What I did on Memorial Day

2 Jun

Craftsbury Common

Sterling College is a small liberal arts college in northern Vermont, in the tiny village of Craftsbury Common, where it really feels like time stopped about fifty years ago. 

On Sterling College farm

The college is very small (a little over 100 students), and focuses on issues that relate to the environment and sustainability. Students can choose from courses in Sustainable Agriculture, Natural History, Outdoor Education, Environmental Humanities and Conservation Ecology.

 

Just behind the classrooms

Sterling is one of only seven Work-Learning-Service colleges in the nation.  All students work on campus, earning a portion of their tuition fees while serving the community.  The college offers three semesters – fall, spring, and summer.  Sterling students can begin in any semester, take any semester off, and still maintain full-time status.

The school is also known for its food (yes!) – its dining hall serves the most delicious meals you will ever find on a college campus. 

 

Anne

That dining hall is run by Food Service Director Anne Obelnicki, who is a member of the faculty and also the school’s Director of Sustainable Food Studies.

 

Getting started

Anne invited me to give a pork butchering seminar to kick off day one of a course called “Farm Scale Production of Value-Added Products”, which is part of a larger program called “Vermont’s Table” – a five week course that includes practical culinary experience, field trips, and seminars in food entrepreneurism.  “Farm-Scale Production of Value-Added Products” is a practical stills course divided into two sessions, with Session One focusing on animal products (butchering, sausage-making, meat curing, etc.)

So I spent a wonderful day at the college with my son Todd (also a butcher), working with the students.  First I cut up half a pig, then they did the other half. 

 

Think he resembles me?

 

It’s not so hard

 

Just need to keep at it

 

Preparing bacon

 

This is fun

The pig, by the way, was raised on Sterling’s working farm (here’s her sister).

 

Maple the pig – hog heaven

And in the afternoon we created sausages. 

 

Mixing sausage

 

The finished product

 

Tasting the result


WE HAD FUN!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Old Wood Stove (and me)

22 May

Until I was ten years old, everything we ate was cooked on a wood stove like the one above.  We had a monster of a cookstove in our kitchen.  It had a reservoir on the side for hot water, and closed compartments on top for keeping food warm.  My mother cooked everything… from breads, biscuits, pies and meat… on that old stove. 

With twelve foot ceilings in that old house it also helped keep us warm in winter.  Of course it was hot as hell in the summer.  But that’s all we had.  The smell of bread baking when you got up at the crack of dawn, or a New England pot roast in the oven along with the smell of wood heat, is something I can clearly remember to this day.  The food seemed to taste so much better. And it probably did. 

I can still see my sisters dipping into the reservoir for hot water to do the dishes.  We lacked most of the modern conveniences growing up.  We were very poor and there were a lot of us. 

We had a cast iron sink in the kitchen with only cold running water.  If we wanted to do the laundry or – perish the thought – take a bath, we heated water on the stove.

My mother and sisters washed clothes in an old copper washer with a hand cranked wringer, and the clothes were hung outside to dry. 

We ironed all of our clothes with old flat-irons that were set on the stove to get hot.  I remember the different sized irons.  There was no such thing as permanent press clothing in those days. 

Daily living was lots of hard work, but it was a good life.  It makes me apprecate what we have today, even as I regret what we’ve lost.

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Beauty

16 May


These are some of the works of a young artist named Pinar Yolacan.  Born in Turkey, she lives and works in New York.  

Why am I talking about her?

Because if you look closely at what these women are  wearing, you’ll realize that it’s meat.

I’d be very interested to hear what you think about these portraits.


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Burgoo!

15 May


The first recipe I ever found for the wonderful stew called Kentucky Burgoo required 300 pounds of stewing beef, 30 bushels of potatoes and on and on… 

Finally a friend of mine gave me some that he had made in 5 gallon batches.  I won’t give you that recipe at this time, since it’s not an “expert” one – if there is such a thing – but my understanding is that it was made in huge cast iron kettles over an open fire outdoors for barn raisings and other large gatherings, and that the recipe goes back to the early days of Kentucky. 

one version of many

Burgoo dates to before the Civil War.  Like a mulligan stew, it typically contains at least three different meats, and plenty of vegetables such as corn, okra, and lima beans.  It’s often made for big gatherings like the Kentucky Derby.  In fact, there was a horse named Burgoo, who won both the Derby and the Preakness.  Here he is, in 1929.

Burgoo King 1929

 

The Burgoo can contain every type of meat available… from lamb, mutton, to beef, squirrel, rabbit, poultry etc.  What I tasted was heavenly.  So do yourself a favor and go online to research Kentucky Burgoo,and find a recipe that will feed less than a hundred people.  You’ll be glad you did.

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Stuff me

6 May

Bulk sausage

If you’re interested in making your own sausage but worry that it’s too complicated (dealing with casings and all that stuff), stop worrying.  Sausage is dead simple.  In fact, it doesn’t even have to be put into casings.  Wha?

If you have a small home grinder, or a grinding attachment for your food processor, you’re golden.  Just find a basic sausage recipe that you’d like to try.  Then grind the meat one time only through the medium plate on your grinder. 

Note underlined words above.

Next, mix all of the ingredients the recipe asks for.  First, the dry ingredients, second, the wet ingredients. 

Then package everything just like you would ground meat, or make patties out of it and freeze what you’re not going to use right off. 

Note that sausage should be 25% to 30% fat.  Commercial sausage is often up to 50% fat.  A bit too high, in my opinion.

 

And here’s another tip.  If you’re making lamb sausage, I recommend that you use pork fat instead of lamb fat.   Lamb fat tends to give it a gamey flavor that I don’t care for.  Plus pork fat also gives lamb sausage a much nicer texture.

Richly poor

10 Apr

When you grow up poor, you don’t always know that you’re poor.  You don’t miss what you never had. 

We lived in an old converted school house with 12 foot ceilings, and an upstairs and downstairs apartment.  We lived downstairs. 

The upstairs was never renovated enough to rent out.  In fact, in the cold winter months when we were out of wood (our only source of heat and cooking fuel), my mother would go to the upstairs apartment and tear the door casings and cupboards out.  We would break them up and burn them in the stove downstairs. 

My parents bought the old house for $600.  Imagine buying a house for $600.  I vividly remember my mother sending me to Ken Perry’s Market with a dollar for a  quart of milk, a loaf of bread and a pound of cheap hamburger meat, and warning me not to spend the change on candy.  The three girls all shared one bed and the boys were two to a bed. 

ALL FOR A DOLLAR!!!

We always had a piano.  When my mother wasn’t out of state working, she would play and sing.  Or my aunts and uncles would come by with their instruments and the house was full of music, dancing and a off color jokes.  Maybe that’s where my love of dirty jokes comes from.  As poor as we were, I have very fond memories of my childhood.  Life seemed much simpler then. 

Maybe we need to go back a bit.

Is your meat tougher than an old shoe?

28 Mar

Maybe because it IS an old shoe.

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