Getting my bac-on – dry curing bacon, stage one

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 31 January 2012 in preserving | 5 comments

(Title inspired by the fact I sang a meaty “Get your freak on” parody while doing my cure mixing and meat massaging. It was so bad that even the cats, who usually “enjoy” my silly songs and certainly love it whenever I’m doing anything with meat in the kitchen, left the room.)

I finally started my first load of homemade bacon last night. I got my bacon on.

I’ve been meaning to start a load for a couple of months but things kept happening and I didn’t do it. Then on Sunday, we had the best bacon we’ve eaten in a long, long, long time on Sunday (from the excellent Swillington Farm) – I doubt ours will compared but my desire for perfectly preserved pink pork products is strong enough to force me to give it a go. Conveniently our monthly meatbox from Swillington also contained a small slab of belly pork – about 750g/1.5lbs – so streaky here we come :)

(Mmm, soon-to-be streaky!)

I spent a lot of time looking at different cure recipes and was surprised by how many recipes missed out vital bits of information — carefully detailing how much of each thing to use in the cure but then missing out the weight of the meat (300g? 3000g?) — but I think I figured out the required ratios in the end. I’ll hold off posting anything about my cure now until we’ve tasted the finished product – I will say though that I’m reluctant to use saltpetre and haven’t used it this time around. I’m quite glad we’re only using a small piece of pork as I suspect the cure will need some tweaking, for example, there seems to be a lot of coriander seeds on the meat, even though they make up a tiny percentage of the cure mix and I forgot to include pepper, which had been in my original plan. This post is more for me so I can remember what I did for next time :)

(I did grind the salt up further after I took these pictures.)

What I did: I mixed my cure (NB FutureLouisa: the recipe is in your blue scrap paper notebook), scored the rind the opposite way to the existing scores, then massaged most of the dry cure into the meat. I plopped it into a conveniently correct-sized container, skin down, and within a few hours, liquid had already started leaking out. This evening – and every day for the next five-ish days, I’m going to pour off the liquid and apply more rub (if needed). Then after that, I’ll rinse off any excess cure, pat it dry, then you’re supposed to leave it to hang but I think we’ll probably end up going down the route which sees it wrapped and rested in the fridge. (In the future, I want to try wet-curing & cold-smoking too – but I’ll wait until I’ve finally got around to building another smoker cabinet.)

We’ll just have to see how it turns out!

(Apologies for the bad lighting/mega-shadows in the pictures – we’ve had our normal kitchen lights taken down so the plasterer can reboard and skim the ceiling in there, and have two nasty, very yellow bulbs on wires in their place. Given the disarray, it’s probably not the best time to try an culinary experiment but nevermind!)

Have you made/do you make your own bacon? If so, have you got any tips/advice for my next few days or for my cure next time?

Soap-making questions – can you help?

Posted by louisa on Monday 30 January 2012 in soap | 10 comments

Two people have asked me soap-making questions on Twitter this afternoon and I thought I’d post them over here as well because I know that not everyone is a Twit.

Firstly, Clare of Three Beautiful Things asked:

Do you have any soap cutting tips, please? I’ve just bought a large block and don’t want it to crumble when I slice it.

I couldn’t help with this one – my soap is still a little soft when I cut it so crumbling isn’t an issue. When my first batch was a bit harder, it did crumble a bit under the knife but I just accepted the rough edged soap bars and collected the crumbles for use as laundry/household soap. Any advice to avoid the crumbles in the first place though?

@AlisonJFews replied:

Don’t know about cutting it, but need a really good soap supplies website. With the one I chose, you had to spend £25 + a time!

And again, I couldn’t help! The soap I’ve made has always been from supermarket supplies and I’ve used misc things as moulds so I’ve not had to use any soap making supplies websites for specialist oils, fats or what-have-you.

For people like me who like to use what’s easily on hand, Sharon of SmithyCraft sent us this link for working out how much lye to use – thanks Sharon.

Has anyone else got any advice/ideas for the other questions?

(By the way, this has reminded me that I’ve been sent a soapmaking ebook to read and review – I’ll get that done this week!)

An example of extreme minimalism?

