to have. He also points out that, as we've "learned" more and more rules for eating healthy, our health as a nation has deteriorated. We are fatter now, and have higher rates of diabetes. Playing with the nutrients in food hasn't really benefited us.

He does offer a way out of the maze of nutritionism: eating real food instead of "food-like substances." Pollan's rules for eating real food:

1. Eat food. Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best.

3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible.

5. Pay more, eat less… Paying more for food well grown in good soils … will contribute not only to your health… but also to the health of… the people who grow it and the people who live downstream, and downwind, of the farms where it is grown.

“Eat less” is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. “Calorie restriction” has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention

6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Scientists may disagree on what’s so good about plants — the antioxidants? Fiber? Omega-3s? — but they do agree that they’re probably really good for you and certainly can’t hurt.

7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around.

8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be cheap and easy; that food is fuel and not communion.

9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases.

[Those items are Pollan's words, but edited down by me]

It is a fascinating, if somewhat long, article, and well worth reading.

*Pollan cites sociologist Gyorgy Scrinis as the source of this term

Posole

2007-01-27T19:34:00.000-06:00

It's been cold and wet for a couple of weeks, so I decided it would be nice to cook some posole (that's pronounced poe-SOE-lay, if you don't habla Espanol) today. Of course, it was 65 degrees and sunny this afternoon, but I still had fun.

Posole, if you haven't heard of it, is a spicy pork-and-hominy stew that is popular in Mexico and the Spanish-speaking parts of the southwest. We've been given posole by some of the Spanish-speaking moms with kids in L's class, and we had some wonderful posole on Christmas Eve in Santa Fe last month. This recipe isn't particularly authentic--in fact, I've never actually seen a posole recipe--but it tastes close to what I've had elsewhere. (On the other hand, the posole we had in Santa Fe was a two-part dish. There was the posole proper, which was just pork and hominy--very bland and white; and the chili, which was deep orange, and very spicy, and also had big hunks of pork in it.)

The key ingredients for posole are:

4-5 pounds pork shoulder or boston butt
4-6 tablespoons flour--enough to coat the pork
A little vegetable or peanut oil
4-6 ancho chiles
2 quarts chicken stock
1 big can crushed tomatoes (I forget what size, and I threw out the can already. It's the really big fat can, something like 24 ounces)
2-15 ounce cans of hominy

That's all it takes to make a big, steaming pot of posole.

Start by heating the oven to 250 degrees. I know most folks don't bake soup, but trust me.

Chop the pork into bite-sized cubes. I prefer shoulder cuts (shoulder, boston butt, or picnic shoulder) for posole, because they are cheap and stand up well to the extended cooking. Here is my roast:

Roll the pieces in the flour, then brown them with a little oil in your stewpot over medium-high heat. Browning the meat this way gives you nice browned bits on the meat, and the crusty stuff on the bottom of the pan (that's called fond if you're snooty and french), and incorporates the flour into the fat so it won't make lumps. The browning and fond are important for developing flavor, and the flour is good for texture. Also, brown the meat in batches, so it fries instead of steaming. I tried to get a good picture of this, but the photo didn't stick in the camera for some reason. Maybe it was a vampire pig or something.

While the meat is browning, work over the peppers. Anchos are the dried form of poblano peppers. They are not super-hot, and have wonderful flavor. This is what they look like:

Tear the peppers open; discard the seeds and stems. Chop the peppers into thumbnail-sized pieces, and cook them in a dry skillet for three to five minutes. This really enhances the flavor of the peppers, but don't put your face over the skillet; the steam coming off it bears a strong resemblance to pepper spray. Once the peppers have roasted, put them in a blender and grind them to coarse powder. Set them aside for now.

Once the meat is all browned, put a little of the stock in the pot (by the way, it's much cheaper if you freeze chicken bones and use them to make stock, and using bones from grilled or smoked birds gives a wonderful depth of flavor to the stock. My favorite is smoked turkey bones--that's what I used today). Anyway, put in a little of the stock, and use a spoon to scrape the fond loose from the bottom of the pot.

Now put in the meat, the hominy, the tomatoes, and the ground-up peppers. It will look like this:

Bring it to a boil, cover the pot, and put it in the oven. The flour thickens best at temperatures that aren't too high; cooking the pot in the oven directs a more gentle heat into the pot from every direction. If you were to boil the stew on the stove, the direct heat from the burner denatures some of the protein in the flour and inhibits the thickening reaction.

Bake the pot for an hour and a half or two hours. You don't have to be really precise with stew, it's not rocket science (I'll leave that stuff to the pastry makers). The finished product looks like this:

This bowl is garnished with corn tortillas. Luckily, we had a cold front roll through today, and by suppertime it was 40 degrees--much better for eating such a hearty stew.

Our old friend, E.coli

2007-01-26T20:32:00.000-06:00

Yet another E. coli outbreak has been traced back to to leafy greens (most likely iceberg lettuce) from California. Once again, they aren't sure what the ultimate source of the outbreak was.

California now has competing food safety plans--a legislator has introduced a bill that would require field-to-table tracking, buffer zones around fields, and stiff penalties for violators. Meanwhile, the produce growers association has introduced a voluntary plan that includes fencing animals out of crop fields, testing irrigation water, and limits on the use of manure as a fertilizer.

Neither of these plans is ideal, but both have good elements. Tracking is nice, but it doesn't help until a problem is detected. It does make it easier to get potentially contaminated food out of the supply chain, but that won't kick in until enough people have gotten sick for the government to be sure what the problem was. Limiting manure and testing irrigation water are a better approach--they keep the nasties out of the field in the first place, and they allow for corrective action to be taken before anyone gets sick. There are further steps that could be taken during processing to limit bacterial growth and spread, but those must be consistently followed. The biggest problem with the voluntary plan is that it is voluntary, so the low-grade operations will simply not sign on, and continue producing second-rate products. Both those plans are still in the developmental stage, but may be in effect this spring for the growing season.

