Greenstorm's Journal

Note a menu is a list of things to select from, not a to-do list to accomplish all of

Things to do:

Fire (consolidate brush, light fire, feed fire, haul stumps to sit on, poke fire, cook marshmallows over fire)

Talk.

Mushrooms (heat wax, drill holes, pound in dowels, cover with wax, must all be done in relatively quick succession)

Sauerkraut (cut cabbage and hot peppers and maybe root veg, salt cabbage etc, pack cabbage etc into crock)

Render lard (thaw fat a little, chop/grind fat, put fat into crock pots or oven)

Make soap (make recipe, mix lye, mix fats, heat fats, combine, pour into molds)

Harvest rose hips

Cover straw

Muck out barn (I suspect no one will want to do this)

Help me move the tailgate

Feed baby muscovies

Scritch pigs

Hunt for eggs

Check bucket hen for chicks

Organize carport

Split and/or stack wood

Kill and process roosters

Vanilla comparison

Squash comparison

Food:

Eggs (boiled, scrambled, frittata, custard, those steamed dashi ones, devilled (avocado instead of mayo?))

Potatoes (mashed, fried or roasted in lard or goose fat, lemon-greek, latkes, other)

Squash (roasted savory or sweet, soup, stuffed, honeyed)

Carrots (roasted, pickled, soup, candied, other)

Cabbage (fried, ethiopian with carrots, salad)

Pork (roast, pulled, in peach BBQ sauce, fried chops, ground as sauce for potatoes, ground as meatloaf or burgers, quick sausage, bacon)

Goose (breast rare, confit roast body)

Chicken (stewed with dumplings, soup)

Rice (topped with pork sauce, goose confit, sardines, mixed pickles, chili crisp, maggi, fried egg, and/or steamed or fried greens)

Breakfast hash with bacon or quick-sausage and an egg on top

Casseroles involving many of the above and hot peppers, bonito, kelp, berbere, lemon, many fermented bean things, canned tomatoes, mixed pickles, who really knows, I do have a lot of spices

Applesauce (grape, vanilla)

Meringues

Chocolate lava cakes

Smores

Optional, need to buy ingredients for:

Mega caesar salad, need romaine

Doukhabour borscht, Kris' recipe (oh shoot, there will be two Krisses)

More smores, need more g/f graham crackers

Something with fried mushrooms

Deep fried things, I need to get un-flour-contaminated corn starch or use my tapioca starch since my normal use corn starch is certainly contaminated with gluten. Squash tempura? I could make the dipping sauce easily

Prep:

Maybe I should pre-cook some potatoes to make a frittata fast and easy, or hash browns or whatever.

Get cream for Kelsey's coffee.

Get more milk.

Boil some eggs for snacks.

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.

Today was a slaughter day. It was harder for me than they've been before, and I suspect the sadness of it will linger: these are the first sows I've slaughtered, that is, the first ones who had babies for me. One of them, Sparky, was one of my original sows. They were both good girls.

The kill was clean, and the bleed out was very good: when I stuck I actually hit Sparky's heart. The shooter/helper today was a friend's husband who'd done a bunch of these in Newfoundland (?) where he's from; in addition to his excellent shot placement he also was very useful at dragging heavy stuff. We went from his arrival to gutted and halved by noon, then he headed home and we spent some time recovering. I am bringing a bunch of bacon to him (from a previous kill) tomorrow.

Then will be a very lot of butchering. Sparky's the heaviest pig I've done, so there's a lot of physical strength needed, but her size is welcome. It means I'll be able to do some good big chunks of cured meat. I didn't cure much if anything from the last couple slaughters, except maybe bacon, so I'm in need of new prosciutto stocks.

I feel better having it done

Yesterday both Josh and Tucker made it a point to call me in the evening and chat, which was nice.

And now I'm tired and wishing I was able to put myself into a good paper book for an hour before sleep. I used to read so much and now I can barely keep my attention on a page at all. It's such a loss, especially on nights like this.

Two days drifting in and out of my (soon to be ex) boss' house. Made so much food, shared the experience of neat boozes (neat gins and orange wines), some hot tubbing, some movies (stingray sam!), some solitude, some other folks I liked drifting in and out.

Made a connection with a very sweet and vibrant service sub type who sent me pictures of her bruises after. Im really quite lucky the number if people who not only enjoy being bit but who send me the progression of their marks. A+ to myself for steering the in person conversations required beforehand too; I normally do that stuff by internet but this went well.

Gorgeous moon with the whole open sky full of silver-topped clouds tonight. Tucker comes home tomorrow & I have missed him so much.

There are things coming down the pipe and it has been a hard week, but tonight I am happy.