Fun Playing With Locally, Naturally Raised Meats

We've been eating at home a lot this winter, and I want to share some of the goodness with you. Also, it is CSA subscription season - so I'd like to show you some wonderful things we've done with products obtained through our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) with Breychacks Farm. Kathy Breychak recently indicated that she still has meat shares available, so I'd like to remind you that membership in a CSA will yield fabulous meat (and/or vegetables) at a reasonable cost, without the worry that your vendor will sell out before you can get to it. Kathy accepts new meat share members until April, unless she reaches capacity sooner (which may well happen). Breychak Farms is offering lamb, poultry, (chicken, turkey, duck, goose) and heritage breed pork this year. She is also offering vegetables, as explained on her website.

We are truly blessed in Cleveland to be able to acquire wonderfully fresh, farm raised foodstuffs, even in the cold winter, and even if we don't join a CSA. The dishes shown are not in any particular order of creation/consumption.

Have I got your attention now? More on the eggs later.

First up - lamb stew, made from the leftovers of a roast from Breychak Farms's gorgeous Dorper lamb:



This stew also included frozen garden peas, and carrots Bob dug up from the snow so we could have them in the stew.






Below is Bob's take on Beef Bourguignon, using a beautiful hunk of grass-fed, locally raised Texas Longhorn from Sand Farm LLC.  Brandon Smith and his family have been in the beef business for many years, and the meat is raised on grass and love.

This dish also contained green beans, carrots and garlic from the garden. Sand Farm sends out a weekly E-newsletter to those who subscribe. In addition to their weekly booth at the Geauga Farmers Market in season, they deliver to a central location in Solon during the winter, and can make more personalized deliveries for an additional charge. Sand Farm also sells pork and firewood.

More recently, Bob made bean soup, using the ham bones leftover from a meal made from Breychak Berkshire ham.

Since he didn't think it was smokey enough, Bob added some sliced hotdogs we had in the freezer (my mother's savory  touch when she made Lentil Soup).

Bob is of Bohemian (Czech) extraction- so his New Year's Day food tradition is Pork Roast and Sauerkraut. Though I wasn't crazy about this dish the first time he made it for me (with supermarket pork) - I've grown to love it when it is made with better meat!

Breychack Farms's Pork Roast

Onion saute.

Sauerkraut gets added to onions.

Goodness happens.

See how the fat glistens? That doesn't happen with supermarket pork. And it tastes so good!

First night's dinner, with potatoes cooked in the sauerkraut pot.

Second night's dinner, with Dilled Smashed Potatoes (lard instead of butter - yum!)

It seems like a lot of bloggers and others are making or eating Chicken and Dumplings lately - with winter biting, it is one of those great comfort foods.



To make a great pot of Chicken & Dumplings - one must start with a great chicken. This birdie came from either Breychaks Farm or Miller Farm - I'm not sure which. Miller Farm is discussed in more detail below - but be assured that both Kathy Breychak and Aaron Miller raise their birdies with love, wholesome feed, and true pasture. For some reason, Bob did a deconstructed version of this dish - no matter, it was delicious!


Browned and Simmered Chicken Atop the Dumplings, Far Left


Gravy

I still don't know why he served it on the side..

Next up - another lamb stew, this time from Breychak Farms's Dorper stew meat.

Garden Peas again, though the garden was too deeply buried in snow for Bob to reach the carrots this time; organic carrots came from Heinen's.
 

 

What is more soothing in winter than a pot of hearty black bean chili.

The grass-fed, locally raised beef in this chili came from Miller Livestock Co, Inc. Miller Farm delivers to the Cleveland Area periodically - check the blog of Slow Food Northern Ohio if you want to know when they are in town. Miller Farm also sells lamb, poultry, eggs, and pork.

First Night Dinner, Over Organic Corn Chips

 

Nancy's Corn Bread

For the subsequent Chili dinners, I made corn bread, using some beautiful eggs from BlueLoon Farm and frozen corn from our garden. It came out well, though apparently our baking powder is too old, because it didn't rise as much as I expected.

 

BlueLoon Farm Eggs

BlueLoon Farm is a new farm located south of Cleveland. BlueLoon doesn't have a website yet, but Farmer Jenny can be reached at 330-235-4441 if you would like to discuss an egg purchase. Since she doesn't have a website yet, I'll share some info that Jenny gave to me about her farm:

"[W]e purchased the very rundown farm in October of 2007 and a few days after closing the farmhouse burned to the ground. So we had to build a new house which set the farm renovation back a year plus.

In addition to the ladies and their roosters, we have 4 guard turkeys and 2 steers and A TON of work to do! We have planted over 800 native trees and have begun a small orchard. We are also in transition to certified organic ( a few more months yet).

Our long term goals: Fruits (tree, shrub, small, brambles), vegetables, herbs, hops, poultry (layers, broilers), sheep (undecided if meat, wool or both), pigs in the woods, and maybe a milk cow....oh and bees. My background is in horticulture and native plants so we will be growing some unusual/rare plants. We believe that diversity is the key to a healthy farm."


We procured these eggs because our other favorite local producer, another Jenny, at Hensbury Farm, did not have any (a situation now rectified by additional heat in her barns!). Hensbury Farm also sells Boer Goat, which we have not yet sampled.

