Now we’re really experimenting.  We’re going to brine and smoke our own ham, bacon, and fat back using homemade brine.  People have done this for ages and not everyone died from it.  And yet I find myself googling “will ‘ropy’ brine kill you?” Back a week or two ago, before our bacon turned into a…

Lard and cracklins cook at the same time and it sometimes said “you can have good lard or good cracklins”, perhaps not both.  Apparently we throughly embraced the “good cracklins” side of things, so I’m not even going to talk about our lard right now.  It’s pretty embarrassing lard.   To start out we brought…

This is the day most of the meat turns into tidy wrapped packages of future supper.   There are lots of ways to cut up a hog depending on what cuts you prefer, so exactly how you do it isn’t really that big a deal.   We’re going to start by using a torch to…

Innards are what my daughter calls “man’s food”.  In other words, “I’m not eating that”.  But you can eat it and it’s really quite nutritious.  We save the liver, kidneys, heart and spleen.  I’ve never cooked a spleen before, but I found a recipe so we’ll see.   The liver is the easiest to find…

There is shockingly little information on how to make your own sausage casings on the internet or in any of my books.  Either this is because it’s a bad idea and everyone knows it, or everyone just thinks it’s a bad idea and hasn’t tried it.  So tried it.  It’s really not as horrific as…