Bacon Linguine Fiesta Recipe

We used our home-cured bacon in a recipe for the first time tonight, and it was amazing!  We used the bacon from batch #1, which turned out a bit too strongly flavored to be eaten on its own, but what a fantastic addition to a pasta dish!  Just that small amount of bacon added flavor to the whole dish. 

This is NOTHING like store bought bacon.  The difference is unbelievable.

Here's the recipe we made up.  We're calling it "Bacon Linguine Fiesta."  It makes a big batch, so there's plenty for company or for leftovers.

1 lb. home cured bacon (from batch #1), diced
1 green bell pepper
1 red bell pepper
1 yellow bell pepper
1 purple onion
1 white onion
7 medium tomatoes
12 oz. sliced mushrooms
1 lb. linguine
Shredded cheese to garnish

Cook the linguine according to the directions on the package.

In a large frying pan, cook the bacon gently at a low temperature, stirring constantly until it begins to release some of its fat into the pan. 

Add the mushrooms to the bacon and continue to cook, stirring frequently, until the mushrooms are done.

Remove the bacon and mushrooms from the pan, allowing any excess pan drippings to drain back into the pan.  Add the bacon and mushrooms to the cooked, drained pasta and toss thoroughly to mingle the flavors.

In the remaining bacon fat in the pan, cook the remaining vegetables.

Serve the pasta on plates, topped with a generous helping of veggies.

Garnish with a sprinkle of shredded cheese.

Making Guanciale

I'm not Italian, I don't consider myself a gourmet cook, and until a few weeks ago I wouldn't have been able to pronounce "guanciale" much less known what the word meant.  So why am I suddenly making 17+ lbs. of the stuff?

We butchered a pig recently, and I'm suddenly faced with the task of learning how to turn all the different piggy parts into different kinds of food.  I've been rendering lard, curing bacon, cooking pork chops and eating sausage.  But why guanciale?

Guanciale is the Italian name for pig's jowls that have been cured and dried.  Supposedly, it's a bit similar to bacon or pancetta.  I wouldn't know.  I've never tasted the stuff.

But wait... jowls, you say?  Who does jowls better than a Guinea hog?  And who had bigger jowls than the obese hog we just butchered?  I mean really---look at the size of those things!

 

I had read that the jowls can be cured just like bacon, but frankly, when I realized that this hog produced 54 lbs. of ACTUAL bacon meat, I figured why make more?  If the jowls are considered to be a delicacy when prepared this other way, then why not take advantage of the fact that I now had 17.5 lbs. of jowl meat?

So, as usual, it was off to the internet to do research!  Here are some of the sites I looked at:

Guanciale
Guanciale:  Italian-Style Jowl Bacon
Home Cure Guanciale Is Finished
The Art of the Cure
Bucatini all' Amatriciana, Making Guanciale, and Charcutepalooza!
Making Guanciale
Homemade Guanciale

Most of the recipes I found online called for 2 lbs. of jowl meat.  I had more than 17 lbs., so obviously I had to recalculate the ingredients.


Most of the recipes I found suggested that you trim the jowls into neat rectangles and make a point to cut out the salivary glands.  Because I was doing this on the day we got the whole pig back from the butcher, I was also curing 54 lbs. of bacon, rendering 22 lbs. of leaf lard, and finding room in the freezer for the other 200 lbs. of meat and backfat.  So trimming the jowls really didn't seem like a priority.

I washed the jowls thoroughly and cut them into chunks that would fit into the containers I had.

Then I rubbed them all over with the cure, closed the containers, and put them in the refrigerator.

Here's the recipe I used:

17.5 lbs. fresh Guinea hog jowl meat.
4.5 cups coarse kosher salt
4.5 cups sugar
1/4 cup whole black peppercorns
20 bay leaves, crushed.
1 heaping TB thyme (ground)

They stayed in the refrigerator for 9 days.  On day 3, I turned them over and rubbed a little more salt on them, but other than that I left them alone.

On day 9, I took the chunks of cured meat out of their containers, rinsed them thoroughly, and dried them with paper towels.

I cut a length of butcher's twine (which I happened to already have on hand because it's what I used to make a new drive band for my spinning wheel a few weeks ago).  Then I poked a hole through the thick part of the meat with a skewer, and used the skewer to push the string through the hole.

