One year ago, January 11th, 2021, Chester 12Pound passed from me. I held him in my arms, I told him how much I loved him and I thanked him for being the best ever. Over and over again, I told him what a good boy he was.
He floated away.
It’s been a year.
He’s not coming back.
A PSANN Final Report with Chester 12Pound
HIHIhihi HI!! HI! My name is Chester 12Pound and I am the Little Dog who knows the thing that is All Of The Stuff! Today is a time I have to tell a Very Important Thing.
Okay! First. Last week we went in the new car and they brought me to the place of The Vet and do you want to know a thing? The Lady and The Man made me go in there ALL BY MYSELF!! They did not even come inside with me! And when I was inside they stuck something in my butt and then they SHAVED MY BELLY!! I’m not even going to ask if you can believe a thing because I know you can not believe a thing. I was so mad that I was going to go home and hide my special bone for 2 DAYS! 2 DAYS!!
They finally took me to a room with The Lady and The Hairy Lady and they were looking at pictures and The Lady was crying. She saw me and she hugged me and told me that I was So Good! And that I could go home and have an Ice Cream.
That is when I knew a thing. It’s a thing that all little dogs know about. I knew that I was going to have to go soon. It is a truth that is known and it can make for real sadnesses.
But also with your sadnesses you should think about the things that are good, too. I am 14 1/2 and I have done so many things!
I was a sketchy personal injury lawyer. I got to go to the dog park and I got to do RUNRUNRUN so many times with so many dogs. I told jokes to my dog friends and they laughed and that felt pretty good.
I founded The Greater Bathroom and Hallway Community College with Maddie and I got to be a great professor who told other dogs and people ideas that they should know about.
I found an inside out toad and I rolled around on it until I was covered in inside out toad! One time I ate an entire batch of chocolate chip cookies and then I puked them all up under the bed. Another time I ate a whole bag of peanuts and I didn’t chew them so when I went poohibbity it was all of the same peanuts!! In a pile!
Every day I yelled at the mailman when he came to the house and every day he ran away before he even tried to come inside. And I scared him so much that when we moved to Vermont he didn’t even try to follow us. And I yelled at Fat Squirrel. Fat squirrel is the thing that is SO STUPID!!! He doesn’t even know how to be a way, he can just be fat squirrel.
I went camping and I went in canoes and I got to sleep in tents and I found new and more deliciously stinky things to roll in or eat. I went to farms and I yelled at sheep and I met other dogs and I found more things to roll in. The best place to find the things that are good to roll in is farms! But don’t let The Lady catch you or you have to have a bath and all the sheep find out and they laugh at you! Stupid sheep! This is why you should always yell at sheep. They don’t even know a thing.
Maddie and I made an internationally famous action news network. The Puff Snuzzle Action News Network has so many respects because we tell you a thing! Action News, When You Need It. And we weren’t like stupid Bick Stickerson over at W-Peef-Poff-N Super News! He was always so dumb. The only thing Bick Stickerson knows how to be is stupid! One time someone gave him a peanut butter biscuit and he was so happy but it was just an empty lotion bottle!! We did SO MANY laughs!
I made friends and I loved people and so many people loved me. I got to run in the mountains and one time I thought the canoe was not in the water so I jumped out BUT IT WAS STILL IN THE WATER!! I got wet all over me! I did nudity dances in the park and chased cats and got chased by cats. I got brushes and belly rubs and snugs. I snooched in the sun and snugged by the woodstove. I was never sure about which people I should like, so mostly I just liked a few. But the people that I did like were good people through and through and I will miss them.
I don’t know what the other side is like, no one does. Maybe Maddie is waiting for me, maybe I’ll finally get to meet Ghengis. Maybe it is a forever snooch, that might be okay. I’m pretty tired. But maybe The Lady and The Man will already be there and I’ll remember that I’ve always been there, that we’ve always been there and also we were here. I don’t know, I’m just a little dog.
I don’t know what’s there but I have my little coat and my special bone and the lady is packing up some peanut butter biscuits for me.
Be good to each other, jump out of canoes and do nudity dances. When you love someone lay down by them and tell them they are beautiful and good. Wear your little coat when it’s cold and go to the park when it’s warm. Always move your special bone in the morning and at night; make sure the lady sees that you are moving your bone so she can tell you how good you are. If you find food on the ground, eat it fast before someone can take it away.
Always stop and snuffle the p-mail.
![](https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50814958742_a945ff3574.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="Chester 12Pound)
A Giggle and a Pinch of Lot’s Wife
If there’s any one important thing to remember about Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie book is that it’s salty. Like really salty. The book itself secretes salt crystals if you don’t pay attention. I’m not complaining, I love me some salty food.
So, they had local pork shoulder on sale for cheap (on sale for CHEAP!). The pork shoulder was cheap but do you know what is hard to find? Pig fat. What the hell, Vermont? There are pigs everywhere. Most of the people I know who are raising and slaughtering their own pigs are ‘harvesting’ before winter comes and that means younger, leaner pigs. My half pig had hardly any fat. No leaf lard or fat back, the belly had more meat than fat. They shoulder came skin on and with some nice fat, but it wasn’t enough for a good 10% mix. But, meh, went with it.
