Breakfast

Poached eggs with fresh sausage patty and braised greens.

Preparation time: 10 minutes

Shopping: None

A high-protein, low-carb breakfast for me means two eggs. I prefer them poached to avoid the greasy cleanup from fried eggs. As you can see, I also like my yolks runny.

In the past, I used toast to sop up the yolks and I was mighty frustrated for a time chasing the yolk around the plate without that handy piece of browned bread. Then it occurred to me to add some greens from our own garden to the plate. They do an excellent job of mopping up all that delicious yellowness, so full of beneficial omega-3 fatty acids as they come from eggs laid by hens that forage outdoors on a local farm.

My method of poaching eggs is to heat water in an iron skillet, season with white vinegar and bring to a strong simmer. I crack the eggs and release them gently into the water. Fresh eggs will hold together very well. (Old eggs tend to break apart--not good for poaching, better for hard-boiling.) After a few minutes, I remove the eggs with a slotted spoon. You can pat them dry with a paper towel--or not.

The greens were harvested last year and blanched before being frozen. After defrosting, I simply cook them in salted water until tender, then dress them with a bit of vinegar. Two years ago we helped slaughter pigs on our friend Brett's farm and came away with many pounds of sausage and sausage meat. The meat had been at the bottom of the freezer. We made several different kinds of sausage that year and I'm not sure which this is. I neglected to label it. A sandwich-size package made six patties that I baked off in the oven and have been eating over the last week.

This is the kind of breakfast that gets me out of bed in the morning.

Season's First Choucroute

Choucroute as a recipe is less important than the people you invite to eat it with. So thank you Linda, Tom, Larry, Valca, Pete and Steve for joining us last night. Since we were all basking in the glow of Tuesday's election results, this also constituted our Kumbaya moment.

Choucroute is a classic Alsatian dish of sauerkraut and pork products but there is no single agreed-upon way to make it. In other words, don't feel you have to make it exactly as written in your picture book of French cookery. My own method starts with home-made sauerkraut, shown in the photo at left beginning with about 10 pounds of shredded cabbage and six tablespoons of pickling salt packed firmly in a heavy plastic bucket so that the brine that leaches from the cabbage rises over the top. Give it a month or more to finish.

I then hop on the subway to Capitol Hill to select my pork products from the local butchers: a smoked hock or shank, bacon ends, smoked chops, fresh pork belly if they have it and Kielbasa sausage and bratwurst. Then I get back on the subway and head downtown to the Cafe Mozart where the deli case holds weisswurst and lots of other goodies. Being made of veal, I'm not sure how traditional weisswurst is in choucroute. But we love it and so do all our guests.

The day before the event, I saute a large onion with some bacon grease at the bottom of our biggest and heaviest cookpot. Cook it until it is soft and lightly caramelized. Then I grate two Granny Smith apples (with skins) directly into the pot before adding about six cups of fresh sauerkraut. I stir in a teaspoon of caraway seeds and about a dozen crushed juniper berries. Then I push my smoked ham hock deep into the middle of the kraut, pour in a half cup of Riesling wine and bring the whole mess to a boil. Reduce the heat to the lowest setting, cover the pot and let it simmer for an hour or more until the kraut is soft, aromatic and unctuous.

But for this particular choucroute, there was something special: sauerruben, or fermented grated turnips, that have been mellowing in our refrigerator for the last year and a half. They have an other-worldly nutty flavor to go with the mild tang of fermentation. I added about two cups of that to my pot as well. The results were beyond anything we've ever experienced from mere sauerkraut.

While the pot is simmering, brown all of your other meats in a heavy skillet with a little cooking oil or bacon grease. These can be wrapped and refrigerated until the following day, when the sausages, the bacon ends, the smoked chops and the pork belly are all packed into the pot to wait until the guests arrive, when we turn the heat up to a gentle simmer and let those kraut and wine juices steam everything for about 45 minutes.

We loaded the finished kraut and meat onto a big platter and served it buffet-style with roasted parsnips and carrots from the garden, mashed potatoes and homemade apple sauce. All of the guests had brought various German wines and the libations did flow. Conversation was lively, interrupted by exclamations over the turnip-infused kraut.

For dessert, we plated a stunning sweet potato pie made by my wife the baker from sweet potatoes grown just outside the kitchen window. More about that anon. I am still recovering.

Dark Days: Hungarian Sausage with Braised Red Cabbage

It's been nearly a year since we spent a weekend at our farmer friend Brett's place killing pigs and making sausages. When I went digging for something to make for this week's Dark Days meal, I found two packages of Hungarian sausages at the bottom of the freezer, transporting me back to our pork "matanza."

I like the idea of suspending grocery purchases and living off what's in the pantry--or what's in the freezer, as the case may be. Riana, at the Garlic Breath blog, has been doing just that with great success for the last several weeks. In fact, Riana is on day 40 with no end in sight. At this point, she says, "the freezer is getting bearable but not bare. At least I can see the sides and figure out what is in there."