Until then (or maybe even after, depending on what's adopted) the only way to be 100% safe when eating leafy greens and the like is to cook them hard, so that the beasties are killed by the heat.

Seriously, though

2007-01-22T18:54:00.000-06:00

I did find one useful food article today. It's a follow-up on all the E. coli scares from this fall.

The summary:

We don't know exactly what the source of the E. coli contamination in the spinach and lettuce was. It could have been in runoff from dairy farms, or in the water used to rinse the spinach, or cross-contamination from animal products processed in that plant, or possibly from something else entirely.
Leafy greens are more likely than other veggies to be dangerous, but none of them are 100% guaranteed safe.
Cooking greens thoroughly will kill the bacteria, but it has also been known to render spinach yucky (ask any five-year-old), and I cannot imagine how limp, mushy, and flavorless cooked lettuce would be.

I need to find a good, safe farm that produces safe, high-quality greens to sell.

Slow Day in Food News

2007-01-22T18:35:00.000-06:00

I had planned on doing a link roundup today, but I couldn't find much food news of interest. I did find one item, though, that reminded me of this great conversation from one of my favorite movies, Raising Arizona:

"When there was no meat, we ate fowl. When there was no fowl, we ate crawdads. And when there was no crawdads to be found, we ate sand."
"You ate what?"
"We ate sand."
"You ate SAND?"
"That's right, we ate sand."

In that spirit, I give you this: a man in China claims that eating sand cured his cancer. (I told you it was a slow news day.)

When to Buy Organic

2007-01-21T14:24:00.000-06:00

The Wall Street Journal ($) had an article earlier in the week about when buying organic foods makes sense. You find the biggest difference in produce that otherwise have high levels of pesticides or other chemicals in them, some difference in meat and dairy products, a small difference in l0w-pesticide produce, and no difference in highly processed foods.

The foods that show the biggest difference: apples, peaches, bell peppers, strawberries, grapes, spinach, lettuce, potatoes, and carrots. When conventionally produced, these foods have the highest levels of pesticides in the produce section. If you are just easing into organic foods, these are the biggest winners.

Organic dairy products are free of added hormones that are used to get extra production out of the cows. (All dairy products are free of antibiotics; the milk processors screen vigorously for the presence of antibiotics, and will dump out an entire truckload of milk if they find any antibiotics at all).

Organic meets are free of additional hormones, and the animals receive no antibiotics. All meat is supposed to be free of antibiotics, because they aren't supposed to be administered to animals within a certain timeframe (depending on the drug) of butchering; I don't think they test every animal coming into the slaughter plant, though. Antibiotic-free meats are also good for society; the high doses of antibiotics feed to animals in industrial production settings is a major driver for the antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.

Broccoli, bananas, frozen sweet peas, frozen corn, asparagus, avocados, onions have low pesticide levels when produced conventionally, so buying the organic versions of these doesn't have the same dietary impact as the items above.

Buying organic processed foods makes very little difference. Processing the foods has a much bigger impact on their nutritional value than the method of production. You should be aware that the label "made with" organic ingredients means 70% organic ingredients; the USDA organic seal is only allowed on foods with 95% organic ingredients. Reading the ingredient label is more important with processed foods than looking for the organic seal; this lets you find the foods with whole grains, natural sugars, and a lack of corn syrup. (By the way...looked at every brand of BBQ sauce at the store last week, and they ALL had corn syrup. What's up with that? I had to settle for a sauce where it was ingredient #3, instead of #1.)

Finally, there is no organic certification for fish. Even wild-caught fish may contain high levels of mercury, PCBs, and other nasty things. The pollutant level of fish is a function of where they were caught, not whether or not they're wild.

An announcement

2007-01-16T19:42:00.000-06:00

Starting pretty soon, this blog will be part of a commercial effort. I've had a site in development for a while (about six weeks, if you count the time I've actually been working with a developer, or about six months, if you count the time I was strung along by the loser that I tried to hire first).

Anyway, pretty soon, I'll be launching Checkered Rooster Foods, which will be dedicated to bringing farmmade products straight from the farm to your plate.

However, I need some actual foods to sell on the website, so if any of my three or four readers know of any family farms or co-ops that are selling (or would like to sell) products directly to consumers, leave me a comment, and I'll try to get in touch with them and set something up.

Healthier Eating

2007-01-15T15:57:00.000-06:00

Since it's the new year, here are some tips for eating healthier, and maybe losing some weight:

Brown bag it. Bringing your lunch to work is a great way to get control of your eating, and your food budget.

Shop healthy. Stick to the outside of the store, where the fresh produce, fresh meats, and dairy products are. Stay away from the middle of the store, where the junk food is.

Make small changes. Just a few small changes in food selection can make add up to several pounds lost over the course of a year.

Don't make drastic changes. Be sensible in the changes you make; don't go for sweeping, all-or-nothing changes, because you'll most likely end up on the nothing side of that equation.

Meat Day!

2006-12-20T21:20:00.000-06:00

Meat Day went well. I started the fire at about7:00 that morning, and started cooking about 8:30. It took the turkeys about three hours to cook, and the brisket and pork shoulder about six hours. I couldn't quite fit all the meat at once, so I had to cook the turkeys in shifts, two at at time. It worked well--I was able to switch the turkeys at about the halfway point, with no problems. Everything turned out well. I also found a couple of steaks in the back of the freezer, so I was able to bump up the total amount to just over sixty pounds.

The pictures didn't turn out so well, though. Here's a picture of everything I cooked:

Note that, if you smoke turkeys, black pinfeathers don't matter so much, because the whole thing turns black.

Here's a close-up of a turkey.

The light stripe across his breast is from the string I used to truss his wings.

Meat Day was a success, although there are some things I will do differently the next time I fire up the smoker.

