Greenstorm's Journal

Yesterday was butcher day. 8 pigs, by far the most I've ever handled at once, and it helps to clear out the high numbers I've had since a missed butcher last spring, which rolled into a missed one last fall, which rolled into the missed January one. So it's lots lots lots of meat, and because they're older (and largely sows) it's pretty high quality-- dark and marbled.

There's no way to handle that much meat without a professional setup (cooler, blast freezers) or perfect weather. I have perfect weather. It was maybe up to 5C yesterday, snow on the ground, and then dropped to zero overnight and will flirt with 1-2 degrees this week, then drop to -27. So basically, I could chill the meat in totes in the snow, put the totes into the animal-proof shipping container (which is made out of metal so it really chills down at night), and I have a week to process it and then it will freeze.

So I'm going through at a strong but reasonable pace. I'm alternating between the shoulders (1-2 coppa roasts per shoulder, chunking the rest for canning and grinding) and loins (debone, loin into boneless chops, tenderloin left whole). That leaves me with a good balance of very meaty bones for stock: rib and spine which are cut across to reveal the marrow, shoulderblade and forearm bones.

The first canner load is going right now: it's "heathy canning" (healthy as opposed to pathogenic, not healthy as opposed to having calories, thank goodness) beef stroganoff recipe. I have made the following alterations: 1tsp voatsiperifery instead of 2tsp thyme, 1c runny tomato sauce instead of 4tbsp tomato paste, 1 scant tbsp garlic powder instead of onion and garlic, and I used better than bouillon beef stock instead of "broth". A canner will take about 5kg of meat this way. So far it smells good. It also uses a tremendous amount of worcestershire sauce: more than a cup per full canner's worth. We'll see how it goes.

Lotta work ahead and behind but I'm happy. This is the kind of thing I like. Tucker is here, being companionable and snuggly and lending a hand but not co-planning the butchery project with me, which is the way I like it.

Now I just need to figure out how to get stuff to the folks that need it.

Canned a box of tomatoes today, roughly 17lbs or so after bad bits were cut out (they'd been waiting for Josh to leave so I could give them attention).

Popped them in the oven in the biggest pot for a day on 300ish, strained them through the chinois to get a (thinner than I like) sauce, added some finely processed jalapenos, hot peppers, and celery as per the minnesota mix recipe on healthy canning (omitted onion, added a touch more pepper) and cooked with a couple bay leaves in there for about an hour. Canned with citric acid as per the recipe, water bath 40 mins for 500ml jars. It it definitely on the spicy side for tomato sauce, but isn't anywhere near condiment spicy, so should be perfect. Maybe I wish I'd put a touch of garlic in instead of the onion, or dried garlic powder. I guess I can do that on the far side.

15 jars.

Makes for a lateish night though.

Need to figure out what I'm doing with the rest of the peppers, they can't all go in sauerkraut.

I made garden signs for all my roses and gooseberries. Soon will do cherries and haskaps and apples, at least the ones I know the names of. These are signpost-style, with a stake and painted sign screwed to it. My plastic tags were not holding their marks, I guess sharpies have been reformulated, and so I lost some names that way. I lost some other names because crows and geese like the tags. So, wooden signs seem both practical in an enduring way and kind of charming. Now if only I had pretty painting handwriting, but I was not turning this into a stenciling project.

I found two more squash out there that looked pretty ripe, hiding among the weeds where they were sheltered from frost.

Josh helped me find a dairy crate full of relatively ripe cascade ruby gold cobs, so I'm calling that more of a success than I earlier anticipated. We'll be looking through the painted mountain today. The plants were definitely frost-nipped but I don't think the cobs themselves were harmed.

It's neat to be out in the corn and hear that dry, rustling noise of the leaves. Humans have been listening to that sound for many thousands of years as they bring in the harvest.

I've done a bunch of mixed pickles as documented on my preserving site, urbandryad on dreamwidth (I just keep recipes there). Basically I've done a couple gallons with my zesty brine at half strength for salt and sugar, a couple gallons with a lightly sweet brine, and I'll do a couple gallons with a salt-only brine. all have bay leaves and pepper, I forgot the garlic in the lightly sweet ones. Oops. The veg mix was largely brought up from the big farm on Josh's way from the city, it's more-or-less 1 part cauliflower, 1 part carrot, 1 part green beans, 1 part hot peppers, 1/4 part celery. The goal is a moderately hot pickle mix to eat with charcuterie, everything bite-sized.

Meanwhile Black Chunk (who has still not got a better name) had 8 piglets, and she's doing well with them. Lotta piglets this fall it seems. Ugh I guess I need to castrate, better do that while Josh is here. I will probably miss Tucker's calming presence for it.

A chicken in the bottom chicken run got huge adobe balls on her claws, they must have accumulated through iterations of mud (the ducks splash by the water a lot), dust (everywhere else in the run, it's been a dry summer), and straw/wood shavings from inside the coop. It took Josh and I roughly 3 hours to soak them (did nothing), chip away at the very edges with pliers delicately so as not to hurt wherever her toes were in the balls, and then finally pry the last bits off. I do not know why she got it and no others did. Her toes inside the balls were fine, though she did lose a fingernail by getting loose enough to shake her foot when we were part done and... you know, just don't think about it too hard, let's just say it was another weird and uncomfortable farming moment. She's good now, I gave her a penicillin shot for the one raw bit of the toe where the mud was rubbing and the toenail, I figured her body could use the help, and put her back in with everyone. She's lifting her feet ridiculously high as if trying to compensate for the weight that is no longer there, but is walking and perching just fine. Poor girl. Also I'm much less suspicious of cobb houses now, my goodness that stuff was durable. Clay soil, wow does it behave in unexpected ways sometimes.

Meanwhile I am going to keep one of the americauna roosters from my friend in town, and give another to a friend who has a couple hens and wants to let them hatch out more chickens in spring. That means 7 going into the soup pot this week, which is manageable. I've had the propane ring on the deck and that makes canning a lot more comfortable given the humidity situation in here, not sure if I'll can the roosters immediately or freeze them a bit but I'm more likely to can them now.

Asparagus planted. Daffodills, chiondoxia & relateds, and muscari ordered. These are all supposed to be vole-resistant, we'll see how it goes.

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.