I think we Americans have a kind of unnatural fetish when it comes to needing something different, fabulous, thrilling to eat every night. Meanwhile, food piles up uneaten. Will we ever consume those Vietnamese rice noodles in the back pantry? Or that frozen pork tenderloin I don't even remember where it came from? How about that 29-ounce can of Manning's hominy taking up space next to the Middle Eastern fava beans?

In fact, we've been pretty good the last couple of months about not blowing our budget at the grocery store. Doesn't that make the occasional "special" meal all the more "special?"

I thawed the Hungarian sausages and browned them in the cast iron skillet. There was a red cabbage from the farmers market sitting in the cold room, waiting for just such an occasion. And this week's CSA box arrived heavy with Beauregard sweet potatoes and turnips. Since the produce box also comes from Brett's farm, it created a nice bit of circularity with the year-old sausages.

As the cabbage braised, I dropped the browned sausages into the pot to cook through. I steamed the sweet potatoes in a saucepan, then seasoned them very simply with salt, allspice, nutmeg, cloves and mashed them with a pat of butter and a bit of cream.

Nothing fancy. Just good food. Crack open your best bottle of mustard and pour a nice glass of wine. And look forward to lots of leftovers.

Happy Birthday Slow Cook

In response to an earlier post about the experience of browning chicken in a friend's extraordinary enameled iron pan, family members offered to donate one (enameled pan, that is) to The Slow Cook's kitchen battery. So I arranged an outing with my in-laws to Arundel Mills Mall outside Annapolis to visit the Le Creuset outlet.



At least we thought we were going to visit the Le Cruiset outlet.



After parking in what must be one of the world's largest stretches of asphalt, we entered a mall the size of a small city and made a bee-line for where mother-in-law had last seen Le Creuset. Well, darned if we drew a complete blank. No Le Creuset outlet to be found, nor was it listed on the store directory.


Had we merely imagined there was a Le Creuset outlet on the premises? Mother-in-law insisted there was--or had been.



So while she went off to delve further in the mysterious disappearance of the cookwares store, father-law-in and I found ourselves standing outside what looked like the entrance to Yosemite National Park--columns of timbers and a pitched lodge roof--that turned out to be something called Pro Bass Shops Outdoor World.



Through the front windows you could see acres of tents and kayaks hanging from the rafters and all sorts of golf clubs lined in rows. Just the place to waste a few minutes while we waited for the Le Crueset mystery to unravel. Except there in the short distance I noticed a sign amidst the camping gear that said "Cooking." I had to see what that was about.



We passed propane stoves and deep fat fryers in all shapes and sizes. There were a hundred or so varieties of beef jerky and several different models of vacuum packers and food dryers, just the thing if you're thinking of a long stay in the woods of Alaska, I thought.

But there at the end of the row I caught my breath: meat grinders and sausage stuffer--oh, there were so many different kinds. And so many different sizes: display models--some as big as my car, it seemed, at least big enough to make sausage out of a deer or elk or moose--and then stacks of them in their boxes ready to take home. Just tons and tons of sausage stuff. Who knew?



Suddenly, I was not so interested in a saute pan anymore.



After inspecting all the different meat grinders I narrowed my choice to the one you see in the photo above, a .25-horsepower machine that will replace the little Rival "Grind-O-Matic" that we inherited from my wife's grandmother. I see many, many links of sausage stretching out before us....



What I did find a little scary was the sheer number of meat grinders and sausage stuffers on display in a store I'd never even heard of before. The beginning of hunting and butchering season approaches, so that would explain the interest in making sausage.



But I suddenly had this eerie feeling that I'd stepped into a parallel universe where I was not the only sausage fanatic on the planet. Apparently, there are many, many others like myself who think filling hog casings with ground up pork and garlic and sage is just the neatest thing. Who could they be? Where are they hiding? Why have I never seen them?



"We just put these out recently," explained the store clerk who came over to check me out. "By spring, they'll all be gone."



Very scary indeed...

Dead Chefs and Hot-Smoked Kielbasa

Time now for our annual (sometimes) James Beard dinner, re-christened Dead Chefs Dinner so as to honor the passing of Julia Child as well.

In years past this has turned into quite a formal affair with many courses, many changes of plates and wine glasses and generally more food and drink than a person has any right to consume at one sitting.

Everyone is expected to bring a dish somehow connected to the departed chef(s) in question. For some reason I was swept away by the idea of making sausages. I didn't have a sausage recipe from either Beard or Child but I was pretty confident they would have enjoyed these sausages, even if it meant bending our rule a little.

(However--and I want to state this for the record--in search of something to hold the water bath inside the smoker since the metal bowl that came with the smoker seems to have sprung a leak, I did use a cake pan that once belonged to James Beard himself. I swear I am not making this up. We also have a copper colander that once belonged to Liberace.)

Originally I was just going to brown the sausages on the stove top and finish them in the oven. But summer is fast approaching and a little voice whispered "smoker" in my ear. So I had a quick consult with two of my sausage references--Bruce Aidells' Complete Sausage Book and Michael Ruhlman's Charcuterie--then set up the smoking unit in the front yard where passersby would get a good whiff of sausage and hickory smoke.