After curing, the meat is supposed to hang in a cool, dark place for a month.  Our old house is drafty and hard to heat, so in the winter we close off a few of the rooms and don't bother heating them.  We decided that hanging the meat in our unheated dining room sounded like a more appetizing idea than hanging them down in our tiny, dank, dirt-floored basement.

We happened to have a portable rack for hanging clothes on, so I hung the chunks of meat from that.  I put a lid from a large plastic storage bin underneath to catch any drippings.  And I closed the drapes to keep the room as dark as possible.

Now the task is to wait for a month and see what happens!

Curing Bacon

Mmm... bacon!  What could be better?  How about home-cured, nitrite-free bacon from a pastured, heritage breed of hog?

 The extra-large Guinea hog we just butchered provided us with a whopping 54 lbs. of bacon.  Our butcher doesn't include curing the bacon or hams as part of his service, so I turned to the internet to teach me how to cure it myself.

After studying lots of pages like these:
Home Cured Bacon
How to Make, Cure, and Smoke Homemade Bacon
Home Cured Bacon Recipe
Curing Your Own Bacon
Making Your Own Bacon:  It's Easy and Satisfying

I finally felt ready to try it on my own.  I didn't use any of the recipes I found online exactly, but adapted them to suit my preferences and my available ingredients.  In particular, I decided to skip the nitrates and nitrites by avoiding the pink curing salts called for in most recipes.  Because of that, my bacon won't be pink like store bought bacon, but since those additives have questionable food safety, I think it's worth it to avoid adding them if I don't have to.

I started with 2 BIG slabs of fresh bacon meat, each weighing about 27 lbs.

I had purchased a supply of large, flat Rubbermaid containers to contain the bacon while it was curing, so the first thing I had to do was cut the big slabs of meat into smaller slabs that would fit in my containers.  You can also use large Ziploc bags, but since I had so much bacon to cure at once I figured I'd use containers that stack easily without sliding off.

Here are my smaller slabs, cut up and ready to be cured.

Next, I prepared the curing mixes.  I used two different recipes---one more complex and one more simple---just in case I ended up not liking one of them.  I didn't want to end up with 54 lbs. of badly flavored bacon!

Bacon Recipe #1

27 lbs. fresh Guinea hog bacon meat
2.5 cups coarse kosher salt
1 cup smoked sea salt flakes
1.25 cups brown sugar
1.25 cups maple syrup
1.25 cups apple cider
1 cup juniper berries
1/2 cup coarse black pepper
40 bay leaves, crumbled
0.25 cups minced garlic
3 TB thyme
3 TB nutmeg

Bacon Recipe #2


27 lbs. fresh Guinea hog bacon meat
4 cups coarse kosher salt
2 cups brown sugar
1.5 cups maple syrup
0.25 cup whole black peppercorns
1 TB thyme

Here's a photo of Recipe #1, all ready to use:

I rubbed this mixture liberally all over the slabs of meat and placed them in their containers.

I put the covers on the containers and stacked them in the refrigerator, where they stayed for 8 days.  About halfway through the curing process, I took the meat out of each container, turned it over, and rubbed a little extra salt on, just to be on the safe side.  At that point, the meat was already releasing its liquids and starting to get firm and fragrant with the spices.

On day 8, I took the meat out of the refrigerator, rinsed each piece thoroughly with water, and patted it dry with paper towels.  It had quite a firm texture by then.

Here's how the meat looked when it came out of the fridge:

Here's what the top (fatty) side of the meat looked like after it was rinsed:

And here's what the bottom side looked like after it was rinsed:

I preheated the oven to 200 degrees F, put a cookie sheet on the lowest oven rack to catch any drippings, and arranged the slabs of cured bacon on the upper two racks.  I roasted them like that for about 2.5 hours, or until the internal temperature of the meat reached 150 degrees.

Because I had such a large quantity of bacon, I could only fit a portion of it in the oven at a time, so the roasting stage had to be repeated several times to give each slab of meat a turn.

After the roasting, the slabs of bacon rested in a pan on the counter top until they returned to room temperature.

 

Then with a sharp knife, I cut them into slices as thin as I could.  This would be easier with a meat slicer, but a knife will do, if you don't mind having your bacon thick cut.

The hog this bacon is from was extremely obese.  The fat ratio in this bacon is very, very high, but it's still tasty.

Here's what the sliced bacon looked like before frying:

And here is the end result:

The taste test results?

