Greenstorm's Journal

I altered my pork carnitas recipe to try canning a bunch of pork al pastor, to clear out the freezer some. This uses the basic raw pack + spices method. We'll see how it turns out, but I'm hopeful.

While that was going I made some rose soap, fried up some lions mane mushrooms from smithers with a little kimchi, split and brought in some wood, picked out three roosters for canning when the canner is free and searched out more jars for them, fed everyone outside some, processed some of the grocery store food fo the animals (lots of removing elastics and emptying small cartons of cream today), and now I'm trying to decide what to have for dinner.

Given how early I woke up, I should probably feed the animals a little more, give everyone a little more straw (it's cold out now! Hard on my fingers, can't be great for them) and come in and have a bath and go to bed super early or something.

I also pulled some loin & belly chunks from the freezer to try making two soft spread sausages: one nduja-style and one bacon-style. Stuffing the sausage is my least favourite part, and it's the part that often prevents me from starting on the project, but I realized: if it's spreadable sausage I can cook (sous vide) it in vacuum bags, freeze it like that, and then snip a corner and squeeze it out as I need it. If I were smoking it and fermenting it I couldn't do that, but I'm aiming for the easy-but-done end here.

"Nduja" spread will just be fat/meat + calabrian peppers + salt + a couple drops of liquid smoke
"Bacon" spread will be fat/meat + salt + pepper + a touch of maple syrup + liquid smoke
(I could do a corned pork one, a little firmer, to make hash out of?)

That stuff will take a couple days to thaw outside in the cooler though, especially in this weather, so I'll worry about running it through the meat grinder later on.