I had ground and stuffed Kielbasa over two days previous. My only question was about the legitimacy of smoking them. I don't claim to be an expert in this area. In fact, I am fairly new to sausage making. I have made Aidells' fresh Kielbasa on several occasions already, though. It's an excellent recipe with lots of garlic, marjoram, dry mustard and coriander. A very full-flavored sausage.

Kielbasa is typically smoked, but I'd venture to say that what you see in the supermarket has been prepared using a "cold smoke" method, where the meat never gets close to the actual fire and has been treated with some form of preserving salt. In the hot smoking process, the temperature inside the smoker reaches about 215 degrees (at least it does in my smoker) and the finished temperature of the meat is 150 degrees or more. No preservatives are required, although you can add them if you like the flavor.

I soaked a small bucket-full of hickory chips overnight, then set 6 1/2 pounds of finished sausage (I did not bother to twist it into links) on the two grates inside the smoker. The sausages were finished in about two hours, measuring for doneness by inserting an instant-read thermometer lengthwise into one of the sausages.

Meanwhile, our farmer friend Mike Klein had stopped by the day before with two pounds of fresh strawberries. It's been a very dry spring so far, this after a balmy January and a record-setting cold snap in April. Mike declared it perfect weather for strawberries, although farmers in our area around the District of Columbia are warning that their fruit tree crops may be a bust if we don't get a good, soaking rain soon.

After some extensive research, my wife decided to use a Julia Child recipe to turn the strawberries into a souffle in two batches. Once the souffles had set, we iced them down in a cooler. So it was with cooler, sausages, ceramic platters and a crate of dessert plates that we arrived at the home of food friends Bill and Cathy where cocktails were well underway.

The menu was much less formal this year, more like a picnic theme that worked perfectly with tables set for 30 guests on the lawn under the tulip poplar trees. Along with my sausages was a boat-load of fried chicken for the entree. There was a creamy cucumber salad, two potato salads, tiny white asparagus in vinaigrette, green beans, a huge bowl of salad, ginger bread and a brown bread.

The hors d-oeuvres were exquisite, including a gorgeous shrimp salad smothered in dill, thinly sliced onions and lemon, asparagus wrapped in prosciutto and cheese, a smoked salmon spread, and of course the traditional brioche sandwiches with sweet onion, mayonnaise and parsley. (Here I need to make a correction: Larry does not make the sandwiches, although he apparently sourced the original James Beard recipe. The sandwiches are made by friends Greg and Ginna.)

Just prior to announcing the buffet, Larry gave a solemn reading from the Book of James, also known as The New James Beard (1981), while my wife quoted a passage from Julia Child's The Way to Cook.

I have to say I was surprised by all the huzzahs over the sausages. They're just sausages, after all. But they were damn good. They came out of the smoker a stunning mahogany color with just the right notes of hickory, nothing overpowering.

My wife was less pleased with the strawberry souffles. Maybe a little less gelatin next time, she said. Personally, I think Julia's souffles pale in comparison to my wife's strawberry trifle.

The Gentle Art of Re-Heating

I know many of you are anxious to hear the results of the parents dinner last night.

It was a huge success, with many raves for a menu representing the work I've been doing with the kids in my "food appreciation" classes.

Besides the kids themselves, the stars were the fresh Kielbasa sausages that the kids helped me fill over the last couple of days, plus a sauerkraut that I had fermented using our bucket method and braised with onions, apples, juniper berries and carraway.

The kids have been learning to peel vegetables. Lots of peeling going on. Se we also served boiled parsleyed potatoes and glazed carrots with dill. And for desert, highlighting our exploration of certain whole grains, oatmeal cookies with dried fruits and chocolate chips.

I had been told to expect 40 for dinner, so I made enough for 60, knowing how these things go. The trick is not so much making the food. No, that's the easy part. The challenge was getting the food hot again without overcooking it once we arrived at the school.

My wife and I have spent some years in the catering business and catering is all about reheating food. Many wedding guests may not realize that their fabulous dinner was actually cooked two days ahead of time, then merely brought up to serving temperature at the appropriate moment.

Yet that's why caterers get paid the big bucks. Most of the food, especially the side dishes, are prepared well in advance then re-heated with sterno in tall aluminum proofing boxes. The proofing boxes roll of the catering trucks and cans of sterno are arranged on baking sheets and lit under the food.

Some items, such as expensive beef tenderloin, chicken breasts and fish filets, are too delicate to cook and reheat. More often than not, they've been "marked" on a hot grill to give the food a chic restaurant look. Then the cooking process is completed over the sterno.

Imagine the value of a chef who can finish off, say, 30 whole beef tenderloins to perfect medium-rare doneness at exactly the right moment to serve a hall full of wedding guests? The thought is almost frightening, yet this time of year it's done all the time.

Now we cater our own dinner parties at home. Meaning, no crazy chefs running around trying to cook a la minute, scaring the guests. We have the meal cooked ahead so we it can just warm in the oven while we enjoy a cocktail and gab with our friends.