Recipe #1 tastes amazing, but VERY strongly flavored and very salty.  I had originally planned for that amount of cure to be spread over twice as much meat, but it just wouldn't spread that far (plus I was nervous about having too little salt and the meat rotting instead of curing.  Next time I'll trust the process better, and use less cure for the amount of meat).  I tried soaking one slab of this bacon in several changes of water for an hour to see if that would decrease the saltiness, but it didn't help all that much.  This batch of bacon will be best served in small doses where its big flavor can have the greatest impact without being overwhelming.  I'm looking forward to it in pasta, on salads, in soups.

Recipe #2 is milder and has a flavor more like breakfast type bacon.  You can taste the maple syrup, but not too strongly.

Both batches of bacon taste fantastic, and the Guinea hog meat has a richness of flavor and texture that bursts in your mouth like no store bought bacon ever has.  Because of that exceptional richness and the exceptionally high percentage of fat in the meat from this particular pig, I find that I am fully satiated by smaller portion sizes than usual.

After the taste tests, I sliced all the bacon into slices, arranged the slices in Ziploc bags, and stored them in the freezer.  That's a lot of bacon!

Guinea Hog Pork Chops

Tonight we tried some Guinea hog pork chops for the first time.  I dredged them with seasoned flour, pan-fried them in home-rendered lard, and served them with potatoes, pan gravy, and asparagus.

The meat, as expected, was excellent.  The real surprise, though, was what an enormous difference it made to fry the chops in lard instead of our usual olive oil.  The chops were tender inside with a delicious crispy surface, and even after I fried 3 pan-fulls of chops in succession, there was absolutely no scorching or sticking to the pan, which made it easy to make delicious pan gravy in a matter of moments.

Now that I've tried it, I would definitely recommend frying in lard!

Here's what the chops looked like before they were cooked:

These chops were from a hog that was very obese.  I'm showing this photo as a reminder to people:  Don't overfeed your Guinea hogs!  They are easy keepers and gain weight very easily.  If you feed more than is necessary, you're not making more meat, you're just making more fat.  I like a bit of marbling in my meat, but that marbling doesn't need to be in big 2.5" wide swaths like in that bottom right chop.

Rendering Lard

As I noted in my previous post, the overweight hog we sent to the butcher recently produced---in addition to a freezer full of pork---more than 75 lbs. of fat, which I have been rendering into lard.

The first question people ask when I tell them I've been rendering lard all week, is:  "Why?  No health-conscious person cooks with lard anymore, do they?"  In fact, that's not the case at all.  As described in these various articles, lard is a lot healthier than most people think:

Lard:  The New Health Food
Lard Has Clearly Won the Health Debate
Praise the Lard
Lard:  After Decades of Trying, Its Moment Is Finally Here
Trans Fatty Acids:  Why Lard May Be Better for You Than Vegetable Oil

Of course, even with the unexpected benefits, I'm not planning to eat 75 lbs. of lard this year!  Some of it I'll save for cooking, but the majority I'll make into soap.

Lard soap is mild and gentle to the skin, and it will be great to have some "zero mile" fat for soap making (as opposed to the olive oil I use to make my sheep's milk soap, which is imported from thousands of miles away).  I'll still keep making the olive oil based soap, since it's been very popular, but the natural farmstead lard soap will give buyers an additional option.  Choice is good!

Anyway, since a lot of people have never rendered lard before, I figured I'd show the process, step by step, here on the blog.  Rendering isn't difficult, but it does take a while, so you have to be patient.

Since I had such a huge amount of lard to render, I had to do it one portion at a time over several days, according to how much would fit into my largest stock pot.

Our hog was very large and very obese, so he produced 22.5 lbs. of leaf lard and 53 lbs. of back fat lard.  The leaf lard is the internal fat from around the pig's kidneys.  It is considered the highest quality lard, since it's said to have a finer texture and a more neutral flavor than the back fat lard.

Here is one of the slabs of leaf lard from our pig.  We got two slabs this size.

 

The slabs of back fat were even larger.  Folded over themselves and stacked together, they filled an entire banana box!

The first step was to cut off chunks of fat that were a more convenient size to handle.  Here's a chunk of back fat, ready for me to start processing.

 

To get a neutral (not so porky) flavor to my lard, I trimmed off all the little scraps of meat.  Then I cut the fat into little chunks, maybe about 1" square.

The discarded scraps of fatty meat made a VERY popular snack for my chickens!