Meat Day!

2006-12-14T19:40:00.000-06:00

I've declared this Saturday, Dec. 16, to be a new holiday--Meat Day! Meat Day is a floating holiday; it can be held any day you feel like celebrating meat. I'll be celebrating Meat Day by firing up my new big smoker and cooking a little meat--59.5 pounds, to be exact. I need to find a couple of steaks or something to run the total to over 60 pounds, just because that's a nice round number. My fifty-nine and a half pounds consist of: a brisket; a picnic shoulder; a pork loin; and four home-grown turkeys. The turkeys are for my folks to take home after Christmas. The brisket and picnic shoulder will be served at various family functions over Christmas.

Here's a picture of the meat before I started brining and dry-rubbing yesterday:

Here's a close-up of the good stuff:

The dark stuff you see on some of the turkeys is pigment left over after pulling out the pinfeathers (feathers that weren't fully grown yet). The two on the left were bronzes--very dark birds. The second from the right was a bourbon red, and the far right was a narragansett. I prefer the reds, because they make a much cleaner bird for the table. Plus they have a good personality.

I dry-rubbed the turkeys and the brisket, and dropped the picnic shoulder into brine with molasses and salt. The dark package in the middle is a pork loin and half a cup of molasses in a ziploc bag. I bagged it before I remembered that I wanted a "before" picture.

That's it for now--all the meat is in the fridge waiting for Saturday. I'll have a Meat Day wrap-up after the weekend.

Food Safety: what's definitely not safe

2006-12-13T19:33:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, I looked at foods that are definitely safe to eat. Today, I'll look at foods that are definitely not safe, and what you can do about it.

The key transmission route for food-borne illness like salmonella and the dangerous strain of E. coli is fecal-oral transmission. In other words, foods that may have come into contact with poop. In a nutshell, any animal product that hasn't gone through a sanitizing step should be considered dangerous. As we discussed yesterday, heat, acids, salt, and fermentation all have the potential to kill the germs on food. Raw animal products--meat, milk, and eggs--are all potentially dangerous; cooked animal products are safe. Let's take a closer look at some animal products.

The food that is most likely to be contaminated is raw poultry. According to the New York Times last week, 83% of raw chickens they tested carried some pathogenic bacteria. You should treat any raw poultry as if it were contaminated, and anything it touches as contaminated. That means that if you handle raw chicken, you must wash your hands before handling other food. If you chop it up, you must wash (with hot, soapy water) the knife, cutting board, and counter. Never, ever handle raw chicken, then immediately touch your hands, cooking utensils, or countertop to something you are going to eat raw. That's the surest way to make yourself sick. The good news is that the bacteria on chicken are strictly external. The inside of any muscle tissue is sanitary, unless the animal was sick. Once you have started to cook the outside of the chicken, it becomes safe. There is actually no danger from eating rare chicken, if you get the outside good and hot. It may be gross, but it's safe.

Red meat also has a high probability of being contaminated, but lower than that of poultry. That's because so much poultry either has the skin on, or is just one cut removed from the skin (meaning the knife pulls through the skin into the muscle, contaminating the meat). Red meat is skinned and cut up much smaller (proportionally), so the bacteria get spread quite a bit thinner. Additionally, the processing of poultry tends to spread the bacteria load much more uniformly over all the animals than large-animal processing does. The same rules for handling poultry still apply, though--clean anything that comes into contact with meat before it touches anything else. Rare meat, like rare poultry, is also safe if you sear the outside.

There is however, one exception to this rule: ground meat. This comes into play much more with beef and pork than with chicken or turkey, because we make sausage out of hogs, and hamburgers out of cattle. With ground meat, the inside of the meat and the outside of the meat get all jumbled up, and so do the accompanying bacteria. Ground meat must always be cooked to an internal temperature of at least 140, or medium. If there's any pink left in a burger or sausage patty, it poses a risk.

Dairy products are generally safer that meats. Most milk is sold pasteurized, so it's safe. Raw milk carries some risk, and its sale is strictly regulated (or sometimes prohibited). Hard cheeses are low-water, fairly salty, and fairly acidic. That renders them pretty safe. By law, soft cheeses must be made from pasteurized milk in the U.S. This interferes with some traditional cheesemaking techniques, but it does produce safe cheese.

Eggs are a slightly different case. The outside of eggs is cleaned and sanitized in the packaging process, so they are safe. However, there is a percentage of hens that carry salmonella in their ovaries, and deposit the bugs into the shell with the yolk. This is much more common with caged hens than free-ranging birds, but all raw eggs should be viewed with skepticism. If you really must have raw eggs (blech), find a pasteurized product like egg beaters, and be safe.

That's a pretty good summary of what's clearly dangerous, but conspicuously absent are green onions and spinach--the culprits behind the two recent scares.

Food Safety: What's Safe

2006-12-12T19:59:00.000-06:00

Since we are just coming through a big food safety scare, on the heels of the big spinach scare, I thought I'd post a little about food safety in general. Today's topic will be foods that are generally safe; tomorrow, I'll talk about foods that are generally not safe; and later, I'll get to the gray area--foods that have been thought safe, but are causing problems now.

Foods are germ-free when there is some process or chemical that kills the germs; they stay germ-free while the process continues, while the chemicals remain, or while they are sealed up from the outside germs.

The main processes that kill food are heat (of course) and dehydration. Food that is kept hot--at or above 140 degrees--is safe. Once the heat process is over, the food should be eaten immediately, or sealed and chilled to less than 40 degrees.

Foods with low water content are also safe. This includes the obviously dehydrated foods--jerky, rasins, other dried fruits--but also foods with low levels of water, or foods where the water is bound up with other chemicals and isn't available for bacterial growth. Low-moisture foods include cooking oils, crispy snacks like chips and crackers, and honey (ever notice that honey doesn't really spoil? It's because there's not enough water in it to feed germs). Low water-activity foods include chocolate and cheese. Salted meats also have a lowered level of water activity, at least compared to fresh meats, that keep them edible much longer than raw meat.