The food for last night's event had been cooked and refrigerated in the kind of big aluminum chaffing containers shown in the picture above. But we didn't have any proofing boxes at the school where we were serving dinner. Our heat source was the school's stove and range top.

How then to get all this food hot enough to serve at the moment our parents were ready to eat?

That's where my wife, the catering chef, comes in.

The method we used was to separate some of the denser and colder items, such as the sausages and the potatoes, into separate containers. I had not taken any chances with the pork sausages. They were already cooked through, but they were really cold after being in the fridge overnight.

My wife placed two containers of sausages in the oven, set at 350 degrees. She put one container of potatoes, dressed with some butter, in a small warming compartment on the side of the oven. That left containers of sauerkraut, carrots and more potatoes to heat. We accomplished that on the range top, setting the aluminums over four burners plus a full-sized griddle.

You just keep a close eye on the food on top of the range, stirring often to make sure nothing burns.

When the time came to serve, we had an assembly line ready at our food prep tables. The kids lined up to take plates of food and deliver them to their parents. Within a few short minutes, everyone was eating.

And if you listen closely, you can hear the sighs and the moans over our delicious food.

"My son won't eat the Kielbasa I make at home," said the school nurse. "But he came home this week and said he'd eaten the best Kielbasa ever."

You'd be surprised what kids will eat when they make it themselves.

Stuffing Sausage

I challenged the kids in my "food appreciation" classes to stuff sausages for tonight's parents dinner and they came through like champs.

I've beeen teaching classic and even ancient food preparation techniques to my elementary school students, including things like fermenting sauerkraut, pickling and lately making sausages.

They are totally captivated by sausage making. They love to squish the meat between their fingers. And this week they got their first look at hog casings and my hand-operated press for filling the casings.

The casings fit over a long nozzle. A long handle attaches to a plunger that forces the meat into the casings. Pressing the meat requires a good bit of upper-body strength. Each of the kids got a turn, and there were cheers, hoozahs and squeals as the meat squirted into the casings.

Some of the little kids actually had to grab the handle with both hands and lift themselves off the ground to get the meat to move through the nozzle. But they did a great job. We made five dozen sausages during four different classes.

This job is best done with two persons, one to operate the press, the other to hold and guide the casings as they fill with meat. You then shape the sausages into links by pressing the meat this way and that with your hands. Pinch them off, then twist to finish a link. Twist in the opposite direction to finish the next link. And just work your way down the line in that fashion.

To separate the links, just snip them apart with a sizzors.

What we've made for tonight's dinner are fresh Kielbasa sausages with pork shoulder, fat back and plenty of garlic. We used a recipe from Bruce Aidells' Complete Sausage Book and the result was a full-flavored sausage that the kids were wildly enthusiastic over.

2 1/4 pounds pork shoulder (pork butt)
3/4 pound pork fat back
1/2 cup water
2 tablespoons finely chopped garlic
1 tablespoon kosher salt
2 teaspoons dried marjoram
2 teaspoons coarsely ground black pepper
1 teaspoon dry mustard
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
Medium hog casings

Cut the pork and fat back into cubes to fit your meat grinder and process with a 1/4-inch plate (the size of the die in the grinder). In a large bowl, mix the meat with the other ingredients. Grind a second time. Press into casings and form into large links, about five inches long.

Kielbasa can be cooked fresh or smoke-cured. We cooked ours fresh. Use a small trussing skewer to poke a few holes in the sausages so they don't burst. Brown on a griddle or in a heavy skilled, then finish cooking in a 325-degree oven. The internal temperature of the sausage should reach 155-160 degrees, as measured by inserting an instant-read thermometer long-ways into the center of the sausage.

The Daily Grind

I went off to make sausages with the kids in my "food appreciation" classes yesterday and forgot not only a vital part to my new sausage press but also my camera.

You will just have to make due with this pathetic picture of the electric meat grinder that my wife inherited from her grandmother. It's called--ready for this?--the Rival "Grind-O-Matic." And not just a meat grinder, but a "Combination Grinder/Salad Maker."

Yes, it sounds like a send-up for a ridiculous pitch on Saturday Night Live. But I swear it's true. I just wonder who the genius designer was who thought people needed a machine that made sausages and coleslaw. It even comes with an owner's manual equipped with recipes for "Colorful Vegetable Salad Mold" and "Pineapple-Confetti Salad."

There's also a "One-Dish Meals" section with preparations for something called "Salamagundi" and "Tamale Pie."

And just in case you actually want to make sausages, there's a very brief recipe for pork sausage.

There's no date on the paperwork. I've found similar models on e-Bay describing it as "vintage." So I have to assume this machine harks back to the days of avocado-colored kitchens and those Formica countertops that had the wierd, multi-colored, boomerang protozoa swimming around on them.

But apparently Rival is still in business, making crock pots, mixers, fondue sets and whatnot.

Most importantly, this little multi-tasker still works, as demonstrated by the kids in my classes. As it turns out, we really didn't have time to stuff the sausages. It was all we could do to grind 2 1/2 pounds of pork shoulder and 3/4 pounds of fat, then mix in the spices for Kielbasa sausage and run the mix through the grinder a second time.

