Showing Up

That's the theme from my Get to Work Book for March. It bears keeping in mind.

Today I continued some kitchen work - canning trotter gear and chicken stock, prepping pork fat for lardo, rendering the last of the lard and making some "cracklings" aka pork rinds or fried pork fat. Not a low calorie day, but a little goes a long way. This is all part of what I'm calling the "freezer reclamation" project. I don't know about you, but our freezers (we have a small chest freezer in the basement) are almost always full, and often we have no idea what's in there. It's good to get things out of the freezer and onto the shelves.

Things are starting to get back to routine after our week away. It's amazing how seven or eight days away can almost entirely erase the rhythms you had before, but I feel like mine are pretty well established now, which is quite satisfying. Even this blog post - Monday is my usual day to post. It just makes it easier.

Also, I'm pleased to announce that one of my stories was a finalist for the Breakwater Review Fiction Prize. You can read it here.

Showing up, and moving forward! Have a great week.

Three Pigs and a Cow

walk into a bar...

Not really.  There were three organic pigs and a cow (carcasses, mind you) at the sausage making weekend I got to participate in a couple of weekends ago.  I missed the first day where they broke down the cow (not used for sausage) and only got a few hours in on Saturday when we were cutting away all the meat from the pigs.  However, I did learn, on the last day, how to twist sausages.  Next year I just plan on living with the hosts so I can be there for every single minute of it.

I have to say, it was a great experience.  Even though I wasn't there for the whole thing, I learned a lot.  (Of course whether I retain this info is up for debate.)  But I also got to take part in a great moment of community.  I entered the weekend just wanting to learn what goes into the process as well as to "meet my meat," so to say.  I was there to help the primaries (the three guys, including the farmer whose animals we were using, who do this every year) put up their sausages and salamis (okay, that sounds like a sexual innuendo, which is totally unintentional but amusing considering the source).  Not only did I get to meet new people (I'm learning that Hamilton and its environs has some very cool characters), but they shared some of the results of the weekend with me.  Seriously, I was not expecting my own little portion.

One of the hosts said that the weekend felt like what the holidays should be about, and I have to say, I couldn't agree more.

We worked in the garage.  It kept both the meat and us cold.

Working on a side of beef.

 I hadn't arrived yet so I have no idea what that guy (whose name I don't recall) is looking at, but look!  there's salami on the table.

I just love this photo because it's got both glamour and pork.  What more could you ask for?  Oh yeah, the pig's feet - they all came home with me.   Yay!  I'm going to make trotter gear and The Breslin Pig's Foot - a kind of pig's foot sausage, which I believe was inspired by musette, a sausage that I got to sample at dinner on Sunday night.  Oh my beautiful musette.