Salt isn't the only chemical agent that keeps the nasties at bay--acids also do a good job of that. There are lots of foods that are fortified with acids--mostly lactic acid--by naturally-occurring bacteria that take over and make the neighborhood hostile for the bad guys. Cheese, hard sausages (salami, pepperoni, and summer sausage), and various pickles (sauerkraut, anyone?) are all acidified foods, and they are all safe and long-lasting when done right. (My last batch of kraut sat, sealed, on the counter for about three weeks, and in the fridge for three more, and it's still terrific.) Alcohol is another natural chemical preservative. Once again, we invite in good microbes (yeast, in this case), and its waste (alcohol) pollutes the food supply for the bad bugs.

The safest foods are processed and still sealed from the factory. They have been heat-processed (or received other de-bugging treatments), sealed super tight, and kept at the right temperature. Factory foods aren't necessarily the best tasting, or the best for you, but they are quite safe.

Tomorrow, we'll talk about the foods that are generally unsafe, and what to do about them.

Turkey Update

2006-12-09T12:33:00.000-06:00

I got a little busy, and forgot to update the last turkey post. Here is a photo of the whole flock (minus three big toms)

Here is a Narragansett:

Here are a couple of Royal Palms:

Here is a Bourbon Red:

I had a couple of bronzes (they look like wild turkeys), but I forgot to take pictures before they were processed. Here's the only picture I have of one of them, from Thanksgiving Day:

Finally, I'll post a couple more group shots. They're lousy photos, but they are the best I could get of the toms strutting. They are pretty shy, and won't strut unless there is something between me and them. They capture a little of what the strutting birds look like, just to give a flavor. (I've also noticed that the neater a breed looks, the harder it is to get close.) Now I need to get a recording of the whole bunch gobbling at once.....

Chicken Fried Bacon

2006-12-08T19:43:00.001-06:00

Chicken.
Fried.
Bacon.

God bless Snook, Texas, the home of chicken fried bacon (and the butt of jokes told by Aggies).
And God bless Bob Phillips for bringing us the video.

(It's all over the food blogs, but I saw it first at Megnut)

Turkey tips

2006-11-16T21:01:00.000-06:00

Here are some buyer's guides for everyone's favorite Thanksgiving guest:

New York Times
Megnut
Sam Gugino

I've got heritage birds (I need to get a picture up...they've grown a little since this. In fact, they are are literally ten times bigger that those pictures), and they may fit the definition of free-range birds (it's a pretty loose definition); they aren't organic (because I had a hard time finding organic feed until a couple of weeks ago), and they definitely aren't pastured--there's not anything remotely alive in the turkey pen these days.

I pick a particularly big bird on Sunday or Monday (I've got my eye on three in particular, out of seventeen), and dress him for dinner. I may put up some before and after shots, but I don't think anyone will want to see "during." I'll either smoke or grill the bird for L and my folks on Thursday.

Old-school meets new-school

2006-10-31T20:23:00.000-06:00

From the Wall Street Journal ($).

Seed companies are using the latest technology in genetic engineering to speed up traditional breeding programs. Instead of inserting genes from other organisms, they are using genes from old varieties (and even wild ancestors) of modern crops.

Thanks to the decoded genetic blueprints, seed producers can know with precision which plants carry a desired trait and which genes cause it. Just as important, once they've planted seeds from such a plant, they can learn quickly through gene tests whether its offspring sprouting in a test field have inherited the trait.

The result is that breeders who used to need a decade to develop marketable new seeds by traditional selective breeding can do it in half the time. And they can bring about some crop improvements that were once thought attainable only by splicing in foreign genes to create genetically modified organisms.

The key to this, of course, is having the old varieties to go back to. That's why it is so very important to preserve the traditional varieties of crops and livestock--the past may well hold the key to the future.

What's the deal with trans fats?

2006-10-31T20:01:00.000-06:00

NYC has banned 'em. KFC has banished 'em. But what are trans fats, anyway?

A molecule of fat is three long chains of carbon atoms and hydrogen atoms connected to a head. The heads aren't important to this discussion. The tails look like this:

(sorry about the pictures--I don't know why they are black. Click 'em, and you can see what I'm talking about)

Each line represents a bond between two carbon atoms. Carbon forms four bonds; in this picture, the carbons are each bonded to two other carbons, and two hydrogens. This fat is saturated--each carbon has a full compliment of hydrogens. These long, straight chains pack easily, so saturated fats are solid at room terperature. They are mainly found in animals--think butter, lard, and bacon.

This is an unsaturated fat. Notice the double bond beween two carbons that kinks the chain. These fats don't pack well, so they are liquid at room temperature. Think olive oil, corn oil, and vegetable oil.

Unsaturated fats have a problem, though. That extra bond is just itching to break and pick up something else, like oxygen. Especially when it gets hot. The oxygen--or other stuff--makes the food cooked in the fat taste bad. This isn't a problem in a home kitchen, because the fat doesn't stay hot long, and the fat rarely gets used repeatedly. In a commercial fryer, though, the fat hangs around for a while, and that can be a problem. The solution is hydrogenation--a process where the double bonds get broken and filled with hydrogen. This makes the fat chemically similar to animal fats (but to most people, "partially hydrogenated soybean oil" sounds better than "lard" or "tallow.")

That gives us this:

This is a trans fat. It's still unsaturated, but it's straight. That double bond actually makes it stiffer, and easier to pack. Trans fats are solid at room temperature. Think vegetable shortening. Trans fats are a the fat that is most responsible for heart disease, and are also a carcinogen.

It turns out that butter is better than margerine, and lard is better than shortening. The old ways are still the best.