We did that twice, in two different classes.

Kids don't care how fancy your equipment is. They had never seen sausage made before. Up to this point, their sausage universe was described by Oscar Mayer hot dogs and Jimmy Dean breakfast patties. So they were thrilled to be able to squish the meat between their fingers and push it down into the grinder.

It's a great way to introduce the younger generation to old fashioned, hand-made food. Next week, I'll make sure the sausage stuffer is in working condition and I will bring my camera. The Spring parents dinner, where we will be serving our Kielbasa, is scheduled for next Friday. So we need to have game faces on.

The Machine

The moment has arrived.

Armed with my new sausage press, I am on my way to school to make Kielbasa--aka Polish sausage--with the kids in my elementary school "food appreciation" classes. The plan is to make about 100 links for the parents dinner that is just a few weeks away.

I bought this beauty from The Sausage Maker in Buffalo, New York. It's all stainless and built in the shape of an elbow macaroni. There's a long handle attached to a plunger, which pushes the meat out through this long tube. The hog casings fit over the tube. It's just a matter of getting a second pair of hands to guide the filled casings to a soft landing, then pinching and twisting the finished product into links.

We have an old, electric grinder--a Rival "Grind-O-Matic"--left to us by my wife's grandmother. It also has stuffing capabilities, but I thought it better to go with something manual that will give us more control. I like the idea of being able to feel the stuffing process through my hand and arm, and it will be easier and more instructive for the kids as well.

Onward, Kielbasa!

I will definitely keep you posted on this.

Bandol Tempier Meet Matanza Pig

The vineyards of Bandol in Southern France have been producing wines since Roman times. Normally I would have guessed a Pinot Noir to accompany our matanza pork roast. But my brother-in-law, Tom, Pinot skeptic and eonophile that he is, had selected a choice bottle of Bandol from the Tempier domaine near Toulon, on the Mediterranean coast of Provence, to accompany our loin roast.

Before I start sounding like Robert Parker, I want to stop right here and note that Tom, a librarian by profession, is a bit of what I would call a wine snob (sorry Tom). Since I have forsworn wine snobbery, and since I rarely spend more than $10 for a bottle of wine, this puts me in the category of someone who knows practically nothing about wine any more. I say any more because back in the day I did know quite a lot about California wines. That was when you could spend a week and stop at just about every vineyard in the state for a free tasting. Those days are just a wisp of memory. And while I have a rudimentary knowledge of French wines (I spent some of my student days there, so I know the pleasures of sitting in the lee of some plane trees with a hunk of pate, a baguette and a bottle of vin ordinaire), and while I have toured many times the caves at Pommery and have even taken part in the champagne grape harvest at risk of pneumonia, and while I have experienced a range of the German, Swiss and Austrian vintages, and while I have watched with some befuddlement the emergence of Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Spain and Italy as centers of wine refinement, I am basically a wine ignoramus.

All of which is simply another way to say that we are completely dependent on Tom for making wine choices to go with our food.

So after all the work I described in my earlier posts killing and butchering pigs at our friend's farm in Southern Maryland, last night was our first opportunity to taste the pork we brought home. I froze about half the haul we received for our help at the weekend matanza, or pig slaughter, two weeks ago. What I had sitting in the refrigerator was a bone-in pork loin roast of about five ribs and a bag of 10 Hungarian sausages. I also had about six pounds of homemade sauerkraut at the peek of ripeness, as well as a couple gallons of cream of cauliflower soup from the food classes I teach. So we invited my sister and her husband Tom, along with our friend Shelly and her husband John, to help us deal with all this food. Then our friend Darren called at the last minute and we invited him over as well. This is the menu I came up with:

Cream of Cauliflower Soup w/ Asiago Bread Croutons & Garlic Chives

Hungarian Sausage & Sauerkraut Braised w/ Onions & Apples

Pork Loin Roasted w/ Sage & Garlic; Parmesan Mashed Potatoes; Caramelized Brussels Sprouts w/ Tennessee Smoked Bacon

Creme Brulee

Tom brought a dry Alsatian Riesling for hors d'oeuvres, while I purchased an Alsatian Pinot Blanc to go with the soup. Tom said he really favors heavier wines these days over the Pinots that never quite measure up to his expectations any more. So we were saving the Bandol for the loin roast. A blend of Mourvedre, Grenache and Cinsault grapes, and with an alcohol content of 14 percent, the Bandol certainly is a powerhouse of a wine.

I've mentioned before probably a dozen times at least that supermarket pork simply does not measure up in my book. The pork industry years ago decided to cut the fat out its pork and sell the flesh from beasts raised in dismal, putrid confinement lots as "the other white meat." In the process, they completely eliminated the fat and flavor that many of us remember from the pork roasts of our childhood. You can recapture some of that flavor by seeking out Niman Ranch pork, a cooperative of farmers using more flavorful breeds and more hospitable living conditions for the pigs. Or you can look for a local source of pork.