 

To begin the rendering process, I put a couple of inches of water in the bottom of my largest stock pot, then filled the rest of the pot with cut-up chunks of fat.  I heated the pot on the stove top until it started to boil, then reduced the heat to a low simmer.  

The water in the bottom of the pot helps prevent the fat from sticking before it has a chance to melt.  By the time the rendering is finished, all the water will have evaporated away.  

You do need to stir the pot (less in the beginning and more frequently toward the end), to prevent the solids from sticking to the bottom and burning on.  

 

Almost immediately after the boiling started, the fat changed color and began to get translucent.

 

Little by little, the chunks of fat started to release quantities of melted liquid lard.

 

 

For a while, the liquid in the pot was a milky whitish color.  It was at this point that the pot began to need more frequent stirring, because the solids started sinking to the bottom.

 

Eventually, the liquid turned clear.

 

The smaller solids sank to the bottom.  It was hard to keep them from sticking to the bottom of the pot!  Meanwhile, the larger solids puffed up and floated on the top of the liquid.

 

When the floating bits turn golden brown and slightly crispy, the rendering process is done.  For a pot this size, it took about 6 hours.

 

Next, I strained the rendered lard through a strainer lined with several layers of cheesecloth.  The solids that are left in the strainer are "cracklings."  You can salt them and eat them as a snack, cook them in cornbread, sprinkle them on salads, or use them anywhere else you might use bacon bits (they don't taste like bacon, though.  They taste---not surprisingly---like pork rinds).

The cracklings from the backfat came out chunky, as shown in the picture above.  The cracklings from the leaf lard came out in smaller crumbs.

 

I'm storing my cracklings in ziploc bags in the freezer until I'm ready to use them.  

The rendered, filtered lard itself I poured into mason jars.  I had originally thought I would pour the lard into molds and store it in blocks like pounds of butter.  But unlike the partially hydrogenated lard you can buy in blocks from the grocery store, this lard is still liquid at room temperature, so jars turned out to be essential!

When the lard was first poured into the jars, it was a clear, pale, golden color.

By morning, it had cooled down and turned pure white, but it was still liquid.  It does turn into a solid if you put it in the refrigerator or freezer.

I'm going to store my lard in the freezer until I need it.  Frozen, it should keep almost indefinitely.

From the 75 lbs. of fat I got from my pig, I rendered about 37 quarts of lard.  That will make an awful lot of pie crusts and and awful lot of bars of soap!

How to Make Cherry Cordial (Part 3)

So, this weekend when my friends were here, we tasted the Cherry Cordial I made recently. Since I posted the recipe here on the blog, I thought I'd post the results here too, since my recipes are always a work in progress, and subject to revision.

Having sampled the results, my opinion is that the cordial was delicious, but definitely NOT cherry flavored. The couple of cinnamon sticks FAR outweighed the fresh cherries, so this turned out to be a sweet, luscious cinnamon cordial with a mild cherry background to keep the cinnamon flavor from getting too prominent and bitter.

Would I make this recipe again? Yes, definitely. But I might not bother to use my precious hand-picked, straight-off-the-tree cherries to do it. Since you can't taste them much anyway, frozen cherries would have been easier.

With this, my third attempt at making a cherry cordial, and my third failure to get anything that truly captured the wonderful flavor of fresh cherries, I'm going to have to conclude that cherries, like strawberries, just don't translate into cordial making in a way that maintains their full flavor. Like strawberries, the cherries seem to get weaker, milder, and a tad insipid... tasting a bit like fruit punch.

But, as this cinnamon cordial demonstrates, they can still be lovely bases to help highlight other ingredients.

How to Make Cherry Cordial (Part 2)

As promised, it's the end of June, and here's Part 2 of my "How to Make Cherry Cordial" post.

As you may remember, the cherries and cinnamon sticks have been steeping in the brandy for about a month now. Yesterday, I opened the jars and strained the liquid. As you can see, the brandy leached not only most of the flavor, but also most of the color out of the cherries.


Next, I put a paper coffee filter (wetted with water, for ease of handling and to help speed the initial filtering) into a large funnel, and began filtering the cordials. This is the most tedious part of the cordial making process, because some cordials take a VERY long time to filter. But this one wasn't too bad.