(Nerd note: trans fats are called that because of the arrangement of the hydrogens around the bond. They are across the chain from each other--trans in latin. The bent unsaturated fats are cis unsaturated, because the hydrogens are on the same side of the bond.)

Eating clones

2006-10-20T18:54:00.000-05:00

The FDA is getting close to approving meat and milk from cloned animals. I’m not particularly worried about the safety of cloned foods. It’s no different from eating animals that are identical twins. We’ve had the technology for twenty years or so to produce clones from embryos, producing two or three or four identical babies instead of just one, and those critters aren’t particularly unsafe. Furthermore, due to the difficulty and expense involved in cloning adult animals, I doubt we’ll see many of them, and there is zero chance they will make it into a feedlot and thence to the meat case at your local grocery store—they will be far too valuable to eat.

The bigger danger is loss of genetic diversity. Because clones are identical twins, they have identical immune systems, and identical disease susceptibility. Consider a clone that we already eat—the humble banana. The Cavendish banana variety is productive, tasty, travels well, and seedless. They are propagated by digging up shoots from mature plant and putting them in the dirt somewhere else. Every single yellow banana you’ve ever eaten is a clone, genetically identical to every other yellow banana (there are other varieties, but the Cavendish is the biggie). Every single Cavendish banana is strongly susceptible to Panama Disease and Black Sigatoka, which are fungal diseases. Panama Disease wiped out the Gros Michael banana variety in the 1950s, putting the Cavendish on top. Losing the worldwide banana supply would be a loss for us, but it would be a disaster for the tropical banana farmers and farm workers.

Now imagine a world full of cloned dairy cattle, or chickens, or hogs. We are close to that now in the poultry industry—commercial birds aren’t clones, but they have very little genetic diversity. The avian flu that is causing so much panic isn’t being incubated and mutated in wild populations or small family flocks. It’s a byproduct of huge barns full of inbred birds. That is the true danger of cloning.

Fish Oils

2006-10-20T10:08:00.000-05:00

The FDA has decided the benefits of eating more fish outweigh the risks. ($ubscription required) There is a clear link between eating fish and reduced chances of heart disease. There is also a risk of picking up pollutants from the fish, but that is small compared to the risk of heart disease. The FDA does caution consumers to limit the amount of fish (a couple of times a week is good, three times a day could be bad) and to eat different types of fish to limit the intake of a specific pollutant. They also suggest women who are pregnant or nursing, and kids under twelve should avoid big predatory fish (sharks, swordfish, and mackerel), and limit the intake of tuna, to avoid the highest pollutant risk.

In a related story, researchers working with prisoners have discovered that an adequate supply of omega-3 in the diet reduces violent incidents by a statistically significant amount. Part of the fatty acids we eat are incorporated into the membranes of cells in the brain. The researchers speculate that cells with more omega-3 fatty acids have more flexible membranes, and pick up neurotransmitters more easily. They think that the prisoners who got a boost of omega-3 fatty acids are now more receptive to dopamine, which makes one feel good, and to seratonin, which helps with impulse control.

I'm usually quite sceptical of claims made on the behalf of foods and herbs to cause weight loss, change mood, prevent illness, etc. Those claims usually lack 1)empirical evidence, and 2)a plausible mechanism for causing the benefit. This study has both--the behavioral studies were conducted in double-blind trials (where one group gets the treatment, and the other gets a placebo, and no one knows who's getting what), and a plausible hypothesis whereby the effect is linked by the food to something we already know about how brains work. It seems fish really is brain food.

Eating cactus

2006-10-17T19:49:00.000-05:00

Heidi at Mighty Foods is talking about eating prickly pear.

I've always heard that the tunas--the red fruits that grow on the pears--are pretty tasty. However, the few times I've attempted to eat 'em, the spines get me. Not the big hard ones, but the little ones that are hair-fine. They break off in your skin and itch like the devil, and they're hard to spot and pull out. There's a link on the above post about how to get rid of the spines. (I don't want to give anything away, but I'll just say that tunas, like meat, are better with some fire).

I have eaten nopales--those are the big flat pads that make up the green part of the plant. We had them shredded raw in a salad. They tasted something like green beans, but they were juicier and a little more acidic. They were OK, but not great.

Now I need to go find a prickly pear plant to harvest. I wonder if I could make prickly pear pie?

Sauerkraut wrap-up

2006-10-03T20:05:00.000-05:00

I finally ate some of the second batch of sauerkraut. It's very different from the canned stuff. It's got some mint green in it, instead of being all white. It's not as crisp as the canned stuff, probably because I really pounded this batch pretty good. The flavor is quite different--not nearly as acidic (though it's still pretty sharp), but it has a much more cabbagey flavor. It actually tastes like pickled cabbage instead of the overwhelming acidity of canned kraut. It also didn't make me sick, which is a real bonus to any food product.

I paired it with some nice german-type foods--roasted pork loin with a roasted apple / mustard sauce, and a side of roasted potatoes and carrots. The sauce is much better than it sounds--the sweetness of the apples and the sharpness of the mustard balance nicely, so neither is overwhelming. The kraut mixes nicely with those strong flavors. I also included a German-style beverage, but I choose poorly there. It was a pumpkin spice ale, which is pleasant on its own (it's got a touch nutmeg or somesuch, and it does taste kind of like pumpkin pie. It's really good). However, it's not all that strongly-flavored, and it doesn't hold up well to the kraut, mustard, apples, and pork. It just tastes like water next to the germanic flavors; I guess I need to find a nice dopplebock to go with it.

Sauerkraut, again

2006-09-17T20:32:00.000-05:00

I had to ditch the sauerkraut. It started getting moldy, so I took it to the compost pile. I found out that you have to have firm seal on top of it so it doesn't have any contact with the air. I made a new batch today (with an appropriate amount of salt--3% of the total weight), and got a better seal on it--saran wrap over the top, then a gallon ziploc bag full of water, then another layer of saran wrap. That should keep those pesky spores out.

