Non-Traditional Living Room Decor

About nine weeks ago we butchered our hog.  It wasn't a walk in the park, but it wasn't that difficult either.

Since we didn't have a meat saw (an electric one, that is) and didn't want to mess with the sawzall, we just boned the entire carcass.  We had boneless pork chops (i.e. pork loin), tenderloin and lots and lots of ground pork.

We also made our own bacon (go drool over OFG's recent bacon-making while you're at it) and cured our own hams.  Well, technically we are still curing our own hams.  

When we butchered the hog, we boned the hams and I rubbed two of them with Morton's Sugar Cure, let them sit in a zippy-bag for two weeks, rubbed them down again with the cure, then let them sit for another three weeks.  Technically we let the hams sit in the cure longer than suggested, but that's how it happened; if you don't hear from me after I say we tried the hams, I'm probably dead. Two weeks ago we rubbed the cure off the hams, rinsed and soaked them for a few hours, then dried them off and put them back in the fridge sans zippy-bag for "equilibration"...., whatever that means.  

Now all we have to do is dry cure them.  Which basically means wrapping the hams in paper and hanging them some place that's 70-85 degrees.  For up to six months.  Yes.  Six months.  In 70-85 degree temps.   Sounds like a rotted meat disaster just waiting to happen.  But we're going through with it anyhow.

When I took the hams out of the refrigerator, I gave them a good sniffing.  Smelled like meat.  Not, "I just killed this thing and it's still twitching" meat smell, nor a "Wow, did you pick this up in a ditch in the summer time?" kind of smell either.  Just a ham'ish, meat'ish kind of smell.  The outside of the hams were dry, but not crunchy-dry, just tacky.  Now I wish I would have left a thicker layer of fat on them.  Live & learn.

Hunk o' meat that has been in my refrigerator since the beginning
of November.   It is now the middle of January.  And it's not rotted.
Pretty neat, hugh?

Anyways, after wrapping them hams in "Official Cured Ham Wrapping Paper" (i.e. brown paper grocery bags), we stuffed them in old orange "socks" and debated on exactly where we were going to hang these puppies.

I thought of hanging them from the dining room chandelier, but I didn't think the light fixture would have handled the load well.  Maybe under the kitchen cabinets?  Not unless I wanted to have to remove the cats from them every morning.  How about from the living room curtain rods?  Bet Martha Stuart never had Ham finials in her decor.

We finally settled on hanging them from the fireplace mantle, which made perfect sense.  The mantle is a huge honk'n piece of timber and it was high enough that the cats would have to actually exert themselves if they wanted to get to them.  So Paul got some screws and proceeded to screw them into the mantle.  When he was eyeballing where to put the screws I said to him, "Make sure they are centered on the mantle, I don't want it to look weird."  

And he turned around and just stared at me.

Yeah.  We wouldn't want the huge raw chunks of pig flesh to be hanging off-center in front of our fireplace now would we?  Because that would just look.....weird.

So now we just wait.  I doubt we're going to wait the entire six months because I'm worried that they'll dry out too much since they don't have the skin on them and the fact that it's really dry in here.  Winter is dry enough, but we heat with wood and it only averages between 40 - 45% humidity in the house.  Great for zapping people with static electricity, not so great for hanging hams.  I'm going to shoot for a two month hanging period.  

Or until we get hungry and open up those puppies and fry them up.

Or until the cats manage to yank them down and eat them during the night.

Or until my Mom can't stand it any longer and makes me take them down.

Personally, I'd LOVE to see not only the hams, but an entire row of summer sausages and snack sticks hanging in my living room.  Who wouldn't want their fireplace mantle bedecked with deli deliciousness?!  Now that would be some yummy decor!

Pricing out the Pig

It seems like the pork posts will never end.  And they wouldn't if I waited until all our sausage was mixed up and our hams were fully cured, but I need to get some finality in the pork butchering day. Here are the totals from our hog butchering weekend (two weekends ago):

Loin: 15 lbs.
Tenderloin: 2 lbs.
Roasts:  36 lbs.
Ham: 13 lbs.
Ribs: 11 lbs.
Ground: 51 lbs.
Liver: 7 lbs.
Lard: 6 lbs.
Jowl: 4 lbs.
Bacon: 32 lbs.

For a Grant Total of 170 pound of pork goodness!  I didn't even include the 20 or so pounds of meaty bones for soup stock or the countless treats and future suppers for the Giant Sloppy Dog.

