Latest food whiz.
Made more stock and pressure canned it. Five quarts of chicken stock and 7 quarts of beef stock. I know the pressure canning is weird, it’s easier to freeze it. But, like I said, my freezer is tiny and I need the pressure canning practice. Also, popping open a quart jar of beef stock is pretty amazing, the great beefy smell that comes out of there. It’s straight up beef stock right off the stove smell, you want to chug it. BEEF CHUG! I imagine it is my own bias, but I swear the resultant textures of the stews and soups made from it are phenomenal, way better than my frozen stocks. Yeah, probably bias and also tweaking the proportions to load it up with more collagen than before. Still, though, I’m going to believe it is because of the pressure canning versus just freezing it.
In making my chicken stock I have had to switch from chicken wings to chicken thighs. I liked the chicken wings, I thought the flavor and the extra connective tissue really made for a better result. I know a lot of people use whole carcasses and leftovers for their stock, but we almost never eat chicken in any form. I have no leftovers to save and use. Chicken wings have gotten stupidly expensive lately and thighs are a good second option. And the dogs love the thighs because it is easier for us to get the meat off the bones for them.
Had another sausage and burger making weekend and the results were… disappointing.
I made a common, yet foolish mistake. Instead of making sausage because the stuff I needed was available all cheap or whatever, I decided that the weekend would be the time of sausage making and I would just go find whatever is available and use it. Dumb. The meat counter across the way had no pork shoulder or butt, just trimmed pork loin. They also didn’t have any shoulder/chuck/blade cuts of beef so I went with round bottom. The regular grocery had pork shoulder at insane prices and the beef wasn’t much better. I basically came home with a bunch of meat trimmed of all fat with no connective tissue or flavor.
I made my standard hot italian sausage. Dry but basically good, it’s hard to screw that up. Wrapped up five 8 ounce packages and one 12 ounce pack.
Last time I made breakfast sausage I also added ground bacon because who wants to have to choose between bacon or sausage! Have both! It was good but any subtlety the bacon might have added was overwhelmed by the sausage seasoning, so mostly the bacon just added salt. This time I did it without bacon and it’s definitely a better result. Bacon is good, but you really need to hold bacon’s hand in order to appreciate it. Six 6 ounce packs of breakfast sausage.
But the bacon wasn’t lost. I made up more bacon burgers. 1 part ground pork, 2 parts ground beef and a goodly toss of ground bacon. This is where the dryness of the meat and its lack of character really show. It’s just meh. Five packs of two 6 ounce patties, we’re eating through them but mostly as an afterthought, something to eat when we don’t feel like anything in particular.
Also made burgers with chopped oven dried grape tomatoes and mashed up slow roasted garlic. These are good, dry but definitely good. The bland meat canvas is definitely improved on by the flavors and textures of the tomatoes and garlic. I imagine they will be even better the next time around when I use better meats. I got 3 packs of two 6 ounce patties out of that.
Then I had a bit of a muddled experiment. Using the pork I wanted to make a dried apple and sage sort of sausage patty. Something to eat like a burger, but with pork and apples and sage. As I was putting it together I had an idea! Hooray for ideas! I quickly heated up a bit oil, tossed in mustard seed, cumin seed and fenugreek and shook it around until it got toasty and a bit poptastic and swished it into the meat mixture. It definitely removes any original idea I had about these patties, they aren’t apple and sage anymore (though they have dried apple and sage in them). It’s an Indian flavor which is good, but not necessary. Apple and sage and some red pepper flakes would have been perfect. I might make more with the cumin/mustard/fenugreek seeds and some other, more focused flavors. For this I got 3 packs with two 6 ounce patties, one pack with one 6 ounce patty. The dried apples are pretty good in there, you should try it.
Lesson learned about scheduling these things. You process and put up food while it is cheap and abundant so that you will have it around when things are scarcer. I just really wanted to make sausage and I didn’t want to wait. Not my best work, but we are chewing through it all and the other day they meat counter had pork should for cheap and now I have one in my freezer ready for next time.