I was incredibly curious how pork raised by our farmer friend Brett on his spread in Lexington Park--the same pork we had killed and butchered ourselves,--would look and taste on our dinner plates. The Hungarian sausages, with paprika and golden raisins, paired exquisitely with the braised sauerkraut. I was concerned that the sausage might prove overpowering, but the flavor was subtle. The loin roast exceeded all expectations. Unlike anything you would find at the grocery, it was streaked with fatty unctuousness and layers of dark and pale meat. I had stuffed the roast in several places with a mix of garlic, salt and sage that I pounded with a mortar and pestle. I had then browned the roast in an iron skillet before placing it in a 350 degree oven. So there were many complimentary flavors happening in that roast along with some very assertive flavors and a bit of gameyness that I had not expected. The sturdy Bandol wine matched it perfectly.

Shelly is a great storyteller. All you have to do to get her started is pour a Bombay Sapphire martini. She had just returned from a business trip to New Orleans, so we were all anxious to hear her impressions. Tom brought a half-bottle of Muscat for dessert. We drank it with my wife's famous creme brulee. That part is a bit or a blur for me. I remember going upstairs to read a bedtime story to our daughter. I remember reading very, very slowly. But then the lights go dim...

We have struggled with the idea of becoming full partners in the annual matanza because it would mean owning a 325-pound pig and storing the pork from that pig somewhere within the confines of our urban dwelling. But after last night's tasting, I'm starting to think that an investment in a large freezer chest might not be such a bad idea.

Stuffing Sausage: Matanza Day 2

By the second day of the matanza, the crew is showing signs of wear. Children are over-excited and sleep deprived. We missed much of the festivities the night before when our own daughter melted down for lack of sleep. Fireworks were canceled because of high winds. Some of the crew are feeling the effects of too much merry making.

The good news: we are way ahead of schedule. Six pigs have all been killed and butchered. Most of the meat has been carved. What remains is to package and organize the finer cuts, and turn the rest into sausages.


In past years, this was no easy chore. The group was using the most rudimentary of equipment. All of the sausage meat, for instance, was ground in a small Cuisinart in the farmhouse kitchen. "We had to throw bags of ice on the Cuisinart to cool it down," said Christine Bergmark.


One of the matanza participants, Bob Feldhaus, has solved that problem. Feldhaus operates a pet store in nearby Leonardtown with friend Ronnie Frederick. Both are frequent visitors to the farm to help process venison. They are avid sausage makers. This year Feldhaus has purchased a commercial-grade meat grinder and a Cabela brand sausage extruder that holds several gallons of meat.


Most of the "volunteer" help has departed. Now it is down to the matanza shareholders: Brett and Chris, Bobby and Ronnie and Rusty and Karen, two former neighbors from a time when the farmer-wife team lived in Arlington. For some reason, the men gravitate toward the heavy equipment, while the women begin vacuum packing and sorting the meat. I have cleaned the bathtub in the walk-in refrigerator. Now the hams and bacon slabs are curing under layers of kosher salt. I join Bobby at the sausage making station.






There has been extensive chatter and deliberation over what kind of sausages to make and which recipes to use. One of the sources the group relies on is Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing by a fellow named Rytek Kutas. Kutas, a man of simple tastes and straightforward opinions, advocates a husband and wife team for making "up to 100 pounds" of sausage a day. His recipes call for quantities no smaller than 25 pounds of meat.

This year the matanza group has decided on 7 different types of susage: Kielbasa, Italian, Sicilian, Hungarian, chorizo, breakfast patties and a "mystery" blend. Actually, two kinds of chorizo sausage emerged when one faction declared that the recipe did not have enough heat. The mix was split in half and some of Brett's incendiary homemade Tabasco sauce, along with red pepper flakes, were added to jack up the heat quotient.


To season the sausages, Bobby has brought bags of spices mail-ordered from Detroit: fennel, marjoram, paprika. After the meat has been pressed through the grinder, and after the seasonings are added, Rusty, a carpenter by trade, itches to apply his half-inch drill. The drill holds a three-foot-long mixing tool that makes child's play out of blending the meat and spices in a large plastic tub.



From there, the meat makes its way to Bobby's big Cabela extruder. Bobby's hands are practically numb from handling the cold meat. Wearing a pair of bright blue, neoprene gloves, I pitch in to keep the extruder loaded. Bobby slips a sausage casing onto the extruder. As he pulls down on the extruder's handle, the meat is forced into the casings forming one long, long sausage. I guide the finished sausage to prevent any tangles or pile-ups. As the hours pass, we cover several plastic-lined tabletops with the different varieties of sausages, about 300 pounds in all. They are laid out in long coils to dry. Later, we will twist the sausages into smaller links before cutting them into lots of five and vacuum packing them for distribution to the matanza members.


Meanwhile, back at the ranch, chef Jeffrey Heineman is hunched over a small Cuisinart, making filling for his jumbo hot dogs. The meat for hot dogs must be finely ground and emulsified. Once in their casings, the dogs are then poached slowly in a water bath in the oven.