But I also have to admit that we did waste more than I would have liked to.  I didn't save the hocks to smoke (but Charlie was a very happy, hock-chewing dog).  I didn't clean out the intestines to make our own sausage casings.  The head never made it to "head cheese".  And I didn't even tan the hide to make footballs.  Instead we decided to pay tribute to the Pork God by placing the odds & ends and other remnants on a wooden altar and set it ablaze so the smoke from the burnt offerings would rise into the heavens to appease the Pork God.  In other words, we tossed the guts & stuff into a huge burn pile and lit it.

So now we know the amount of meat, lets look at the amount of money:

Yummy the Pig: $240
Feed: $90
Pig-Sitting: $50
Total: $380

So even if I just divided the price of the pig into the total poundage of meat, we're at $2.24 per pound.  Not bad, not bad at all.  But since I'm occasionally a bit anal, I went to the local supermarket and got prices (some on sale, some not) on the various cuts of pork.  You know, just to figure out how much we would have paid had we bought all that meat at the store....and so I could remind myself that it is, in fact, worth all the work.  That "Grocery Store" number was $587.....a two hundred dollar savings!

I'm a happy bacon-eat'n, pork chop-grill'n, ham-snacking gal.

Making Bacon, Part 2

Well, this isn't the most informative post on how to make bacon.  But there are pictures, so that counts as eye candy at least, right?

The bacons cured in the refrigerator for nine days.  On day ten they were taken out of their zippy bags and soaked for several hours to remove excess cure and salt, then patted dry and left out on the porch (it was cccccccooold outside) until the next day.  Paul smoked them for several hours at a low temperature, around 150 degrees, not so much to "cook" them, but to impart a hickory taste to them.

We put them back out on the porch (it was still ccccooold outside, even during the day) to cool off and firm up for slicing.

I must say, we're pretty spoiled.  Having that meat slicer is awesome when it comes to home meat processing (thanks again, Dad).  But if we didn't have it, I'd probably just cut the bacons into 2 pound chunks (come on, what family eats just one pound of bacon?!) and freeze it like that.  Then when we wanted bacon, I'd just slice it as needed.

Then came the real test......the taste test!

It was good, but not exactly what I was expecting.  I used Morton's tender quick and added maple syrup, so I knew it was going to be a sweeter bacon, but I suppose I was hoping for a more "bacon'y" taste.  And there wasn't really that much fat in a lot of the slabs so there wasn't much in the way of drippings to save (you DO save your bacon drippings, right?!).  Not only wasn't there a lot of drippings, but the maple syrup flavoring was too powerful for what I would normally use the drippings for.

Don't get me wrong.  This bacon is delicious.  But it's not your typical Oscar Meyer package of bacon.  I think I'd call it a "custom flavor".  Which, technically, it is.  Maple flavored and hickory smoked, to be exact.

What I should have done (slaps self in the forehead) was made two or three different bacon rubs.  Then we would have been able to modify our recipe easier.  As it stands now, we have thirty two pounds (minus much taste testing and snacking last night) of this new Hickory Maple bacon and probably fifteen pounds of the "normal" smoked bacon left from the last hog.

Variety (albeit somewhat limited) is the (bacon cure) spice of life, right?

Making Bacon (and Ham, and Sausage)

For the past four or five years, we've had our hog made into the usual, familiar cuts.  Two of those cuts, the ham steaks and pork chops, have bones in them.  But since we didn't have use of an electric saw (i.e. fancy, much nicer, and much faster than a hack saw), going boneless seemed like the easiest way to get all that yummy pork in the freezer.

Although I did say that this was our first pig-solo-gig, we did have some help.  Aaron (who's done more than his fair share of hog butchering) came over to help us with the massive amounts of meat sitting on that cutting table.  Paul and I would have been able to go it alone, but I really wanted Aaron's bacon expertise when slicing apart the Holy Grail of the porker.  And it definitely helped speed things along.

The loins were cut out in two huge, long pieces. They were then cut into more manageable hunks, perfect for roasting or cutting into boneless pork chops.  The tenderloins were cut out whole and wrapped up separately.  The ribs were cut out, trimmed and rolled up and jammed into the freezer.  One of the back legs (ham) was made into roasts and the front legs were ground up along with any other miscellaneous hunks of meat and fat.

One of the other things the butcher would do for us was cure and smoke our hams.  Since we were the butchers this time around, we were going to have to do this step ourselves.  I deboned the second back leg and made it into two smaller hams.  And last, but not least, the belly (bacon) was cut and trimmed.  Oooo....bacon in the mak'n.

