Bacon, Brought Home

Matt arrived home from Farmer Pete's with bacons! Every girl likes to see her honey come through the door with bacons, right? Well probably not, but I sure do, and it never happened to me before, so I danced around the kitchen with my wooden spoon twirling in the air.

It just so happened that I had mixed up a pizza crust, and all that my fixins were missing was a little smoky pork.

Clockwise from top right: a small portion of
Matt's Five Pound Cheese Block (an incredibly flavorful
monolith of pastured raw milk mozzarella that arrives
with the bakery order on the back of a truck),
sage from the herb garden, bacon!!!,
and last year's final shallots (still firm).

Gluten-free pizza with all delicious things on top!

The story of the bacons starts here, in case you missed it. Since then, as I gather, Pete smoked and froze the bacons.

The Vegetarian Butcher Makes Sausage

Every other Tuesday throughout the summer, Matt helps with the processing of a batch of chickens at a friend's farm. They call him The Vegetarian Butcher.

Matt has been a vegetarian for all of his adult life, and involved in the food business in one way or another for even longer. So while he has no taste for poultry, he helps with chicken dispatch because he has a deep, reaching interest in food and farming. And also, he just likes hanging out with Farmer Pete.

These days, Matt's vegetarianism is broken by exactly one pig a year. Said pig grows up where the chickens do - on a mountaintop farm with 360-degree views of blue horizon, steep cloud banks, and pasture that is thick and deep like water.

Our friends Pete and Eliza own Clodhopper Farm. Each year they host a gathering of friends called Sausagefest, which begins with an ending (pig's). Pig becomes pork, while men wield spices and knives and beers.

Todd and Pete grinding fat

This year I saw the pig hanging in the back room, and it was oddly lovely. Clean and pink and ripply. Granted it had no head or guts or skin, which I expect makes the experience of seeing it strung from the ceiling sort of G-rated.

In the weeks leading up to Sausagefest, if I notice a faraway look in Matt's eye and ask what's on his mind, he answers, "chorizo." There are recipes going on - adding, subtracting, curing, aging. Little pinches of smoked paprika going in and slugs of red wine coming out. Minced garlic is whirling around in his skull like a snow flurry.

Bacon in waiting

In two days, a pig was divvied up into Mexican chorizo, sweet and hot Italian sausage, breakfast sausage, salami, Spanish chorizo, bacon, ribs, and pate.

The bulk of Matt's share is in our freezer, except for the salami and dry chorizo, which are hanging in the coldest corner of the house, atop the bedroom wardrobe. Sometimes the dog sits in her bed at the foot of the wardrobe, gazing up with longing.

Spanish chorizo and salami curing

You can read about last year's Sausagefest at Pete's blog.
You can find a couple of the recipes Matt used here: Spanish chorizo and pate