I tried the kraut

2006-09-12T20:15:00.000-05:00

I ate one very small shred of my sauerkraut. It's very, very salty. I wasn't brave enough to eat any more, but at least I tried it. We've got an extra bratwurst laying around; I'll heat it up with some of the kraut, and try to give a better report later this week.

Kraut update

2006-09-10T20:04:00.000-05:00

Some of you have asked about the sauerkraut. Here's what it looks like now:

Here's the best view I have of what the original cabbage looked like:

It's gotten kind of clear and limp, and it smells pretty strongly. It's a sour cabbagey smell, which I think is right. It's not getting moldy or smelling like Pseudomonas (the bad-food-refirgerator smell--Pseudomonas are the bacteria species that spoil food in the fridge), so I'm thinking it's going well. I'm not ready to eat any of it, though. I'll let it sit around for a couple more weeks, then mayve I'll eat some.

Eat Your Veggies!

2006-09-04T16:10:00.000-05:00

Here's my attempt to try veggies in a new way--homemade sauerkraut! There are only two ingredients, cabbage and salt. Here's our star:

Sauerkraut is made through fermentation. "Fermentation" is a nice way to say "controlled spoilage," which is a nice way to say "we're going to turn some bacteria loose on this food." It's important to control exactly which bacteria we turn loose, though. We want to encourage the nice bacteria that already live on the cabbage, and which excrete lactic acid. Lactic acid is what gives the nice, tangy flavor to cheese, salami, and, yes, sauerkraut. We don't want any other bacteria present, though, because they can produce nasty off-flavors (at best), and things that make us sick (at worst). So everything gets soaked in bleach first:

Next, we shred up the cabbage:

And add the other ingredient:

The various recipes I looked at call for kosher salt, pickling salt, and non-iodized salt. I don't know why iodine is a problem (maybe it's not good for our lactic-acid producing friends), but I used kosher salt anyway.

Then, you bruise the cabbage, to release enough cabbage-juice to cover the cabbage. How do you bruise cabbage? The same way you would bruise, say, a bully. With a fist!

I'm a fan of any recipe that requires a fist. It's very manly.

Here's a shot of the fermenter. It's a stainless steel bowl, sealed with a smaller ceramic bowl. A tight seal is bad, because it keeps the gasses produced during fermentation trapped. This could cause an explosion. Leaving the cabbage uncovered is equally bad, because it could allow other bacteria to land in the cabbage and ruin it.

It's going to sit on our counter for a while and ferment. I'll keep an eye on it, and post updates as things happen.

Monday Links

2006-09-04T15:18:00.000-05:00

Some suggestions for continuing to enjoy food while you're on a diet. The basic idea is to replace low-quality bad-for-you foods with high-quality bad-for-you foods, such as dark chocolate for regular chocolate; or replace really bad for you foods (full-fat latte) with lower cal foods (nonfat latte). I've been doing a similar thing with my diet this summer--substuting a small amount of a really good food (like one ounce of aged cheddar, or dry-cured ham, or a half cup of top-shelf ice cream), for more of a lesser food. I eat the good stuff slowly and enjoy it more, and don't crave food as much. It's been part of an effective diet--I've lost 35 pounds since March.

Some farm memories, from Nebraska. I've never chopped silage, but he makes it sound like working cattle--hard, unpleasant work, that takes a bunch of folks.

Americans don't eat enough vegetables. Part of it may be that we don't know what to do with vegetables, except boil them to death, and that's not very good. So experiment--find a new vegetable, and try to cook it, or find a new way to cook a vegetable you already know. Eat your veggies!

But does that really matter? A man in L.A. recently died at the ripe old age of 112. He mostly ate sausage and waffles, and he took care of himself until he was 110. (He was also a veteran of the First World War, and lived in a home he built himself in 1935). Maybe we should all skip the veggies, and try some eggos and sausage. Or not.

A New Feature

2006-09-01T14:33:00.000-05:00

I want to start answering food questions on a regular basis, so if you have any food-related questions, post them in the comments. I'll start answering them next week.

Friday Link-o-Rama

2006-09-01T14:14:00.000-05:00

Researchers in Boston and New Zealand showed that eating berries keeps your mind sharp in old age. Weird that the different studies were both announced this week.

Wal-Mart has really stirred up the organic world by stocking organic produce. Lots of folks are predicting bad things for small farmers.

Penn State is offering a one-day class on processing venison. It sounds pretty cool...now, I just need to figure out how to get that deer.....

Eating wild in Colorado--wild plants, that is. I've eaten lamb's quarter; it's pretty good. It would be neat to be able to gather wild plants to eat.

It's tailgate time

2006-08-28T20:50:00.000-05:00

College football kicks off this weekend (Thursday evening, actually), and tailgating will once again be in full swing.

Tailgating America and the American Tailgater's Association are websites devoted wholly to tailgating.

The Gainsville Times has a nice write-up on tailgating, with tips, gear notes, and some background. (Trivia: at the University of Georgia, they have banned starting to tailgate prior to 7 AM. That's hardcore) They've also got some recipies.

Food safety tips for tailgaters, from Kansas State.

Men in Aprons shows us the best cuts of meat for grilling . Fillets and porterhouses don't reallly seem like tailgate food, but they are mighty tasty.

Finally, Seriously Good has a little something to motivate all of you to get out and fire up your smokers. There's nothing better than good meat and good times with good friends and family.

Monday Link-o-Rama

2006-08-28T20:27:00.000-05:00

A researcher at Texas A&M has found a way to make vegetable packaging fight foodborne illness. That's becoming more and more important with organic veggies, because they are fertilized with manure, which increases the chances of nasties hitchiking on your lettuce. Gig 'em, Aggies!

