Chewing the Fat: Learning how to Preserve Meat and Love Lard

Today Michelle I decided to take our quest for local foods and sustainability to the next level and attended a Meat Preservation class through the Phoenix Permaculture Guild. It was, how can I say this….totally awesome. I’ll begin by saying the class was way more structured and professional than I was expecting. The class was taught by a biology professor and she was really an amazing teacher. I feel like I learned tons. The class was held in the Tempe Transportation Center and it was really cool to be in this kind of community space.

So, the class began with learning about what fat is, and some of the terminology about meat. She also talked about rendering your own fat to make your own lard. As class started, she emptied a jar of chopped pork fat into a pan with a little water and set it over a small burner to render during the course of the class. Even though it kind of made me nervous at first, it began to smell pretty delicious. Plus, she began to talk about why one might want to use their own lard and what partially-hydrogenated oils really are, etc. I had thought that this class might be more about making jerky, but I was beginning to understand that rendering your own fats can have a stronger effect in terms of sustainability and the intake of real foods versus chemicals.

Then the teacher told us about nitrates and nitrites and the myth of nitrate-free bacon and ham. She said that chemically, there is just no way to cure the meat like that without nitrates. The rub, as one might say, is that they use either celery powder or celery juice to cure it. Celery, it turns out, has the highest concentration of nitrates in ground harvested/root vegetables. These veggies make up 70-90% of our human intake of nitrates. Crazy! The nitrates in the store are a chemical version of what is naturally in the celery. Still nitrates though, which was really eye opening to me.

After that we learned about making jerky, bacon, and ham. I can’t wait to try the recipes. This stuff sounds wicked awesome, not to mention delicious, and I am super excited to try to do it. As class ended, the fat had rendered, and the teacher strained it, removing small crispy bits and errant bits of meat (this keeps the fat from tasting like bacon, and being more flavor neutral – though the type of fat used has something to do with that as well). She salted the hardened fat bits and let us taste them. They were crunchy and tasted a bit like bacon, and a bit like crackers…sort of a crunchy meat treat, much like chicharrones, though it’s been so long since I’ve had them I can’t be sure.

While I’m not quite ready to forgo all vegetable oil and switch to a lard-heavy lifestyle and/or cooking regimen, I feel like we learned some great skills and became a bit more educated on where food comes from – a topic I am super interested in learning about.

Either way, the class was excellent and I’m really looking forward to our next class with the Permaculture Guild.

Liquid Fat - Your Lard, Liquified

It's Crunchy and Tasted a Bit Like Bacon

Ooh, Fat Bits!

References FTW!

My Week in Food – Jan 21-27

This week has been really interesting for me with food. Michelle and I did our usual class. This week’s topic was “Fast & Fresh: Pasta.” I’ll be honest, I was pretty disappointed. They made a bolognese with 59 cent spaghetti and fancy jar sauce with fancy imported pasta. I can’t say that I thought that either was particularly good. I thought they were both bland. Also I thought that combining the jar sauce with fancy pasta was a cheat – even though it seemed to backfire in end. The class (usually 1 hour +) was done in 35 minutes and we booked it to the Old Town Farmer’s Market to get in on Truckin’ Good’s Duck Fat Fries. Totally worth it.

I also managed to snag a serving of Torched Goodness’ Salted Caramel Creme Brulee. I also managed to pick up some more great jam (grape, pomegranate, & plum), a couple of pounds of fresh grass fed beef, and lots of citrus. I have been on a serious grapefruit kick lately and am averaging about 2 a morning. So good. We also got some random veggies from McClendon’s and a killer glass of lemonade from the FNB tent. It was definitely a good haul.

I played Pathfinder in the afternoon, before having a Wizard People, Dear Readers viewing party. Since a few couples were coming over, I made two pastas, one veggie, one not and I can’t say that I thought either one turned out well. While my husband insists that seconds were being taken I was pretty much blah-ed out by the meal. What I did like was the impromptu garlic bread I made with homemade bread, butter, garlic, and Italian Seasoning. Yummy. After that it was a round of pumpkin ice cream for the group.

Sunday seems like it was really busy, starting with a fantabulous breakfast at Mac’s Broiler and Tap. I owe them a review, but I can tell you that I love this restaurant and that it’s one of my top five faves. It is a great community restaurant/bar/hangout/etc and I am down to eat there just about any time. This morning I had the Mac’s Original off the breakfast menu, subbing the hashbrowns for steak fries, and effectively creating a plate of ham and chips. Adding in a side of their amazing (literally best in town) medium wing sauce and it was perfect. After a quick trip to Hoodlums for some musica, and a massage (yay me), I had some church stuff to do and ended up eating Cheerios for dinner.