While I was filtering, Ken made the sugar syrup. To do this, you heat 2 cups of sugar and 1 cup of water in a saucepan, stirring constantly until it just starts to boil and the liquid suddenly goes clear. Then remove the pan from the heat. This makes 2 cups of syrup.

When the cordial is done filtering and the sugar syrup is cool, you just add the syrup to the cordial, tasting frequently, until it is as sweet as you like it.

In this case, Ken and I felt that the cinnamon flavor was too strong and the cherry flavor was too weak, but we noticed that the cherry flavor became more prominent the more syrup we added. So we made a sweeter cordial than we normally do, by adding the entire 2 cups of sugar syrup.

The result was 2 mason jars almost full of cherry cordial, which will need to steep for about a week to reach full flavor.

Normally I bottle my cordials in pretty, tall, long-necked bottles, but this time around, I made this batch knowing that we're having a bunch of friends over for the July 4th weekend, and we'll probably drink most of the cordial then, so I didn't bother with the fancy bottles, I just put the cordial back into the mason jars to wait until our friends arrive:

It's the Pits

I picked more cherries yesterday---almost 7 quarts so far, and perhaps that many more on the parts of the tree that I can still reach (while standing on a small stepladder placed in the back of our pickup truck, that is!).

What I didn't realize was how long it would take to pit all those cherries! They are small, about the size of cranberries, so there are a lot of cherries---and a lot of pits---in 7 quarts. Lucky for me, Ken pitched in and helped. We spent several hours pitting cherries and watching tv last night. The results all went into the freezer.

I plan to pick the rest of the cherries that are in reach this afternoon, so I guess we'll have another evening of pitting tonight.

But for cherries that taste this good, it's worth it to preserve as many of them as possible.

How to Make Cherry Cordial (Part 1)

The bird netting we put up on our cherry tree last week really shouldn't have done much good, because when we hung it, we could only reach the very lowest branches, leaving the majority of the tree exposed. But apparently the very presence of bird netting so offended the local crows and cardinals, that they promptly abandoned our tree and have left it untouched, despite the thousands of ripe cherries it now boasts.

There is something about a loaded fruit tree---especially if it's one that you didn't have to plant, prune, water, or spray with pesticide---that makes you feel rich, gifted with the treasure of free food in abundance, there for the taking. There's something profoundly joyful about accepting Nature's bounty, as if the earth herself has chosen that moment to try to make you feel welcome on the planet.

With such an abundance of cherries this year, it took me almost no time at all to pick enough to make a couple of jars of cordial. I don't know what variety these cherries are, but they are clearly the smaller, tarter pie cherries, not the big sweet eating cherries.

I've only made cherry cordial twice before. Once with sweet cherries, which turned out thin and insipid, and once with tiny wild black cherries, which had so much pectin in them that the cordial turned into a sort of alcoholic jelly in the bottles!

Let's hope this time we find a happy medium!

After I picked a big bowlful of cherries, I pitted them all by poking them with a kitchen skewer. Then I filled two clean mason jars about 1/2 full (approximately 2 cups of cherries in each one), and mashed the cherries thoroughly to release as much of the juice and flavor as possible. Then I dropped a 3" piece of stick cinnamon into each jar (breaking each one into several pieces for better flavor distribution), and filled the jars to the brim with brandy.

For cordial making, we use Christian Brothers Frost White Brandy, because it is colorless. For best presentation, we like our cordials to get all of their color from the natural ingredients inside, not from the alcohol base.

Once the jars were filled and sealed, I shook each one briefly to disperse the brandy all through the fruit. The brandy is what preserves the fruit from spoiling as it steeps, so you want to make sure it's well mixed.

Now I just put the jars away for a few weeks in a cool, dark place. I'll shake them once a day for a few days to keep the brandy well-dispersed.

Then, near the end of June, I'll do the next step. So stay tuned for Part 2!

Defending Our Cherries

One of the nice surprises we discovered after we bought this farm is the cherry tree in the back yard. I'd never seen a cherry tree before, so I didn't identify it for the longest time. It's clumped in amongst the lilac bushes, so at first I just assumed it was some kind of ornamental shrub. Even after it formed fruit the first year, I ignored it, thinking it was some kind of crabapple, and not worth harvesting.

The following year, on a whim, I tasted one of the "crabapples" and figured out what we had. Yummy delicious cherries, free in our back yard! But things were busy and I was going out of town, so I didn't harvest any.