Foods and memory are strongly linked; that's why eating something you often had as a kid can make you feel so good. Leon Hale remebers comfort foods (and finds some new ones). I remember eating some of those things, but he doesn't mention my dad's childhood snack--mustart biscuits. That's a cold biscuit, with mustard on it. COme to think of it, I don't think Dad remembers those fondly, either.

A survey finds that people are confused by food labels and nutritional claims. That's not surprising, given that the rules seem to change every six months or so. So just stick to the basics--real food, cooked in a traditional way. Eventually, science will catch up with you (like finding out that butter is less-bad for you than margerine), and you'll enjoy eating in the meantime.

Coca-cola is being sued for the presence of benzene in drinks. Benzene is a carcinogen. Yummy!

It's the same old story--manufacturers are working hard to fabricate food that's as good for you as real food. But this story is from a food-industry website.

An analysis of what's being put in food, from Britain. Got maltodextrin?

Turkey update

2006-08-25T15:47:00.000-05:00

One of the bigger birds is trying to gobble. He isn't very good at it--he seems to lack confidence, but he's trying to gobble. What a neat sound.

Civil Unrest in Chicago

2006-08-25T15:44:00.000-05:00

Chicago's ban on fois gras took effect this week, and several restaurants defied it. Good for them! This seems to be a foot in the door for other food bannings (can veal be far behind?), and seems like the first step to banning meat.

It makes me wish I knew where to buy and how to cook fois gras. I'm all about solidarity in eating good stuff, and the descriptions sound wonderful.

How to Eat Fried Worms

2006-08-25T15:36:00.000-05:00

The movie "How to Eat Fried Worms" opens today, and some adventurous folks are showing us how to do just that.

Fake worm recipies from Detroit (gummy worms and the like).

And the real thing (including "wormzels," or worm-pretzels).

Ants, crickets, and wormy lolipops.

A worm-eating contest. Worm flavors include chipotle.

What's worse than finding a worm in your apple? (hold down your left mouse button and scroll down for the answer)

Finding half a worm!

That's it for me--this is one real food trend I can't really get behind.

Friday Link-o-rama

2006-08-25T15:05:00.000-05:00

I have time during the week to find interesting links, but I don't usually have time to post them 'til Friday. So here's the big pile 'o links for the week.

Small-town museums are using food history and regional cuisines to draw in visitors. Food is a big part of who we are, and how we feel about ourselves. It's no wonder that linking food and history is a big draw.
A small-town columnist says that folks put more thought into answering questions about favorite foods than anything else. And they couldn't make up their minds, either.

Another story about fair food, this time from Minnesota. There's a tacit (but unstated) recognition of the three basic fair-food groups: fried, frozen, and on-a-stick. Someday, a tinkerer will invent a way to put fried ice cream on a stick. That person will become the King of Fair Food. (And it will be a man, because a woman isn't going to waste her time trying to put fried ice cream on a stick.)

A book review of a couple of books about real food (but not a review of the book Real Food by Nina Planck). The benefits of eating real food include lessened chances of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and food poisoning; weight loss; cleaner rivers; and cleaner air. Plus real food tastes better.

A neat overview of the benefits and hardships organic farmers face, from the Wall Street Journal. ($ubscription required) There's a focus on Wal-Mart's recent move into organics. They can't push down prices for organic foods the way they've done for other things, because the risks to farmers are higher, and supplies are much tighter.

Fried okra at Too Many Chefs. The only way I like fried okra is sliced thin and fried to a crisp, so all the slime and okra flavor are gone. Your mileage may vary, though.

Biggles at MeatHenge is buying a truckload of custom-made charcoal. I'm jealous.

Once again, soy is under attack. And once again, the best preparations for it are traditional.

That's it for my big link roundup this week. Bon apetit!

Thanksgiving update

2006-08-18T14:03:00.000-05:00

Here are some pics of my Thanksgiving dinner project. There are seventeen birds in total: four royal palms, five bourbon reds, and six narragansetts, all hatched in mid July, and one royal palm and one blue palm, hatched in early July (named Stan and Ollie).

Here's the entire group. The two older birds are still bigger, but they younger birds are catching up in size.

Here's a closeup of Ollie, a royal palm. The palm color pattern is white with black in the wings and on the back. Palms are small as turkeys go; the younger birds are about to catch up in size (you can just see a narragansett leaving the frame to the left). They are also pretty flighty, which I don't care for. One more thing: I'm pretty sure Ollie is actually Olivia. I wish I had gotten a closeup of Stan so I could highlight the differences, because they are noticeable.

Here's a narragansett. They originated in Rhode Island, on Narragansett Bay. They should mature steel gray with white feather tips--very sharp looking.

Here's a bourbon red. They originated in Kentucky, and will mature a deep red, with white wings and tails. These are my favorite birds--they are almost friendly, and they talk more than the others. Plus, they seem to be better adapted to the heat than the other birds.

I'm not sure if I will actually have them ready in time for Thanksgiving, though. They should be 20 weeks old the week of Thanksgiving, and that's how long it takes to grow out an industrial bird. Maybe I should call this the "Christmas project" instead.

Eating locally

2006-08-18T10:03:00.000-05:00

That's a new trend, taking things one step further than eating organically. The idea is that, by only eating things grown withing 100 miles of your home, you cut pollution and energy usage a great deal more than by eating organic foods trucked in from California or Mexico (or, as Michael Pollan describes in Omnivore's Dilemma, flown in from Argentina). In practice, it's fairly difficult. Here are some chronicles of the effort:

In Vermont.

In Wales. Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5

In Canada. Here, it's not just local, but also wild.

In Philadelphia. No mention of local cheesteak sandwiches, though.

Eatlocal.net The heart of the movement.

The consensus is that it takes more work to find local food, and it costs more than normal. It also tastes better, and seems to be better for you, probably because folks switch from processed foods to fresh fruits and vegetables, which are better for you anyway.