The work, the cold, the long cocktail hours--all are taking a toll. I yearn for a nap. It's just about this point that Brett taps me to join him in one of his two greenhouses to "pick bones." The bones from the butchering operation had been placed in a huge kettle and simmered the day before. Now we get to pull a couple of milk crates up to the kettle, sit in the warmth of the greenhouse and sort through the bones for bits of meat that can be used in sauces and possibly scrapple.


I am happy to pass an hour with Brett this way, sitting and picking. We talk about the business of farming. We gab about the huge rains that fell last June, about tomato blight, the fungus that killed my squashes, planting seeds early, and whether my collards will come back from last month's snow and ice storm.

For lunch, I return to the house and help my wife prepare a platter of fresh hot dogs wrapped in baguettes. Chef Heineman has not used any nitrates in the meat, so the dogs, pink at first, look more like weisswurst--a pale greyish tan--once they are cooked. But the flavor is still there. We savor them with mustard and chopped onion and a cup of beer from Brett's keg.


When it is finally time to go, Brett points to a large cardboard box containing our reward for helping: two large, bone-in loin roasts, a slab of ribs, two pint-sized bags of breakfast sausage and an assortment of sausage links. Not a bad haul. Thanks, Brett and Christine. We had a great time.

How to Skin a Pig

I find nothing repulsive about butchering an animal. Where others see gore, I see the miracle of evolution. The innards of a pig are utterly pristine. To me this came as a revelation. It does not matter how many of the animals you slice open: on the inside, each is identical to the one before it, a marvel of genetics and mammalian engineering. The organs glisten. They are squeaky clean--the liver crimson against the steely grey of the intestines; the kidneys perfectly ovoid and efficient; the heart a mighty muscle, a compact little machine.

During the first full day of the matanza, or pig slaughter, we will kill and gut six pigs. As we work around the viscera, the first order of business is to tie off the colon, to avoid any contamination of the animal's cavity. Then these few organs--liver, kidneys, heart--we seek out and keep. The rest becomes feed for the chickens. We wrestle an empty carcass into position and hoist it off the ground with rope and pulley for skinning. Four of the original six pigs will be handled in this manner, skinned and broken down into pieces. Two others, being white pigmented, are immersed in a hot water bath, a giant metal drum filled with water heated from a fire pit underneath. These two pigs are then scraped to remove all hairs, revealing a smooth skin that will crisp up nicely around the succulent hams.

By mid-morning there are 13 adults working at various phases of the pork production. I am already weary. My day began at 3:30 am, when anticipation shook me awake in our motel room. We had agreed to serve breakfast and lunch for the workers. We made the meals ahead, so they only needed to be reheated and displayed on platters. We'd been told the men-folk would be up at the crack of dawn. It was still dark when we arrived at the farm, where farmer Brett Grohsgal, greeted us with a flashlight and guided us into the house. We started coffee. We heated the oven. We checked the menu: My wife's special strata of Panettone and Challah breads with pancetta, rosemary and Gorgonzola cheese; Tennessee smoked bacon and chicken-apple sausages; scones with dried fruit and lavender-vanilla sugar; chocolate chip banana bread; tropical fruit salad. There was food for a crowd.


One by one the shareholders in the pig operation wandered into the kitchen. The house was utterly full.


"Having a lot of people over is my favorite part of the matanza," says Christine Bergmark, the second half of the farm team. "Most years we have someone sleeping on the couch."
The matanza is into its eighth year. It started when Bergmark was trying to figure a way to deal with all the leftover tomatoes at the end of the season, the ones that weren't good enough to send to market. The tomatoes were being thrown back into the fields to rot. Bergmark thought a farm animal might take care of the tomatoes.


"I thought maybe we should get a pig," Bergmark said. "Brett went out to get a pig. He came back with five."


"They get lonely," Grohsgal explains sheepishly.


They tried raising other animals for the matanza: goats, sheep. But goats and sheep find a way to break out of their enclosures, and then they are in the fields eating Grohsgal's prized greens.


"They were eating my collards!" he declares. "You can eat my arugula, but don't mess with my collards. That sealed their fate."


No more goats and sheep.

These days there are six pigs, making plenty of work at killing time. And most years the weather is much more of a factor. The slaughter usually takes place in January, sometimes in bitter cold. But this year the sow was not impregnated on the first attempt. The pigs are a mixed breed adapted to local conditions. Weeks passed before the sow was ready to mate again, which pushed the matanza into March. Not so bad if you like warmer temperatures, and a little more daylight on either end of the workday.


Inside the barn, things are humming. Besides the skinning operation, there are several stations where workers are carving big hunks of pork, cutting and sawing loins into manageable pieces, separating choice cuts from sausage meat, trimming slabs of bacon from the bellies. Inside the walk-in refrigerator, a bathtub is filling fast with hams, shoulders and rib sections.


My job, it turns out, is official Cleaner and Sharpener of Knives. I am constantly running back to the house to the only source of hot, soapy water. I wash the knives, then give the blades a quick tune-up on the Chef's Choice grinder. There are lots and lots of knives. Knives of every size and description. My personal favorites are the ancient carbon steel chefs knives, of which Grohsgal seems to be a collector. They sharpen to a mean edge. Before the day is out, I am using one of them to separate pig heads from pig skins, then trimming the bristly skin off the jowls so they can be cured for guanciale, a bacon-like specialty.