There it was, summer of 1987, I was 14 years old and drinking a glass of milk. As I was drinking it I thought, “you know what? This is NOT a tasty beverage. It does not taste good, I do not want to drink it.” and mostly I stopped drinking milk.
I’m not a picky eater at all, I will try most things. I’ve eaten jellyfish, chicken feet, tripe in both chinese and mexican preparations, tongue, fish maw, bubble tea, though I have not been able to bring myself to eat fish eye when it’s been offered (sorry fish eye). Of course there are the things I despise and will not eat, mushrooms, olives, raw onions (and some cooked onions, I have onion problems). It makes me seem like a picky eater because these are things the majority of people like.
GAAAAAAAH! I hate mushrooms. Hate them. The texture, the flavor, all of it. Being forced to eat them, getting the occasional, completely disingenuous, “just try it, if you don’t like it you don’t have to eat it,” which almost always devolved into, “there’s nothing wrong with mushrooms… blah blah kids in china. You ate them before!!” Yeah, I ate them before! You forced me to eat them, you ass. Pizza time was fraught with danger. If we were lucky we got just regular style meat covered pizza. If not, we got the supreme pizza with everything on it. I would take a bite and very carefully with my tongue, remove all the offending mushrooms, olives, onions and bell peppers and swallow them whole and then continue with the chewing. A tuna sandwich is completely ruined by chopped onions. The olive bar at the grocery has to be given wide berth because they smell so bad (David had never noticed the stink of the olive bar, but he is 14 inches taller and I think the heavy stench of olive does not waft that high).
Luckily, by the time I reached junior high and high school I was allowed more control over what I ate and I did not have to eat mushrooms or drink milk anymore.
I hate milk but I am cool with most other dairy products, cheese, yogurt, ice cream, chocolate milk. It’s not so much that I hate milk, but that I hate the flavor of milk. I don’t want that flavor in my mouth, it’s nasty. In the last few years, however, people have been suggesting that I try raw milk. They tell me the flavor is different. I am skeptical of such a statement. It is still milk in milk form with no added chocolate flavor or cheese culture. Skeptical.
We move to Vermont and we work on changing our relationship with food. Doing things like getting to know the pigs we might eat later, buying eggs and tomatoes from people’s front yards and supporting local agriculture. There’s a dairy up the road that sells raw milk. We decide to try it out. It’s $7 a gallon which means that we will have to prioritize the budget a bit. $7 milk means not buying Marshmallow Mateys anymore, I’m okay with that. We get our milk and bring it home and it is a delightful wonder to behold. Jersey cows mean higher butterfat content and the cream at the top is amazing. We mix it up and pour a little bit to try. I am still skeptical but open. It tastes like milk. That’s all, milk. The flavor in my mouth is the flavor of milk and it’s still as gross as it was 25 years ago.
But! BUT! All is not lost. I do use milk in my coffee, on my oatmeal and in other things. Even better, I have started making cheese and yogurt with the milk and it they are so painfully delicious. The cheese is a fromage blanc, described as a ‘cream cheese’ which is a bit of a disservice, it is nothing like the gummy Philly cheese. It’s got the texture of a good chevre, a bit crumbly but not too dry, and the flavor is amazing. Because the milk is not homogenized the cream still rises to the top while the cheese is setting up. You get this beautiful, thick layer of full fat cheese. In the quiet celebration of another perfect batch of cheese you stand in the kitchen and spread a bit on a piece of bread and savor it before you mix the layer back in with the rest of the batch.
And the cheese is so satisfying to eat. Mix in some oven dried tomatoes and roasted garlic, a bit of salt and pepper. Or add powdered sugar and vanilla and serve it with crepes and homemade clementine marmalade. It’s amazing on a pizza along with homemade italian sausage and no mushrooms.
The other day I made my first batch of yogurt. It’s a bit bland at first but it just sucks up the deliciousness of maple syrup and you could fall into a pit of sugar and high butterfat bliss.
My favorite, though, is accidentally not shaking the cream back in “well enough” and making hot chocolate. It’s like a heart attack in a mug. A delicious, delicious heart attack that does not taste like milk.