Monday, I had coffee at Into the Bungalow, a neat little coffee shop that I had only had the chance to check out once before, and I made my awesome tacos for dinner. Tuesday was tacos otra vez and then Wednesday, we had a fun work lunch at Contigo Peru, where I had the best Shrimp Ceviche I think I’ve ever had. Contigo Peru (review to come eventually) is a great little restaurant in Mesa and I really love the food there – especially the home made Alfajores. After that, we snuck over to Dori’s Bakery next door (go go gadget Apple Turnover) for a totally worth it batch of sugar, butter, and all around good cheer.

Wednesday night I went with a friend to check out a “Wild Dining” meetup group, who was dining at an Australian restaurant in Gilbert called Down Under. That’s a whole experience, but I’m glad I went. I actually didn’t get a chance to eat much, so I plan to go back, test it out, and then review it properly.

Yesterday, we went to Cost Plus to look at furniture and ended up walking out with some Dark Chocolate Salted Caramels and a bag of Haribo Raspberry Candies. After eating just about all of them, we met friends for dinner at Boulders on Broadway – a great tempe spot with killer waffle fries. I was really impressed by the Spinach Artichoke Dip. They served it with toasted french bread and chips and it was really tasty. The perfect combo of spinach, artichokes, tomato, cheese, garlic, cream, and spices. I was really happy with it. My sausage stromboli was good but super rich, and I ended up mostly eating fries with Ranch ( a throwback, I know) and just enjoyed my Mango Iced Tea (a must).

So that’s my week in food. A little here, a little there, a little late of a post, but still tasty. Enjoy.

My Weekend in Food: Jan 8-9, 2011

My lovely friend Michelle called me and asked me to join her at a local free cooking class again. We went almost every week last fall and learned lots of great things, but that was not the case on Saturday. That’s a whole other post, but generally, there are a couple of tips we learn and we have a good time. This week was about stir fry, and we got through 1 of the 3 recipes on deck. It was tasty and I’ll be excited to try it at home. Afterward, we went to the Old Town Farmers Market for breakfast and it was quite tasty. We got crepes and while it was a little hard to eat, I’ll definitely try them again. Then we wandered around getting various tastes and groceries. Definitely a success in that I got some Tangelo Honey-belles which I had been ogling in my Harry and David catalog earlier that morning.

Once we got back to the house (husbands were gathering for a music practice), I got my bread machine going on a loaf of the Home-style White. It is one of three breads in the beginning of the killer bread machine recipe book Brendan got for me (along with the epic breadmachine) for my birthday. The book is neat in that it teaches you how to use the machine through a few simple recipes. I am trying each a few times to get the hang of the machina before advancing to crazy awesome breads. It’s still ridiculously tasty. I love it. Anyhow, once the ingredients for that were situated, I decided to make a cake from a mix I had in jar. When my friend Lauren got married (she loves zombies) I found a jar cake mix online and made dry mixes for all the girls at her shower, calling it Lauren’s Country Zombie Cake. In rereading the recipe I was totally scandalized by it not needing eggs. I should have know it would produce a flat cake. Oh well. Once that was baking, I wanted to make Orange Biscochitos, which I had bought the ingredients for for my Christmas baking, but hadn’t gotten around to making them.

I had no idea what I was getting into. The state cookie of Nuevo Mexico is not so easy. I was SO thankful Michelle was there to help me mix, and then dunk the cookies into the sugar-cinnamon coating because the 5 dozen the recipe mentioned as the bounty was spot on. It was my first time rolling out dough with cookie cutters. It took way longer than I thought it would. The cookies themselves were cutout with a star, which was fun, and they tasted pretty good. They had flour, lard, anise, orange juice, sugar, cinnamon, and triple sec. They tasted really mild despite all the crazy ingredients.

At that point it was like 4:30 or something, and we started to frost the cake. The frosting recipe we tried said unsweetened chocolate. I made the mistake of thinking that cocoa powder would work. Not so much. So then I had to add more water (didn’t work)…so then we added butter (tasted better, but the consistency was still junky). In the end, we just didn’t like the taste of the cake or the frosting, so we decided to layer it with raspberry jam to make it better. We cut the cake into three even pieces and then filleted them into 6 thin pieces. We layered jam and liquidy frosting alternating, and then Michelle artfully poured frosting over the top, getting a nice drip effect. At this point we decided that even if it didn’t taste good, it would look good. We tried to chill the frosting with the hopes it would set, and eventually it set enough that it changed colors. Michelle poured another layer on the top, making it zebralicious and it looked amazing. I busted out my fancy cake platter I received for our wedding and it looked killer.

It was maybe 5, 6′o clock and we were getting hungry so I decided to transition straight into enchiladas. I threw the green chiles I had purchased at the farmers market under the broiler and asked Michelle to peel some garlic and grate some cheese. About an hour later, we had neat stacked red chile enchiladas (both chicken and cheese) and I hadn’t burned myself during the dutiful dip in oil, dip in sauce routine needed for the tortillas. Mixed with a little green onion and cilantro – they were definitely a success.

As we sat around with Michael and Michelle and Mack, eating cake and cookies, and drinking tea, only then did I begin to feel tired from being on my feel almost all day. Cooking weekend #1 = success.