Isn't that. just. beautiful. 

But that "bacon" wasn't really bacon yet.  It was just two long flaps of fat and meat, fat and meat.  In order for that hunk of belly meat to become bacon, it needs to be cured.  Same with the hams.  I was a bit anxious about doing our own curing.  It seems like it should be complicated, but it's really darned simple. We bought Morton's Tender Quick for the bacons and Morton's Sugar Cure for the ham.

I sliced the thirty-two pounds of soon-to-be-bacons into eight pieces (perfect for 1-gallon zippy bags).   The Tender Quick curing salts are based upon weight so my chosen recipe called for two cups of Tender Quick, two cups of brown sugar (I just used white sugar and added some molasses) and two cups of maple syrup.  When I started to mix it all up in the tub, I was a little worried.  All that sticky maple syrup caused the cure and sugar to turn into a big, sticky, gloppy blob of a thing.  So it wasn't as simple as just rubbing dry ingredients into the bacon.  I kind'a just smooshed the glob of goo into the slabs of meat and it eventually started to "melt" from the warmth of my hands as I worked it in.  I didn't put any maple syrup on the Sugar Cure for the hams, so they were much easier to work with.

The zippy bags of soon-to-be-bacon are in a spare fridge and get turned every day.  They'll be in there for an entire week and then I'll stick them in the smoker.  The hams will take a little while longer.  They were rubbed down with the Sugar Cure.  A week later, they were rubbed down again.  And in another week, the final rub and another week's wait.  Then finally, after three weeks, the hams will be soaked for a half hour or so and I'll toss them into the smoker.  That's the plan anyhow.  I sureshit hope it turns out.  Can you imagine how pissed disappointed I'd be if they ended up rotting or tasting horrid or if the electricity goes out or if a bear breaks into the fridge and eats everything or if a SWAT team come crashing through our windows and confiscates our homegrown meat in some botched up meth lab bust or, or, or.....

I'll let you know in a few more days.  With pictures, of course.  Probably of me eating all that bacon.

Oh!  I've found a new beauty secret!  All that time I spent cutting that porker up made my hands soooooo very, very soft.  Granted, it was almost impossible to get that water-impervious layer of lard scrubbed off of my hands after butchering, but once it was off they were softer than a baby's butt.  Then, two days later, I treated my hands to a sugar / salt / maple syrup scrub.  The callouses on my hands had just about disappeared.  So not only did I now have soft and smooth hands, but they smelled like BACON!!

I'm now working on my new home-based business; LardLucious.  Hand creams, sugar scrubs, and lotions made from lard!  Bacon scented, of course.  I wonder if I should put a disclaimer on the containers saying that the products should not be used if you'll be in close proximity to hungry people / animals?  I'd hate to have to deal with a lawsuit involving the LardLucious wearer and the neighbor's German Shepherd.

Bringing home the Yummy (Bacon)

This weekend was the first that we were expecting cooler temps in the daytime and freezing (or close to it) overnight.  Normally this would only mean that I may have to chip ice out of stock tanks and light the wood stove at night, but this weekend it was going to mean much, much more.

More sausage, more pork chops & more bacon to be exact.

Paul, Rhiannon and I went to the school barn to pick up Yummy on Saturday.  Well, not so much "Pick up" as "Try to convince him to get into the back of the trailer with the prospect of getting a huge bucket full of slop".  Which wasn't as easy as I had hoped.  It took us close to a half-hour to finally get his plump butt in there.  But after that it was an uneventful drive home.

What's in the trailer, Ma?

Although we've helped butcher hogs before, this was our first solo-gig.  Yummy never left the trailer; at least not alive.  A well placed .22 round to the brain ended his life here on earth and began his new existence as sustenance for our family.  We bled him out (a deep cut just behind the jaw, into the jugular) and hoisted him up using the tractor.  I finally got to use my birthday present from last year (thanks, sees-ter!!):

284 pounds of porky goodness
This weight was "on the hoof", although bled out.

While the pig was hoisted up, Paul gutted it.  Choice organs were saved for us (liver, mainly) and Charlie got just about everything else but the intestines and stomach.  He's in doggie heaven on butchering days.  After the insides were outside, Paul cut the head from the carcass, we hosed it off and had to get it off the tractor boom.