Chef Jeffrey Heineman, one of the shareholders, will turn the pork cheeks and tongues into incredible braises. And that will be my last memory of the day: dinner of tongue and cheek, a bottle of red wine, a piece of bread. Call it a night. I'm done.



Stay tuned for tomorrow's exciting conclusion...

Killing a Pig: Matanza Day 1

The farmer raises his rifle shortly after 8 am as the sun emerges from behind a stand of oak and hickory trees. We've been waiting for full light to illuminate our deadly business. Now the moment has arrived. Except for the soft grunting of the pigs, all is calm. Then a single report from the farmer's .30-calibre Winchester cracks the air, and the first pig slumps to the ground: It is dead instantly with a bullet in the brain, but still thrashing and kicking involuntarily. We wait for the animal's spasms to subside, then grab its legs and drag the 325-pound carcass out of the holding pen. The farmer cuts a long incision along one of the pig's Achilles tendons and runs a steel chain through the hole. Moments later, the hydraulic lift on the back of a John Deere tractor hoists the pig into the air. We watch man, tractor and pig rumble and bump their way toward the barn where the pig will be gutted, skinned and cut into parts.

So began the first day of our matanza on Even' Star Farm outside Lexington Park, MD. For two years I'd been hearing stories about this annual weekend pork fest, named for the Spanish custom of community gathering and merry making around the slaughter of a large animal. The farmer, Brett Grohsgal, his wife, Christine Bergmark, along with several friends pool their funds to purchase and feed six pigs for the eight months or so it takes the swine to reach butchering size, then take the booty home to fill their freezers. I had heard there was much toil involved in turning the animals into roasts, chops and sausages, but that periods of hard work were bracketed by aggressive consumption of excellent vittles, spirit-enhancing liquids and lively camaraderie. I had groveled, pleaded and harangued for an invitation. And this year I came up lucky in a somewhat circumscribed fashion. I would not be one of the actual shareholders in the matanza, but a volunteer helper and chronicler of the event. Oh, and might I and my wife be able to provide breakfast and lunch for the first day's activities?

You bet!

So we loaded family, grub, buffet platters and a few bottles of booze into the ol' Corolla and headed for St. Mary's County, about two hours south of Washington, DC.

Right here I will address some of the thoughts I know some of you are thinking, such as, Ew, yuk! Are you really going to look those pigs in the eye and then kill them? Don't you think that's cruel? And then you're going to cut them up and get blood on everything. Isn't that disgusting?

To which I respond, yes, no, yes and no.

In fact, I wish I could reply that I've given these matters a great deal of thought, but I haven't. I don't consider myself a deeply philosophical ethicist where animal rights are concerned. Perhaps that is a failing on my part, but certainly it is a common fact of our current condition. First and foremost, I consider myself a human who exists at the top of the food chain, and who is happy to occupy that position and not one farther down. Humans are omnivores, meaning they have evolved to eat almost everything, including other animals. I eat other animals. It only follows that the other animals must die and be made ready to eat. The question is, how humanely was the animal raised and killed that was meant for my consumption? And I happen to believe that the most humane treatment for such an animal, in this case a pig, is to give it plenty of room to romp out of doors, to feed it regularly with wholesome food, and then make its death as swift and painless and reverential as possible. Most of us--even the most sanctimonious--have simply removed ourselves from the process. We don't care to know that the animals we eat were raised in factory feedlots, then killed and sliced in assembly-line fashion by human drones. We sleep so much better at night oblivious to the way our food is mistreated on an everyday basis. We prefer to imagine that the pork chop staring at us from our dinner plate arrived there by some bloodless miracle of modern science, the spiritual connection having been drained out of the equation in the interest of efficiency and corporate profit.



The plain truth is, we are complicit any way you look at it. You can't eat meat without first killing an animal and spilling blood. And although I did not come face-to-face with this truth until later in life, I do not flinch from it. I have helped Brett Grohsgal butcher deer that he has shot on his farm. I have helped him kill and butcher sheep. Brett may be unusual in that he does not shrink from the fact of death preceding life. He lives off the land and is reconciled to that most primal of needs to kill in order to survive. He brings life out of the ground with his crops, and he puts meat on the table with his gun.

Fortunately, he also knows how to have a good time in the processs. So we spent our first night on the farm not with polemics, but with some excellent prosciutto made by one of Brett's cohorts in the matanza, chef Jeffrey Heineman, owner of Grapeseed restaurant in Bethesda. We followed that with grilled burgers wrapped in baguettes, a pleasant malbec wine and eventually a few rounds of some potent homemade schnaps.

Memories of the evening are a bit vague. We were steeling ourselves for the work to come. At one point there would be 13 adults and five children involved; pigs to kill, gut and skin; roasts and chops to carve; fires to stoke; fat to separate for rendering lard; hams and bacon to salt; 300 pounds of sausage meat to grind, season and stuff into casings; many more pounds of meat to label and package. All that awaits.

To be continued...