It was such a treat to enjoy some Blue Eggs (now available from both Hensbury and BlueLoon) in addition to the browns! Here's our first breakfast using BlueLoon's eggs:

 

Bob's Wheat Bread, Hartzler Farms Butter, BlueLoon Farm Eggs, Kielbasa Rounds

The last photo was the blue egg; the previous ones were brown. Words fail me to describe the exquisite taste to you.

Bob is preparing pork chops from our Breychak hog for tonight, with pickled garden beets. I'll make sure to show them to you, sooner or later! In the meantime, I hope you are having fun playing with foods sourced from our local, hardworking farmers, or at least making arrangements to enjoy their goodness later this year.

I Have Given Myself Over to the Pork Side, Episode II - Ham

My last post detailed how the Pork Side began to seduce me over this past summer. Although I felt an intuitive sense of resistance - at the risk of mixing pop culture metaphors - resistance was futile. Hooked on the meat and the fat I was. The bacon and sausage from our Berkshire Hog were sublime. But then, I had always liked bacon, and in recent years, I had learned to like quality sausage. With a half hog in the freezer, however, there would be one more test before my journey to the Pork Side would be complete.

I have never particularly liked ham. I have tasted it in various permutations, and though I won't reject a thinly sliced bit of artisanal ham, the thought of sitting down to a hunk of it for  breakfast, lunch or dinner has never appealed to me. So, when I recently asked Bob, "what's for dinner" and he said "ham" - my heart sank. Of course, our half hog had yielded ham - I just hadn't realized until that moment that I'd be expected to eat it!

I spent eight hours in a hideous Continuing Legal Education Seminar (on Business Succession Planning) on November 12. Arriving home exhausted, I caught a whiff of dinner from the garage - it smelled great. Not just great - it smelled like bacon. No, not exactly like bacon - kinda like bacon on steroids. Could this be ham? Would this be my final step on the path to the Pork Side?

Even though it smelled heavenly - I still felt a little tentative. I had never liked ham - sure this smelled good, but would this really taste different?

Oh yes! The butcher, Keller's Meats, had smoked the ham (they had also smoked our bacon and made our sausage, which you saw in my previous post), and the smoky, sweet, savory smell filled the house. And Bob hadn't done a thing to it - so salt or pepper, no grease rub - just roasted it in the oven. The first thing I tasted was the skin - cooked to crispy perfection with an amazing layer of glistening fat under it:

 

In fact, once I started to nibble the skin - I could not stop. I mean - I really could not stop. Both the crispy top and the creamy bottom of it - I could not stop.

By this time, Bob had sliced up some of the flesh, and dished out our sides (potatoes, butter, parsely and roasted Turban squash).

 

While the ham slices could not match the unctuousness of the skin - it was not until I had tasted the  succulent, smoky flesh that I knew for sure - I had, of my own free will, given myself completely over to the Pork Side. The flavor was like nothing I'd ever tasted, and the meat melted in my mouth. Don't grieve for me, Obi-Wan - it's a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done! (Drat those mixed metaphors - forgive me Ronald Coleman and Charles Dickens!) I gotta admit - I had fun playing with this Breychak ham!

I Have Given Myself Over to the Pork Side, Episode I - Bacon

Cue the Darth Vader music! I now realize that it is pointless to resist. I have given myself over to the PORK side!

As most of you know, I was raised in a Conservative Jewish house on Long Island, in New York suburbia. We did not keep kosher (though my father's mother did), but we generally observed quite a few of the dietary rules imposed by Kashruth - more as a cultural than religious matter (my mother wouldn't know what to do with a sausage or pork roast if you gift-wrapped it for her). Drinking a glass of milk with a meat meal, for example, seemed gross (and it still does, to me), and I never put cheese on a cold meat sandwich - but that doesn't keep me from enjoying veal parmigiana. And other than the occasional package of bacon (after all, who doesn't like bacon), you would seldom find any shellfish or pig parts in the house where I grew up. Ironically, after I moved out, my mother because enamored of ham and cheese sandwiches; ham had always been an unidentified object in our house, and I always passed on it at school lunch. My pre-marital exposure to pork was mostly bacon (yum!) and the occasional taste of mass-market sausage (not so yum).

Since I moved to Cleveland in 1995, I have been exposed to a world of artisanal pork, and have tasted many varieties of chops, roasts, sausages, and charcuterie with pleasure. It was with this background that we ordered half a Berkshire hog from Blue Egg Farmer Kathy Breychak this year.

Our first tastes of our hog were mostly bacon. We also sampled some sausage, which we ate like burgers:

Inspired by Michael Rulman's BLT Challenge, we enjoyed a few amazing BLT's once the tomatoes came in this summer.

BLT: Garden Lettuce, Tomato, & Hungarian Pepper, Bob's White Toast, Breychak Bacon, Mayo

None of our BLTs would have been eligible for Ruhlman's contest, because the butcher of the hog smoked the bacon (and the mayo was Hellman's). These were some of the most delicious moments of our summer and fall, though.

BLT "Deluxe" - with Farmers Market Egg:





 







And finally - the last BLT of the season - on Bob's Freshly Baked Wheat Bread - I couldn't bear to toast it!


















 






And now, summer is over and the tomatoes are gone. Sniff.

We have used the bacon grease in so many kitchen applications; the smell and taste have been everywhere - no old coffee can for this liquid gold! I tried - I tried to resist my feelings. But the rich, sweet smell and taste of the Pork Side had me in its grasp. Would there be no salvation? Save me Obi-Wan Kenobi - you are my only hope!

To be continued . . . .