greenstorm: (Default)
greenstorm ([personal profile] greenstorm) wrote2020-10-14 02:37 pm

Nose to Tail

I have so much to write about from the last... has it only been a couple days? There's no natural starting point except for the butcher.

So.

My freezers are full, as is my fridge. I have roughly 86lbs of meat into cure, 22lbs of chunks to be made into sausage, 18lbs of ground, many chops and roasts, 8 or 10L of soap lard, 2.5L eating lard plus maybe another half-dozen liters to render, and I'm currently processing stock into bean with bacon soup and chili con carne, which I will can.

A sow's meat is so glorious. Everything is laced through with thin ribbons of far. Nothing - even the loin - was white, or pale pink, or even pink: it was all deep red with use and life. I have never felt the visceral abundance of food or harvest in the way I did with Sparky when I was cutting up her meat. For me -- with commercial food cheap and abundant, and rarely having gone a full day without food without it being my own choice -- I found this a gift worthy of spiritual awe. For someone who is doing hard labour in fields every day, whose living from the soil has no backup? I can't even imagine how holy it would be to see all that food, all those calories, all that security for so many days to come.

This is why animals were sacrificed to gods: because they are such a stuff of life.

I'm glad my family shared it with me. Well, some did: mom and Ben. They helped the whole way through, with skinning and pulling out tenderloin and leaf fat and cutting meat from the bone and bagging and vacuum sealing. Those labels have mom's and Ben's writing on them for me to remember fondly over the next year as I pull them out of the freezer to eat. It's a lovely sharing.

Plus we had scraps fried crispy in lard, tenderloin seared in maple and salt, and a low-roasted shoulder chunk with peach BBQ sauce. We had two kinds of sausage and bacon. We may have had other things but I remember those mostly clearly. It was a good thanksgiving. Tucker even made it back from his trip with a pecan pie he'd made.

Mom is learning to channel her energy in my space. She asked about things, she didn't wreck anything I think (?) and she cleaned a lot in useful ways. She did take my multiple months of garden cardboard to the dump, but you can't have it all. She mentioned maybe coming back after Christmas and I'm looking forward to that a lot -- coming back if she isn't able to fly to New Zealand and help bring her friend's boat back, that is, which is entirely covid and politics dependent.

I taught her how to make sauerkraut, Ben learned different charcuterie cuts by sight ("shouldn't this side have a loin?"), and I had a stockpile of company for the emotional shock I got on the last night.

Ben even stopped snoring as much once I started leaving the upstairs window open at night.

Now we're getting our hard frosts. I haven't pulled the beets yet, but I do need to. I also need to do the winter pigpen.

The leaves are falling still, fallen in some places and tossing back and forth in glittery gold in others. Geese are fattening for winter. The cats are spending most of their time indoors and the woodstove is running full-time.

It's time for turning inwards, for contemplation.
yarrowkat: original art by Brian Froud (Default)

[personal profile] yarrowkat 2020-10-17 03:35 am (UTC)(link)
i feel you on the garden cardboard. i have to hoard mine in my bedroom here or people make off with it for other things. otoh, there are so many of us, and our lives involve so much mail-order this year, that replenishing it is fairly quick.

This is why animals were sacrificed to gods: because they are such a stuff of life.

this is beautiful.

do you make your own soap from the lard? Jenny and I are going to start practicing soap-making with goats' milk this winter, to be more prepared for having too much milk this spring. i've gotten very interested in the process and all the variations!
yarrowkat: original art by Brian Froud (Default)

[personal profile] yarrowkat 2020-10-19 07:28 pm (UTC)(link)
that's awesome! we have some leaf-lard from a friend who raises pigs - would that work for soap?

we are also planning on experimenting with shea butter/coconut oil/etc soaps. i'm making some medicinal oil extractions (of calendula & creosote bush, at the moment) using apricot kernel oil, and we plan to use those in some soaps too. we're thinking a calendula/balm of Gilead blend would be really lovely and helpful for dry/chapped/cracked skin. we live under a lot of big cottonwoods, so i nearly always have balm of gilead on hand. so to speak. ;) and then a creosote/sagebush scented blend - that would be both medicinal and scent. creosote bush smells exactly like the desert in a rainstorm, it's an amazingly uplifting smell.

if the lard smells lard-y (the jar we have certainly does), does that smell stay with the soap, or does it cook out? do you work with lard the same as with another "hard" oil like coconut oil or shea butter?
yarrowkat: original art by Brian Froud (Default)

[personal profile] yarrowkat 2020-10-21 05:51 pm (UTC)(link)
this is great, thank you so much! we will probably experiment with the leaf lard & coconut oil since we already have it.


one of the reasons we bought this land was the big cottonwood trees. when the little house (we call it the cottage, though it's not very cottage-like) was built around 1920, they planted 9 cottonwood trees around the house, all about 20' away from the house but surrounding it. Those trees are now giants. they are a hybrid called mountain cottonwoods, so they don't produce cotton fluff, unfortunately. (i love the fluff. the Rio Grande cottonwoods along the river and throughout the neighborhood do produce it though, so I still get to enjoy it in early summer!) one of the trees fell in 2016, and we had to have the one closest to the street taken out because it was threatening to fall on our cars (it was dying also), but the rest are strong and healthy, and i love living under their massive presence.

shea butter is a moisturizer, yeah. you see it in lotions a lot. it's solid at room temp, and plant-based (i think it's from some kind of nut). i experienced an amazing goat-milk soap from Pastures & Pine in Montana recently, and she uses finely-ground coffee as an exfoliant, and it was so perfect that i'm going to have to try it.

thank you for the soapcalc link! BrambleBerry soap supplier has a Lye Calculator on their page where you plug in the different fats you're using & how much of each, and it tells you how much lye you should use, similar to this one.
yarrowkat: original art by Brian Froud (Default)

[personal profile] yarrowkat 2020-10-21 10:24 pm (UTC)(link)
they will sucker if they are getting too much surface water & not enough subsurface water, yeah. or if the root gets cut; then they are tremendously persistent. i have STORIES about cottonwood roots & our greywater system! we had to redesign the entire greywater system three times because the nearest cottonwood had so much interest in it. the final time, we dug an 18" wad of fine tiny hair-thin roots, so many of them that they made a single solid object, the exact diameter of the bathtub drain pipe. it was climbing up the drain and had made it under the house. after that, we switched to a sunken mulch-basin under that selfsame cottonwood, with an above-ground outflow. we stuck a big marble slab we happened to have laying around directly under the outflow pipe, at an angle, and i keep mulch cleared off of it, so that the tree gets 100% of the water, but can't climb inside the bathtub anymore.


yarrowkat: original art by Brian Froud (yurt)

[personal profile] yarrowkat 2020-11-07 07:15 pm (UTC)(link)
it's a truly lovely and resilient tree. it also shelters my yurt, so i sleep underneath its outermost edge, and i love it.