I don't think I could handle a serious local diet, because I'd have to give up coffee. I started drinking black coffee when I was seven or eight (really), and I've been drinking several cups daily since I was about fifteen (wow--I can now say that I've been drinking coffee daily for most of my life!) I'm an addict, and I can't give it up.

Kohlrabi

2006-08-18T09:57:00.000-05:00

A columnist for the Des Moines register encounters kohlrabi. Puzzlement, and enjoyment, ensue. I wish my kohlrabi had done better--I only got a couple of, um, balls? projectiles? kohlrabis? I'm not sure what to call the individual items that I harvested. At any rate, they were good, and it would have been nice to get more.

Tomatoes

2006-08-18T09:52:00.000-05:00

It's tomato time again. Is there anything better than eating a ripe tomato in the garden, while it's still warm from the sun?

Seriously Good brings us this seriously cool pic of the variety of tomatoes.

Epicurious has a recipe for tomatoes stuffed with fresh mozzarella. I'll try that and get back to you.

Link-o-rama

2006-08-16T17:59:00.000-05:00

Kate at Accidental Hedonist has tips for cooking chicken. They are pretty good tips, especially the food safety tips. You should always assume that raw chicken is contaminated with germs that can make you sick, and handle it accordingly--nothing should touch the chicken and also touch food that is ready to serve unless you wash with soap and hot water first.

My favorite way to cook chicken is to butterfly it and grill it with a hot brick. I stole that one from a Bobby Flay show, and it works great. It's quick, too.

The New York Times says that coffee is very, very good for you. It lowers the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and cirrhosis of the liver substantially. It has more anti-oxidants than grape juice, raspberries, oranges, or blueberries. Two words: woo-hoo! (Or maybe two and a letter, Kenya double a, which is my favorite coffee.)

Soy is found in 60% of processed foods. Isoflavones in soy are similar to the hormone estrogen, and can impact the human body if you eat enough soy. This isn't a problem in Asian diets because the soy products there (mainly tofu and soy sauce) are fermented for up to 18 months, which makes them more digestible and breaks down the isoflavins. I wonder if I should skip soy for a while like I'm skipping corn? That shoudn't be too hard, because the only processed food I eat more than occasionally is coke zero. I should check out the label on coke zero, but I don't want to, because I like it. How sad that my guilty food pleasure is diet soda.

That's an example of food hypocricy. "Food hypocrisy is where you tell yourself that you are a moral, virtuous and pure creature because you don't eat certain food stuffs." It includes telling yourself something is good for you because it has one good ingredient, and ignore the bad ones (like Caesar salad, loaded with cheese and croutons and dressing); cancelling out, where one good thing cancels out another bad thing; and food substitution, where you eat a lot of a good thing, then eat a bad thing to make up for it.

That's food for thought.

Goat: it's what's for dinner

2006-08-11T10:41:00.000-05:00

The previous goat post is here

I finally broke down and bought the goat on Friday. The short review: it's pretty good-juicy, tender and mild. Lamb has a stronger flavor. However, it has a very low yield--4 pounds of meat from a 12 pound goat. That means the meat cost just over $10 per pound, which is on a par with steak. Cabrito joins crab and crawdads on the list of things that are more expensive and bothersome as steak, but less good. I probably won't make it again, but it was fun to try.

Here's the dialogue from the butcher shop:
"I want to buy a goat, please."
"We can't cut it up for you. The guys who cut them up went to lunch, and won't be back for an hour."
"Well, how big are these goats?"
"Ten or twelve pounds."
"OK, then. I'll take one whole goat."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"OK, then."

So they went back, and rummaged around, or whatever they do back there, and emerged five minutes later with a 12 pound whole goat. "Whole" in this sense doesn't mean "all the major cuts" or "a single big piece." "Whole" means all of the goat, from toes to nose. All they left behind were the innards and the skin. Even for me, it was a bit disconcerting. They put it in a plastic bag, and put that in a box, and charged me forty-one bucks.

I took my goat home and got it ready to cook. I took off the head, because it was too gross. I was left with something that looked like this:

(Trust me on this one. I've been personally involved in processing meat animals since I was six or seven. I've worked in a chicken-meat research lab. If I think a food product looks gross, it really is gross.)

Next, I dry-rubbed the goat with some cheapo "BBQ Spice Rub" I had laying around. It's mostly salt, with some sugar, and paprika for color, but it tastes OK. Then I stashed the goat in a trash bag, so L wouldn't come home and see him in all his lovely, whole-animal glory, and put him in the fridge.

On Saturday, I pulled him out of the fridge, and was confronted with a dilemma. My smoker is about a foot across. Mr. Goat was about eighteen inches long, with four long legs to contend with. No way that would work, so I pulled out the gas grill instead. I wanted to cook him with indirect heat, but that didn't quite work--he was so long that, while most of him was above the burner I had off, part of him was directly over the flames. I wound up putting some foil over that part of the grill, to moderate the heat a little, and moving him every half hour so no one part would get overdone.

I kept him on the grill for just over three hours. Fortunately, at about hour two, I figured out how to get the major muscles off the direct heat. I stood him up on all fours in the grill, closed the hood, and let him finish that way. After an hour of standing on the grill, he was ready, and all the big muscles registered 145 degrees. I pulled him in, wrapped him in foil, and let him rest for a half hour or so.

I went ahead and sliced all the meat up on the spot, and wound up with what you see at the top of the post.

As I said before, my twelve-pound goat yielded four pounds of meat, but it's mighty tasty. It's tender and juicy, despite my less-than-ideal cooking method. The flavor is mild--not at all like lamb (which surprises me a little), and not much like anything else, either. Goat tastes like goat, but it's not what you would expect. It's much better.

I wish I could offer a recipe here, because it would immediately be the best recipe for cabrito on the internet, but I really wouldn't recommend cooking a whole goat by standing it up on a too-small gas grill. If any of you try something that works better, feel free to comment or e-mail.