Last year, I had good intentions to harvest some. I checked the tree regularly, waiting for the day when they would be ripe. The day I thought they would be just about perfect, our neighborhood crows got up several hours earlier than I did, and stripped the tree bare before I could get a single one!

This year, we have a bumper crop, just starting to turn red. The crows and other birds have already been checking them, but they're not quite ripe yet. We don't have much time left to stake our claim to our share of the treasure.

So Ken went to the local farm store and got some bird netting. The tree is large and the majority of the cherries will be well out of our reach, so the birds are welcome to them. But we draped the netting all around on the part of the tree that we can reach, hoping that will protect at least a little of the crop for us.

I tasted one of the not-quite-ripe fruits today. It's still very tart, but wow, what a flavor. I'll have to decide what to do with the cherries I pick. Eat them fresh? Make a pie? Freeze them? Dry them? Make a cherry cordial? I'm a whiz at making home-made cordials---I've taught workshops on it, and have developed dozens of recipes.

I guess what I do with them will depend on how many we get. I'm just looking forward to getting SOME, for a change.

Heavenly Honeysuckle

Is there anything so wonderful as the smell of honeysuckle? With its heady scent hinting of coconut and gardenia, it makes every spring breeze a luscious, sensual delight.

Our farm used to be overrun with honeysuckle vines (everywhere, that is, that wasn't already overrun with poison ivy vines!), but the sheep find it so tasty that it is now all gone except for several healthy vines that tangled themselves in our enormous boxwoods, out of the reach of sheep.

Even the few plants that are left are making our whole yard smell delicious right now. The flowers make a wonderful herbal tea, very healthy, and it makes you feel good just because it tastes as wonderful as it smells.

Honeysuckle doesn't dry well for use as tea. Even after a VERY long time in a high-quality food dehydrator, I've found that the flowers have a tendency to mold if stored over the winter. So this year I collected a ziplock bag of flowers, which I'm going to try freezing, to see if that preserves them better.

Since I'm prone to long bouts of bronchitis every time I get the smallest cold or flu, I've done a lot of research on herbs and natural remedies that can help. Honeysuckle-Hyssop tea, sweetened with honey is one of my favorites. It tastes SO good!

Here's part of what the Peterson Guide to Eastern/Central Medicinal Plants and Herbs, by Steven Foster and James A. Duke, has to say about honeysuckle:

Leaves and flowers a beverage tea (Japan). Flowers traditionally used (in e. Asia) in tea for bacterial dysentery, enteritis, laryngitis, colds, fevers, flu; externally as a wash for rheumatism, sores, tumors (especially breast cancer), infected boils, scabies, swelling. Stem tea is weaker. Experimentally, flower extracts lower cholesterol; also antiviral, antibacterial, tuberculostatic. Widely used in prescriptions and patent medicines in Traditional Chinese Medicine to treat colds and flu. Pills are made from floral concentrates. Both authors have used such preparations for bronchitis, colds, and flu. When Echinacea or Garlic have failed against flu, Jim Duke has used the plant as a last resort. Flowers contain at least a dozen antiviral compounds. With the rapid evolution of viruses, synergistic combinations of phytochemicals, such as those found in Japanese Honeysuckle, are less liable to lead to resistant strains than solitary chemical compounds. This serious weed might be managed by using it for proven medicinal purposes.

Such a wonderful gift from the land: something so beautiful to see and smell that makes good sheep feed and helps cure you when you're sick!

Siberian Bacon

A short while ago, my sister Donna sent me a care package from her farm in Siberia, Maine: beef steaks, ham steaks, and bacon, all from naturally raised animals on her farm.

We ate the beef steaks for dinner that very night, and they were some of the tenderest, most perfect steaks we'd ever cooked.

But this morning we tried the bacon for the first time. In all honesty, I think that may have been the finest thing I've ever put in my mouth!

Home-grown bacon---with a meatier, more substantial texture than store-bought bacon---smoked with apple wood, injected with maple syrup from Donna's friend's trees, and rubbed with spices. An absolutely magical combination. I can't even describe how good it was.

We also are spoiled to have a freezer full of lamb from our own sheep. And next year, we hope to start a flock of chickens, so we'll have eggs and meat from our own chickens.

There's something both wholesome and luxurious about eating natural foods that you raised yourself. It makes me sad that so few people in our country nowadays have that privilege.

Grocery stores are convenient, but nothing in any grocery store can compete with Siberian bacon!