Posted by louisa on Thursday 26 January 2012 in anti-consumerism, decluttering | 12 comments

Last week, my t’other half John sent me a link to a quite old article by a guy who has pared down his possessions to just “15 things”.

(John came across the article on a geeky news-sharing site and the discussion on there is more interesting than the comments on the blog itself – albeit a lot more longwinded/bitchy now than when I first looked at it last week.)

There are a few people pointing out that he’s not got 15 things – one thing is a “toiletry kit” and he also says he has “couple things not on the list – like socks and underwear – that [he] can easily replace and could not resell for any value” but the exact number is unimportant really because the main point is that, as he says, he’s gone from an overconsumer to a extreme minimalist, who spends his days “traveling, living a pretty simple life”.

What stood out from his list of things (as it stood in May last year) is how nearly everything is listed by brand: from his “Arc’teryx Miura 30 backpack” and “NAU shirt” to his “iPhone 3GS” and “Macbook Air”. Perhaps he’s making a point about having few good quality items (I don’t know if that backpack and shirt are good quality but the backpack costs £120 and the cotton shirts £75+) and just because you’re minimalist doesn’t mean you have to be frugal, but it smacks to me of brand fetishism. (He posted an update last week after the new round of attention and now has 39 things – his phone has been upgraded, we know the make of his new laptop bag and the £75+ shirt is no more.)

Other people on geeky discussion board point out that by while he doesn’t own as much stuff – like pans & cutlery, furniture or bedsheets – as most of us do, he’s using his money and/or goodwill to temporarily rent those things (at restaurants or hotels) – or outsourcing the renting/ownership of those things to friends he’s staying with. A few years ago, a friend of ours was living in a fully furnished rented flat – which included everything from his bed to the cutlery in the kitchen drawers: he didn’t technically own that stuff but he was able to make full use of it, much like this guy making full use of his friends’ sofas and household appliances. I’m also reminded about our friend of a friend who throws his change in the bin — he also used to buy CDs, rip them to his laptop then throw them in the bin too: he still “owned” the music just not the physical medium.

There are obviously lots of definition arguments too about what is minimalism & what is a simple life and I guess I do have to give the guy some props for actually changing his life around, but it seems to me that his life still seems as defined by “stuff” as it was back in the day. It also reminds me of what I’ve said before about people going extreme to compensate for previous behaviour – the hair shirt to atone for your sins – which I personally don’t think is a good idea.

Oh I didn’t mean to spend so much time waffling and being negative! I just wanted to introduce the article to you guys, to see what you thought about it. I know a lot of people who read this blog are frugal, just-in-case hoarders but also have a lot of stuff to allow off-grid/”self-sufficient” activities (even just less extreme stuff like making our own food from scratch), so in many ways, we’re the opposite of Mr 15 Things while still living “pretty simple lives” — and that’s why I’m especially interested in what you have to say!

Have you heard about this guy or anyone else living an “extreme minimalist” lifestyle? What do you think about it? Do you think they serve as inspiring examples for the rest of us clutterers?

Chicken having a (saw)dust bath

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 25 January 2012 in chickens | 3 comments

Every time I clean out the chicken coop, I marvel at how they’ve managed to get wood shavings EVERYWHERE. Now I know why:

If you go down to the woods today…

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 24 January 2012 in green, growing | 1 comment

You might find a pretty much brand new collapsible garden bin.

That’s what I found on my walk with Lily-dog today.

When I first saw it a little way up the hill from the path, I thought it was one of ours but when I got closer, I saw it was bigger and frankly better quality than the ones I use. That part of the woods, which isn’t very popular with dogwalkers but is very popular with Lily-dog, isn’t really near any houses so I didn’t know who it could belong to so … yoink!

Coincidentally, the one I use for cleaning out the chicken coop (carrying the wood shavings from the coop to the compost heap) is just about on its last legs so this was a very well timed find indeed.

By way of thanks to the woods for their offering, I filled it with all the litter I came across on the walk out and back. It was mostly carrier bags, crisp packets and a couple of cans/bottles, but there was also an unused rubble sack which I bet someone lost in the recent high winds. Inspired by Su’s “goals for 2012” comment on Recycle This the other week, I’d been thinking about doing a litter pick in the woods when the weather got a little better – I’m glad this forced my hand sooner rather than later :)