First up was the spicy italian, page 121. It was definitely a step up from my own recipe and I’ll be making it again. The addition of the red wine vinegar was the real game changer. It really brought out the flavors of the herbs. I did not, however, appreciate the whole coriander seeds. I love coriander, I use it all the time especially in Indian food, but it was just wrong. It specifically called for coriander seeds, not powder. You’re sitting there all sucking down this italian celebration when POP a coriander seed gets in there and crunches. It just isn’t right. But that’s my only real complaint about the recipe. I didn’t stuff the sausage this time around, we’ll save that excitement for later.
Next up was breakfast sausage. For this one I used my own recipe. The recipe in the book called for ginger and too much sage. I just can’t imagine it all in my gravy and smothering my biscuits. Speaking of… my biscuit game is sort of slowly but not really getting better. I did use the salt ratio in the book.
Both sausages were pretty salty and I have to keep that in mind when I cook with them. It also had me grind the meat on the smaller plate and that was too fine for my tastes. I’m going back to the bigger plate next time. My dad just sent me a load of garlic from his garden and I will be making up a batch of the garlic sausage on page 116. Once Kristen thins the herd a bit we’ll have lamb meat for Moroccan merguez.
For the record, it takes approximately 8 Blue Moons to bust a 12 1/2 pound bone-in, skin-on pork shoulder down to 10 pounds of sausage. I kept the bones, as it had both the shoulder and the elbow joint in there and that means connective tissue and that means delicious, delicious asian soup stock. I also kept the skin which I will turn into cracklins the next time I fry up some chicken.
But it’s not all salted meats, sometimes you have to set your sights on the vegetables in your life. Decided to make some lactic acid fermented pickles. Instead of vinegar you soak your veggies in a 5% salt water solution and it makes some lactic acid which gives you pickles of varying levels of pickle-tude. First experiment was a mix of carrots, fennel bulb, fennel frond, jalapenos and serranos and the pickling spice from page 68. It was generally okay, not great, I didn’t take my pants off or anything. I did actually like the fennel bulb and carrots, they stayed nice and crunchy and absorbed a good deal of the spice from the chili peppers, they also managed to keep the salt absorption down. They weren’t so overwhelmingly salty. I did a batch of jalapenos, serrano and anaheim peppers in just a plain salt solution. Made some good crunchy pickled peppers but, again, very salty. The last experiment was actual pickling cucumbers. These sucked. They just plain sucked. Super salty and they got very soft and mushy. Nothing pickley about them, just 4 jars of impotent disappointment.
I’ll probably do the fennel and carrots again, but mostly I’ll stick to vinegar pickling.
Coming up… this is the Winter of The Shank, I’m going to dive into the art of the braised shank. For Shanksgiving I have a lovely pair of local lamb shanks. It’s a toss up between some sort of traditional red-wine-braised recipe or something Persian since I got me a Persian cookbook and also all the ingredients, even the weird ones (like angelica and mahlab). Kristen’s got a pair of pork shanks for Shanksmas and I’m hoping to get my hands on some veal shanks for the hell of it. I do really want osso buco.
And I’ve perfected the scone recipe. Not ‘made better’ or ‘yeah, it’s okay’. I have perfected the shit out of my scone recipe.
And we all fall down
I’m still working away at my bread baking. It’s slowed down a bit here in the dead of summer. I’d baked a pretty good basic hearth bread (The Bread Bible pg305) and a couple of mostly successful pugliese (pg 346). Last week it was time to get back to the basic white sandwich loaf (pg 244).
I’ve gotten in the habit mixing up my sponge and letting it sit and ferment for a couple hours and then I stick it in the fridge overnight. It adds to the flavor, yes, but mostly it allows me to not be so impatient with that first rising time. The next day I pulled the sponge from the fridge and popped the bowl into the stand mixer.
Everything was going so well. At the end of the 7 minute mix with the dough hook my gluten was amazing. It was really the best gluten stretch and window I’d had the entire time I have been working on my bread. The dough is enough for 2 loaves so I popped it into a 4 quart cambro and let it rise. AND IT ROSE!! At about an hour in it had risen to the top of the cambro, just filled it up completely. I was all pleased with myself! Look at what I did! My skills must be amazing, so very very amazing! I did a stretch and fold and put it in for a second rise. A second magical rise! Like what the hell, bread?!
Its shaped rise in the loaf pans was slower and not as dramatic but it was going well. In the oven I watched it through the window. I wanted to see it form the most perfect loaves I’d ever baked.
But they didn’t. They didn’t rise. In fact they were deflating. The sadness of my heart! What the hell happened to my magical bread? Just 4 hours earlier I was some sort of doughy bread wizard. I was magic. Now this? When they were done I took them out and let them cool before I sliced in. They were what you would expect, dense. Squashed and dense. But bread is bread and butter is butter and we started eating.
