I finally got new slippers! 

I’d picked them out last year when I asked you for recommendations but then I never got around to buying them. I mean, my slippers still worked, technically speaking, so why spend money if I didn’t have to?

I’d heard really good things about Glerups, and even though I was a little nervous about all-wool slippers, I knew that my other wool shoes are some of my all-time favorites (and they are $20 off right now!). So I decided to risk it and wow, do I ever love these slippers! 

my husband says my feet look like they’re wrapped in carpet padding

The material feels soooo good (I don’t wear socks), and there’s no sweating: my feet stay warm but not hot. The slippers aren’t clunky; once they’re on, they’re on. The first few weeks, I had to manually pull them on, but now I can wiggle my feet into them without using my hands at all. The leather bottoms are sturdy enough that I can wear them outside. 

The only problem is that the top edge rubs the back of my ankle a little. It’s not enough to be an actual problem, but that’s the only part that doesn’t feel quite right. Maybe the mild irritation will fade over time? Maybe not?

It’s okay either way — I just want to be completely transparent in case you, too, are in the market for new slippers. 

***

Now that there are only two kids at home, and they’re often gone with school, work, and evening commitments, family suppers are a bit sporadic. Same with lunches. So I’ve been making an effort to make a decent “real” breakfast several times a week: pancakes and sausage, eggs and toast, oatmeal and smoothies, etc. Days they have classes, I often pack my son’s lunch, too, along with my husband’s (my daughter prefers to pack her own). 

Making breakfasts and lunches is my way of “moving food” — making sure the homemade leftovers are getting used up in a timely manner, and in creative ways. Like for both the Dutch puff and the vanilla pudding, I added some extra eggs yolks that were leftover from making the Italian meringue buttercream for my husband’s birthday cake, which gave me a productivity buzz.

Knocking out a big meal in the morning takes the pressure off for later in the day; if supper is just popcorn and apples, then so be it. 

***

It takes me forever to get through a bottle of wine. My husband doesn’t drink alcohol, and contrary to appearances, or the fact that I freaking make the stuff now [puffs chest], I don’t actually drink that much. And re-corking a bottle of mead once it has been opened has thus far proved impossible, forcing me to settle for sealing the top with a piece of plastic wrap.

So! You can imagine my delight when I discovered that there exists a little thingy called a wine saver.

I know! Thrilling, that.

I bought one right away — it came with the air suction thingy, plus four stoppers, and it only cost 14 bucks. To use, just pop the rubber cork into the bottle and then pump the little pumpy thing about 8-15 times, or until there’s a little resistance, and that’s it.

To use, just flick the little needle sticking up in the center of the cork and — tssss — the seal releases.

Every time I pop out the wine saver and pour myself a drink, I’m equal parts:

1) pleased that I have it, and
2) horrified that I only just learned that it exists.

Buy yourself one.

You’re welcome.

***

When I was on cross-cultural in Guatemala when I was in college, one of the guys in my group made a fresh salsa.

I begged the recipe — more a formula, really — and it became my go-to emergency salsa: stir together chopped roma tomatoes, some minced onion and jalapeno and a bit of garlic, a fistful of fresh cilantro, S&P, a hefty squeeze of lime, and some olive oil, if you want. 

A couple weeks ago, I made a bowl of it to go with mountains of cheesy tortilla chips for supper. 

And everyone was happy. 

This same time, years previous: a day in the life of a baker, soft sourdough bread, a hairy situation, back in business, a Dell-ish ordeal, the quotidian (10.20.14), the reading week, autumn walk, a pie party!, moments of silence.

One late September evening, my husband and I finally got around to bottling the sour cherry mead, mead I’d started mid-June and racked at the end of August. 

We washed and sanitized the bottles, briefly soaked the corks in Star San, and then my husband began filling bottles.

Getting them filled to the correct level was a little touch-and-go at first, but we eventually got the hang of it. There was one major hose-down-the-kitchen-with-mead event, but we had spread a bath towel on the floor ahead of time so that soaked up the worst of it (and since our kitchen floor is perpetually in a state of Please Wash Me, it’s always grateful for an excuse to get a good scrubbing — there are worse things).

The corker thingy is an absolute must because there is no way we could’ve gotten the corks into the bottles without it. It’s not great for big bottling projects, though — it’s a little scarily wobbly, and my husband said it made his hands hurt after a while — but for our little outfit, it got the job done. I think we ended up with 22 bottles, or 25…can’t remember.

The mead is drinkable at any point though it should be aged a full year for best results. At that point, the flavor should become more mellow, they say. But I actually really like it as it is now. Like, really, really like it. I don’t know what the flavor compares to. I’m no wine expert, and I was a little shy about sharing the mead with people at first because one) I didn’t want anyone to have to pretend they liked it, and two) I didn’t want to suffer the giant soul crushing of a negative review. But then one girlfriend had some and requested to buy a bottle, and I took another bottle to a gathering and it got all drunk up that very night, and when I have guests over, I notice people helping themselves to seconds, so . . . all good signs, I guess? 