Since we didn't have a stout tree limb to hang the hog from, we stole an idea from Ohio Farm Girl and made a Pig Cradle to skin him.  We would have continued using the tractor to hang it from, but we don't have a safety "lock" to keep the front end loader secured in case of a hydraulic hose / valve / cylinder fail.  It wouldn't be a pretty sight if there were some sort of tractor mechanical failure.

Pig on a Cradle

Once the carcass was on the cradle, we went to skinning it.  Which wasn't as easy as it sounds.  Depending on factors that we have yet to fully understand, one may be able to just start peeling the skin off like any other animal.  Or not.  We ended up having to flesh (i.e. making small cuts using a very sharp knife) out more than half the pig.  It doesn't look very pretty either.  But since the main reason for skinning / fleshing out the pig was to save the fat for lard, pretty didn't really matter.

After the pig was relieved of it's skin, we hosed it off some more and used the tractor to haul cradle and carcass into the garage and onto the nice, stainless steel table that my Dad gave me last year.(Interesting gifts I get from my family, hugh?  Game scale, SS table.  I think it's great!!)  There it sat, overnight, to chill in the 35 degree darkness.

And "Thh, thhh, thhhthhh, That's all folks!

No, that's not really all there is.  To be continued.  I gott'a get back in the kitchen to mix up some breakfast sausage, rub some hams and cure me some bacons!!

Ribs. That's why.

We still have a good amount of pork in the freezer.  And deer season is just around the corner.  So exactly why did I end up buying another 240 pounds of meat at the fair?  Well, besides the fact that I was unsupervised and had a couple of bucks in my back pocket.

Because each hog has a limited amount of bacon and only two slabs of ribs:

Half slab of yummy porky rib goodness from last year's hog.

Now if the science geeks and the animal husbandry guys can get together to make a hybrid hog that puts out a carcass that yielded only ribs and bacon, I'd be one happy camper.  Although I wonder what the hog would look like.  Wait a second, don't even go there, you'll ruin my happy dream of a BaconRib Hog.

Freezer space is going to be at a premium very, very soon.  That is why I intend on canning everything possible from our deer hunts.  I made shredded BBQ deer, stew chunks & ground venison and canned it last year.  I really like the convenience of having "Heat & Eat Meat" on the pantry shelves especially when I haven't defrosted anything from the freezer.  Open a few cans of beans, tomatoes, seasoning & add the ground venison for an easy homemade chili.  Grab a package of hamburger buns on the way home from work (or make your own), heat up the BBQ venison and you've got yourself a mean sandwich.

I haven't canned anything pig related though, and I might try that this year.  Because even if I do end up canning or jerky'ing all the deer meat we'll still be tight on freezer space after we butcher Yummy in a few weeks.

I might have to defrost the last slab of ribs in order to make more room in the freezer.  I'm sure my daughter won't mind another helping.

Have any of you canned pork?  If so, would you like to share recipes with us?  I'd be grateful for the help and ideas :)

Absentee Pig Keepers

I bought a hog at the County Fair last Friday.  It was trailered from the fair to it's new home by our Ag teacher friend and she and her students are caring for it during the week at the barn.  My job was to take care of the hog on the weekends when the kids weren't at school.

So yesterday I packed Grandma and Rhiannon in the car and we all went to check on "Yummy".  Yummy was previously named "Bacon", but the other Grandma said she didn't like that name so Rhiannon re-named him "Yummy".  Probably not exactly what Grandma had in mind, but that's too bad.  You're not supposed to name the animals we're going to eat anyhow.  He's lucky he's got a name.

Anyways, we fed Yummy and gave him an apple core for dessert.  I don't think he's ever seen an apple.  Before we got him he was on "show pig" food and now he's on a basic hog grower feed.  It's not the most cost-effective strategy, but since he's not at our place we can't give him our scraps, extra milk or eggs, nor can we use all the wild forage in the woods to fatten him up.

I filled up his water tube (a 4' tall, 6" wide PVC pipe open at the top, sealed at the bottom with a metal nipple at the base), hosed him off a little and we said goodbye to Yummy and made our way home.

It was a 27.4 mile round-trip drive.  Again, not very cost effective.  This pig is going to cost us more than I thought.

So after talking with the Ag teacher (Adrian), we decided that we would pay one of the kids that also had hogs at the barn to feed Yummy on the weekends.  I would pay the kid $10 each weekend, but not directly in cash.  Adrian smartly decided that instead of giving the kid ten bucks each weekend to blow on soda or whatever it is pre-teens do with a Hamilton, that I would put it towards his show animal for next year's County Fair.  This way he wouldn't have to run around trying to scrape up money (apparently like every 4-H'er does when they want to get a show animal) next Spring.  It probably won't buy an animal outright, but it would be a nice start.

