This year I’m celebrating the holidays with a “12 Days of Christmas” series on the abundances of our kitchen and garden. Share your experiences, too, and happy holidays!
On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me …
7 dozen pounds of pork … and fat to render
6 farm-fresh eggs,
5 daikon pickled for banh mi,
4-some gallons of beer,
3 quarts of applesauce,
2 half-gallons of sauerkraut,
and 1 quart of yogurt, homemade.
Longtime readers might remember that a couple of years ago, my family ordered a quarter beef to put in our freezer. That experience gave us 105 pounds of various cuts of beef and lasted us about a year.
This fall, our CSA put whole pigs on sale, organically raised on vegetarian feed and pastured. We decided to go for it, and split the meat with my mom and her husband. The whole pig, including its fat, wound up being around 135 pounds of meat. We’re keeping the fat to render into lard, so our share was more than half. To date, Mr. Cheap has dived into cooking with our pork, making some tacos, split pea soup with the hock, and a ham for the holidays. I’ve used one package of bacon, and he is experimenting with the fresh side (basically uncured bacon).
We are very pleased to be able to purchase local pork raised in a healthy manner, rather than fed who knows what and raised in who knows what environment. Of course, making this purchase has also raised our awareness about how many people do not eat pork, either because of religious beliefs or concern that it is dirty, diseased or otherwise unhealthy. (For a brief look at pork’s “healthiness,” check out this post.) Buying organically raised took away many of those concerns for us, as we don’t follow a religion that has guidelines about it.
Our upcoming project will be to render the fat into lard. Stay tuned for that …
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Comments ( 4 )
[...] the eighth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me … 8 oranges’ peels, candied 7 dozen pounds of pork … and fat to render 6 farm-fresh eggs, 5 daikon pickled for banh mi, 4-some gallons of beer, [...]
12 Days of Christmas: Candied orange peel | Cheap Like Me added these pithy words on Jan 02 10 at 5:09 am[...] Christmas, my true love gave to me … 9 candied bacon strips 8 oranges’ peels, candied 7 dozen pounds of pork … and fat to render 6 farm-fresh eggs, 5 daikon pickled for banh mi, 4-some gallons of beer, [...]
12 Days of Christmas: Candied bacon & bacon fudge | Cheap Like Me added these pithy words on Jan 03 10 at 10:29 amWow, I can’t wait to see how the fat is rendered into lard… everything tastes better w/bacon…
kimchi added these pithy words on
Jan 01 10 at
5:33 pm
Seems to me (and my memory could be hazy on this) that rendereng pork fat is a very time consuming chore. At least my grandma used to give that impression when she rendered her own lard from a pig my aunt and uncle butchered. Could be she was just complaining. Anyway Good Luck and let us know how the Lard turned out
Rob added these pithy words on
Jan 02 10 at
11:57 pm
