I have no pictures of the turkey or family portraits or plates of food from this Thanksgiving.  Instead, I have pictures of Big Mac. Big Mac is a hog raised by my mother’s cousin’s family, the Barkers.  After Thanksiving dinner (including the delicious ham of one of Mac’s former barn-mates) a group of us went out to visit the pigs.  We found Mac, a solid large Hereford. And when he turned around, we saw Big [...]

I am a mad woman cooking and cleaning for tonight’s POM Party.  The people at POM Wonderful sent me two cases of fresh pomegranates and some juice with which to host a dinner.  I am featuring this non-local seasonal ingredient with a host of Ohio seasonal ingredients.  As two diners are cow’s milk sensitive, this is a cow dairy free menu. The menu is: sciurus rillette with Osage Lane Creamery danish hansen goat cheese and [...]

If you home cure meat, this might be a familiar site: Five pounds of saucisson sec and a fifteen pound serrano-style salted air-dryed ham hanging in our basement.   Both are made from the meat of Red, the hog we slaughtered in April.  The saucisson sec will hang for three to four weeks and be taken on our long back country canoe trip in July.  The ham will dry until the fall at the earliest. Curing [...]

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 [...]