What's In Your Freezer?

If you go back and read the comments to my post on the Kenneth Maue book, and further back to my post on the 14 year old grapes that I baked into a pie, you'll find that the same person twice confessed to having a bat in her freezer.  

I have a pig tail in my freezer.  It's not the kind of pig tail that you see on cute little girls.

A couple of years ago, we bought a whole pig. The whole thing - snout to trotters. We got the pig from someone we know, and visited it while it was still standing. He had it slaughtered for us, we had a butcher cut it up, and some of it got smoked. It was a bargain, and it kept us in pig for a good while.

All of the porky goodness is long gone, save the tail. The tail is still in the freezer, nicely vacuum sealed into sturdy plastic, looking for all the world like a pig's tail.  I'm kind of loathe to part with it, but what the hell do you do with one pig tail?

The other day, I checked my many cookbooks. I was sorely disappointed that the 1953 Joy of Cooking doesn't even mention pig tails (especially since it does tell you how to skin a squirrel), and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall just glosses over them in The River Cottage Meat Book.

But, as one might expect from a book subtitled "Nose to Tail Eating", I hit the jackpot with a recipe for Crispy Pig's Tails in Fergus Henderson's The Whole Beast.  He waxes rhapsodic about the tail of the pig:

On other pages I have sung the praises of how the pig's snout and belly both have that special lip-sticking quality of fat and flesh merging, but this occurs in no part of the animal as wonderfully as on the tail. Like an ice cream on a stick, a pig's tail offers up all the above on a well-behaved set of bones.  By the by, dealing with any slightly hairy extremities of pig, I recommend a throwaway Bic razor (hot towels and shaving cream not required). You must ask your butcher for long tails.

The problem is, the recipe calls for "8 long pig's tails" to serve four people. To get eight tails, we'll need to buy seven more pigs.  We haven't got enough freezer space.

Hump Day? Hmm...

W. brought in the mail and said "now you're getting packages addressed to Magpie Musing?" He handed it to me; from the return address I could tell it was a book I'd agreed to review. I opened it and showed it to him. "Maybe we'll have some fun with this."

It was a book called Hump: True Tales of Sex After Kids.

He blushed and handed it back to me.

I read it. I read the whole thing. It was often amusing, and frequently provocative, but occasionally annoying and kind of unsettling. That may be more about prudish me, but then again, I don't know. I've never had "toys"; the book made me wonder whether I've been missing something (for that matter, so did Aurelia last year). And since I never learned how to be a real girl, I'm not about to start getting Brazilians (I have enough trouble keeping my legs shaved). Nor am I going to start hosting pole dancing parties in my living room.

The book went completely off the rails for me with her enthusiastic endorsement of pornography and Vegas lap dances. Call me old-fashioned, but to me, pornography and lap dancing are exploitative of women, degrading women, turning women into commodity. Thanks, but no thanks.

I kind of wanted to like the book more - after all, I am her demographic: the overextended married mother, in a heterosexual, monogamous relationship. But I didn't really get much out of it, beyond the rekindling of a vague curiosity about vibrators (my turn to blush).

Incidentally, it's all about monogamous sex between married men & women. No adultery, no same-sex relationships. None of that Little Children shacking up with the stay-at-home dad you met at the playground.

And peeps? This is as close as you'll get to me talking about my sex life on this here blog. Bacon? I can do bacon. I'll leave the blogger's sex life to Deb on the Rocks.

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[Many apologies to Julie, who inspired the post title and who will receive a little something in the mail for her forbearance...yup, I mailed the book to her.]

Happy Birthday, Little Brother

My brother is two and a half years younger than I am, and it's his birthday today.

When he was tiny, our mother was inspired to try parental multitasking: she was nursing him while reading a book to me, when all of sudden he let out a holler. I had calmly reached over and chomped down on his foot. Damn it, read to me and stop that nonsense with the baby!

This is a picture of him when he was about nine. Is it any surprise that he's grown up to be an omnivore with a distinct predilection for pork?

Happy Birthday!

The Sunday Adventure

Today's whimsy was a trip to Wingdale for barbecue. Big W's had been on the list of road food places to eat in the general vicinity, and got bumped up because they got another mention in the Times the other day, so today we headed north for some meat. Smoked meat. Lovely falling off the bone smoked meat. And sides of beans (full of porky goodness), rice, macaroni and cheese, and a nice coleslaw palate cleanser. And leftovers. We got a half chicken and a pulled pork sandwich for there, and some ribs and brisket to take home. Yum.

We went north to go south to get home, which took us through Millbrook and past an amazing falling down abandoned school. Truly astonishing building, beautiful in its desuetude. We didn't take any pictures, but I found some online, including the whole series in the link. And the website in that link is fascinating - it's a whole mess of photography of abandoned buildings, mostly institutions, like defunct mental hospitals.

How to Cook Bacon

This looks like a third grade science essay - how matter changes with temperature. But bacon! Toast! Melted butter! Toast for breakfast was an illicit treat, at least on school days. Normally, we had cold cereal for breakfast, with brown sugar. We only got toast if everyone was running late.

Word of the Day: Beeves

I've been reading Michael Pollan's book, An Omnivore's Dilemma, and scratching my head at his use of "beeve". I could figure out what he means from the context, but it's peculiar enough (to me anyway) that I finally looked it up.

In addition to being the meat from a cow/steer/bull, a beef IS a cow/steer/bull. The plural of a beef is beeves. Granted, it's archaic. But odd, no? Especially because Pollan uses the singular back-formation "beeve" to refer to a single cow/steer/bull.

And just in case you were wondering, the meat of a pig is called pork, but "the pork" is not an archaic equivalent to "the pig". The pork is something that gets doled out in Washington and Albany.

Lard

I bought a pound or so of unrendered leaf lard at the Greenmarket this morning, to try in a pie crust tomorrow. I googled how to render it, I'm planning to use about 30% lard to 70% butter, and I'm making a simple apple tart with it.

It seems to me that I'm beginning to have a few too many posts about pigs and their culinary uses. Maybe I need a new label for PORK.

Meat and Drink

The things that show up in the Good Grey Lady: Pork Margaritas

Will wonders never cease?

My brother's comment was "Wow. Finally, someone has invented the Perfect Food."

O unctuous pig

Yup: Pork without fat is sex without orgasm.


I was very happy to stumble on Michael Ruhlman's blog this morning, via Foodmomiac. Ruhlman has written some great books about food and cooking - including The Soul of a Chef and The Making of a Chef. The last section of Soul has Ruhlman hanging out in the kitchen at The French Laundry. I was salivating by the end and wanted to jump on the next plane to San Francisco.

Ruhlman also wrote a book called Walk on Water - a book about pediatric heart surgery at the Cleveland Clinic. I had bought this on impulse because I'd liked other stuff that Ruhlman had written and I like reading about medical stuff. Problem is, I bought this on Election Day in 2003, at the PTA book sale at the school I was voting at, when I was about 37 weeks pregnant with Miss M. In a flight of amazing masochism, I devoured the book in days, reading with horrified fascination and a sick feeling that I was somehow jinxing my poor little babe in utero. Luckily she was fine, but it really wasn't the best choice of reading material in my then delicate condition. And all that said, it's a fascinating book about a world one hopes never to enter.