It seems that we may not see Yummy more than a few times before he's put in the freezer.  This isn't exactly how I envisioned our first foray into pig-keeping would turn out, but so far it seems as if it will work.  And I won't have to.

Weather Report: Beautiful weekend under County Fair skies

We had a busy and fun filled weekend at the County Fair.  The weather was awesome.  There have been some years when the temps were in the 90's but this time we were blessed with low to mid 70's and partly cloudy to sunny skies.  There was a little bit of mist on the first day we went, but nothing that would have kept us at home.  The mild weather was perfect for the fair-goers, but especially nice for the livestock.

And you know, that's what the County Fair is all about.  The livestock.

I don't remember attending any County Fairs growing up.  Probably because we lived in suburbia and County Fairs were substituted with  Town "Fests", which were basically carnivals, food vendors, live entertainment and fireworks.  I think our town had brought in a petting zoo for some of the Fests, but that was about all you got in terms of animals.  To see honest-to-goodness livestock, one had to travel a couple of hours west to DeKalb County's Fair or go to the Springfield State Fair.

So when we moved out here, I was thrilled to be in an area where the County Fair was really a big deal.  I mean, you hear people talking about next year's Fair even before the current one is over with.  I suppose that's what happens in more rural areas, even nowadays.  I'm glad that we belong to a community that takes pride in their pigs, gets giddy with their goats, coo over their cattle and can literally talk turkey.  And that's just the livestock.  The displays for home canned goodies, homemade pies and other delectables was awe-inspiring.  The craft section was also a sight to behold with all the quilts, although I admit that I saw one too many of those crocheted toilet paper covers that look like southern bells.  I mean, do people actually use those things?!?  Anyhow.  It's nice to know that there are still people, young people at that, who take pride in being able to actually make something with their own two hands.

Rhiannon and I visited our Boer kids that were being shown by the local FFA group and sat through some of the dairy and meat goat judging.  Our goats didn't do bad, but neither did they get Grand Champion or First Place or whatever it's called.  I think we got a second & third place (although there were only five in that group, so that really isn't saying much), but we really weren't in it for the ribbons anyhow.  But come on, who wouldn't be just a little bit proud of a big ol' blue ribbon?  I was hoping to get a better grasp of how the whole show thing worked, but didn't get involved enough with the kids (goat kids or human kids doing the showing) so that was pretty much a bomb.  I'm hoping to get together again soon with our Ag teacher friend and pick her brain about it.  Maybe we'll sponsor goats again next year and I'll let Rhiannon show one as well.

After saying hello to our goats, we did the rest of the livestock circuit; cattle, pigs, rabbits, poultry.  And Rhiannon and Grandma got up close & personal with our newest addition:

The Ag teacher heard it through the grapevine that someone wanted to sell one of their hogs so she introduced pig-seller to potential-pig-buyer, we negotiated a price and I was suddenly the proud owner of a pig.  Just like that.  Really.  Just like that.  Dangerous, being able to just go up to somebody, give them $240 and you got yourself a 240 pound pig.  I didn't have a trailer with me and I didn't have a pig pen set up.  Heck, I didn't even know what to feed this thing.  I mean, I've read (and re-read now that I'm in this particular situation) Ohio Farmgirl's"Pigs" posts, but I still didn't have any idea what we were going to do with this porker.

Luckily for me, we were able to have it hauled to the Ag teacher's barn where "Bacon" will reside until the first cold weekend when we will haul it here and put that two hundred plus hunk o' meat into the freezer.  The Ag teacher (and most likely her student underlings) will take care of Bacon during the school week and I'll take care of him on the weekend.  Sweet deal, if you asked me.  We didn't have to make a last-second, half-assed pig pen and I only have to deal with the animal twice a week.  Of course, we intend on paying back the kindness with porky-goodness conveniently packaged in white butcher paper.

She who cannot be left alone

My husband could give me a credit card and drop me off at Macy's for the afternoon without batting an eye.  Because he knows that I would'nt spend a flat dime.

But do you know what happens when you let your wife go to the County Fair with a couple of greenbacks in her back pocket?

That's what he gets for not coming with.

Details to follow.  Because even I still don't know exactly what the details are.