Last week I shared our method for slaughtering a pig by hand.  Previously we shared why we wanted to slaughter. Today’s final post is reflective of the whole experience. Work to Be Done Rachel: Once Red was dead, we all worked quickly to process her body.  There was no spoken communication, but there was a shared feeling that part of honoring her life was to finish the work.  There was a sense that to raise [...]

Meet Red.  She’s the pig we slaughtered last Saturday with the able assistance of another meat lover, JR, and Red’s owner, Denise of 2Silos farm.  Earlier I published why we wanted to slaughter a pig. What follows is a factual account of how we humanely harvested this meat animal.  It was hard manual labor that we attended to with reverence for the life we took. I have included pictures to illustrate exactly what happened.  Some [...]

A few months ago, Denise Beno from 2Slios farm tweeted that she had an unclaimed Duroc/York pig this season.  She asked if anyone might want to buy a whole or half.  Alex and I and decided that purchasing a side of pig would be a good way to fill our freezer with well raised meat and give him more experience with home charcuterie. In making arrangements with Denise, Alex learned that traditional processors often discard [...]

Last year we were members of the 2Silos winter meat CSA. It was a great experience. Alex and Lil enjoyed local eggs, chicken, beef, lamb, and more all winter long. Alex wrote a review of his experience in mid winter. Owner Denise Beno is trying out a new method for CSA signup called the Point. Because this is her first experience with this online program, she is offering a $99 discount on the regularly priced [...]

Readers have been asking me about recommendations for Summer CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) subscriptions.  Wikipedia has a good entry on CSAs if you are not familiar. The truth is that this year, we will not participate in one.  We think we can grow everything we need in our backyard garden supplemented with trips to the farmers market every once in awhile. For two years we participated in small CSA. We can’t remember the name at [...]

To this point I haven’t posted much on our kitchen/food blog. Rachel has been after me to remedy this oversight and now the Restaurant Widow has taken me to task over not posting about my meat CSA. First off, what is a CSA? If you are reading a food blog, I expect you know already. For those who do not know, CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. The basic concept is that at the start [...]