I do have one problem, though: where to store it? Our old farmhouse is skimpy on storage space, and what with all my cheesemaking and now mead making, my projects are eating into our living space something fierce. (And I thought I’d have all this extra space once the kids left, ha!)

I guess we’ll figure something out eventually, considering necessity is the mother of invention and all…

This same time, years previous: making the bed, menopause: seven stories, curbing the technology addiction, practical and beautiful, where the furry things are, the quotidian (10.19.15), rich, no special skills, how to have a doughnut party, part 1.

One evening a few weeks ago, my husband loaded Fern and Petunia onto the trailer, and the next morning, he dropped them off at the butcher shop, along with my cut sheet detailing a dreamy variety of deliciousness. Since we were getting some smoked cuts, it’d be about two weeks, they said. 

For the next fourteen days, I thought about that pork daily. Maybe they’ll call today? I’d think, and a happy buzz would zip right through my brain. I thought about it so much that one night I even dreamed about bacon. Since this was the first time we’d raised New Guinea Hogs (the other time or two, we’d raised just the standard fast-growing variety of pig), I was itching to see if we could detect a noticeable flavor improvement. Was the smaller, slower-growing, lardier breed actually worth the extra months of feeding? The promise of a new flavor adventure made me positively giddy with excitement.

Two weeks and one day after my husband dropped off the pigs, we got the call: our order was ready. 

$845 for a truckload of meat, fat, and bones

As the kids and I sorted the boxes between freezers — bones and fat in one and all the meaty cuts in another — I pulled out various packages for thawing and sampling: two kinds of bacon, some sausage, a ham. 

what I call “Little Red Henning It”:
homemade sourdough, homemade cheese, homegrown ham, CLUCK-CLUCK

For the smoked products, we got Canadian bacon (from one pig), regular bacon (from one pig), and smoked hams (in quarters, and from one pig). We did the celery powder version of smoking (uncured), and it’s quite good, though the traditional bacon has a sweetness to it that I wasn’t expecting, and I’m not sure I like.

We also got boneless Boston butts (from one pig), all the fat (divided between kidney fat and regular fat), and the bones for broth. I discovered a bunch of packs of short ribs that I didn’t order which is kinda fun. And as for the sausage, we got it all ground: 50 pounds of Classic, 50 pounds of Italian, 50 pounds of Breakfast, and 16 pounds plain ground pork. Yes, that’s correct: we got zero pork chops, an omission which apparently horrifies people in the pig-butchering world, but listen: we like sausage. 

to go with our Einkorn and whole wheat pancakes and yogurt smoothies

I spent that first week frying up bacon, slicing ham for sandwiches, making spaghetti sauce and breakfast sausage patties, simmering broth, and rendering lard.

an outdoor broth-making station to keep the porky smells out of the house

I’ve tried a variety of methods for rendering the lard — stove top, oven, hand-chopped, ground — as I attempt to streamline my system. Chopping my way through mountains of semi-frozen fat is a blister-inducing feat of sheer madness, which caused me to kick myself for neglecting to ask the butcher to grind it for me, o woe! 

But then my husband dug our (never before used) hand-crank meat grinder from the attic and I worked up a wicked sweat grinding up all that fat (which is only a small fraction of what we have in the freezer), which was still very miserable but way better than chopping it by hand.

Some of the lard got a little too cooked, which gave it a porky flavor, but it turns out that the porky lard is sublime for roasting potatoes and making lard-butter crusts for quiche. The good lard, the snow white stuff, is as smooth as an Italian Meringue buttercream and an absolute dream to use. I plan to put it in cookies, biscuits, pancakes, bread, and on and on. (Thus far, I’ve only made lard from the back fat — I can’t wait to see how the fancy kidney fat turns out!)

Lard rendered from one box of fat. I think we have eight.

(I also tried crackins — both plain and in biscuits — and they’re pretty terrible, we all think. Maybe I’m doing them wrong? But I can’t really bother myself to care. I mean, the chickens are huge fans and it’s not like we don’t have enough fat already.) 

a bandage-wrapped cheddar: the lard is so silky-soft, I didn’t even need to melt it before applying

And as for the answer to my big question: is this variety of pig worth it? YES. Absolutely and unequivically.

This pork is freaking amazing.
Like, ridiculously flavorful. 
Like, absolutely-worth-the-long-growing-time delicious.
Like, we need to get two more pigs STAT. 

To that last point, my husband is dragging his feet WHICH MAKES NO SENSE WHATSOEVER, especially considering that we’re about to have TWO cows in milk, so while he dilly-dallies about, I passive aggressively punish him by making him dump the buckets of whey on the raspberries and asparagus, whey which, I point out sweetly, we could be feeding to a pair of snuffly little piggies…

This same time, years previous: simplest sourdough bagels, my travails as a self-proclaimed kid environmentalist, three things, kitchen notes, practical and beautiful, the quotidian (10.17.16), a list, the adjustment, grab and go: help wanted, that thing we do.