I was poking at the bread, I was reading my notes (I take lots of notes when I am making bread), trying to figure out what went wrong. Then it hit me, the bread didn’t taste right, it was kind of bland. I forgot the damned salt. There was no salt to keep the yeast under control and it pretty much proofed itself to death. That’s why it had risen so fast and with so much vigor. The yeast was just free to eat and fart and eat and fart as much as it could. Lesson learned and I am glad there was an actual reason. It wasn’t some mystery to beat myself up over, just a stupid mistake.
Once we get past this current mini heat wave I am going to try it again.
This past weekend my aunt and my cousin came to visit and I made chocolate sticky rolls with the brioche dough (pg 487 and 503). It took me too long to get the dough rolled out, filled and rolled up again before cutting. Everything got soft and moodgy. The cut rolls were popflopped into the pan and promised to be ugly. I fridged them overnight and got up early to get them out and risen before baking them. I was afraid that with all the humidity and heat the day before that I’d have killed the dough and we would be left with swirly chocolate paddles. No bad luck there. They rose as expected and baked up perfectly. We had chocolate rolls and ice cream and hot chocolate for breakfast. The brioche is futzy and time consuming but if you have the time it is definitely worth it.
Failures and successes, that’s the way it goes. The project clock is ticking and I have 18 months to learn croissants so I better get going.
Meat’n Greet
Corned beef! I want to write it all out in exclamation points. CORNED BEEF!!!
I made reubens and they were exclamation point fantastic. I used the recipe from Ruhlman’s Charcuterie, corned beef page 65 and pickling spice page 68.
The meat counter had brisket on sale so I popped over and asked for 5ish pounds. The guy behind the counter is not a butcher and did not really know how to deal with a full brisket. He didn’t separate the plate before cutting. He got me a 6 pound slab taken directly from the center where the plates overlapped. This meant I got that great slap of tendon running right through the middle. I considered trimming it myself but then I would have been left with two thinner slabs of meat and this is definitely the kind of thing I wanted to do with a honking chunk.
Made the brine, poured everything into a 2.5 gallon ziploc and fridged it for 5 1/2 days, flipping every 24 hours. I took that time to practice my rye bread.
I hated rye bread as a kid. There was nothing grosser than eating a good sandwich and having an entirely unexpected caraway seed explode in your mouth. Actually, onions and mushrooms are grosser, but…you know. I worked on my caraway seed acceptance by making cheese crackers with caraway seeds. It worked. I can deal with caraway seeds even if I am not a huge fan of them.
I used the Levy’s Real Jewish rye bread recipe page 325 of the Bread Bible.
You know what? It was good. A little underproofed and therefore a bit dense but for a first trial run I was very happy. Still trying to find the sweet spot on the oven dial. The oven cooks hot but not consistently above temp. I’m running anywhere from 10-25 degrees hotter than I’m setting it for.
A couple days later I did it again.
This is where my camera decided to crap out on me. Pictures were taken with my phone. My phone is made from old shoes and lost dreams and its quality can be seen in how crappy the pictures are. I’ve got my camera working again, my phone has just continued to decline.
Definitely better on the second try. Good chew, good flavor, not as dense as before but could have been given another 30 minutes or so to rise. Underproofing is my weakness. I’m so afraid of overdoing it and having it fall that I just cause the same problems but in reverse.
Went with a batard rather than a round loaf because I find round loaves to be futzy when I’m making sandwiches.
The day came to cook the brisket and I realized it was a good thing I upgraded from the 6 quart to the 8 quart Instant Pot. Six pounds of brisket takes up a lot of room. I rinsed the meat off and threw it in the Instant Pot with fresh water and 2 tablespoons of pickling spice. I used the slow cook function and let it go about 4 hours. Probably could have pressure cooked it but for a first time I wanted to stick to the recipe as well as I could. I was definitely worried about that huge tendon in there. As the day went on it just kept contracting itself and getting stiffer. After 4 hours I turned the temp down and let it go for 2 more hours. I pulled the meat out and let it rest about 45 minutes.
I used the Russian Dressing recipe from Epicurious. I didn’t have the time to make my own sauerkraut so the sauerkraut and swiss cheese were both store bought.
Then I sliced the meat.
You can see the tendon there running through the middle. I’m glad I kept it in for an extra couple of hours. The collagen just about melted out. The mouthfeel was amazing. The meat was not in any way dry or chewy, it was full of flavor and the texture was better than I could have hoped for with a first brisket.
When you couple the pickle spice mix recipe with the super fresh spices from Penzeys you get a spice blend with a lot of flavor. You could really taste the allspice and cloves in there. The real problem was the saltiness. It was very very salty. Not inedibly salty, not by a long shot but still it’s something I’ll to figure out before next time. The brine is at about 12% salt solution, I might bring it down to 10% and see how that goes.
The meat was rich, that’s the best word I can use to describe it. It was full and rich and a little overwhelming. I wanted to just cram those sandwiches full of corned beef, I wanted to make big monster sandwiches! But I really couldn’t, we’d have fallen into some sort of meat coma if I tried.
I’m counting the whole thing a huge success (except for the saltiness, we have to work on that). The best part is that when it cooled, half went right into the freezer. We can do it all again.
And next time I can tell you all about my bread superfailure!