It is late January and that means it is cold outside. Single digits below zero fahrenheit (in the -20s C) are the norm. Today we are a bit on the warm side - low 20s above zero fahrenheit (-6 C). Even with chilly outside, inside, we are starting to get moving on spring plans. The ground is rock-solid and frozen with several feet of frost, but garden and yard layout can still be imagined with something as simple as pencil and paper. For now, though, I am attempting to root a grape vine.
We have two basset hound puppies that for all practical purposes, are like nematodes with legs. I do not mean this in a pejorative sense, but more a physiological sense: nematodes have a strong digestive tract with openings on each end.
We did (past tense) have a lovely, four year old riverbank grape vine growing up the side of our shed. This was until the youngest nematode, err, puppy, discovered it was a large "stitch". The lovely vine was reduced to a stump. I did manage to save a length of vine. Wrapped in wet paper towel and placed in the refrigerator, the length rested.
Rooting a clipping or piece of stem is the process where you help or force roots to develop; basically it is a simple form of cloning. I am by no means a rooting expert. But, you will basically need:
- A dormant, vine cutting with a few bud-points
- Root powder/hormone
- A heat mat
- Potting soil mixed with a little sand
- A pot
- Stiff wire
- A sheet of heavy, clear plastic
Start by trimming both ends; identify which way the buds are pointing, pointing up - that is your top (bottom is the opposite end if you were wondering). Cut the top at an angle and the bottom straight. Between the top and bottom, you will want several bud-points and little leaf scarring.
Prepare your potting soil mix by mixing in a little bit of sand. The sand helps to lessen the moisture slightly and, in theory, helps to lessen bad molds. Whether this is true or not, I am not sure. It sounds sensible, though.
Dampen the bottom end and dip into the rooting powder/hormone. Tap off any excess. Push the cutting, bottom first, into the soil closer to the pot's edge than the middle. With two pieces of wire make a hoop-cage that goes up and over the cutting. Drape your clear plastic over after having watered a bit. Rubber band around the pot, and set the whole thing on a heat mat. And now wait. You will want to water the pot now and again if the soil is looking dry, but do not over water.
The twelve hens are egg-laying machines. Since I am a well seasoned data-whore, I took it upon myself to collect and curate data on the hens' egg-laying. Shortly after the girls got into their groove of consistently laying hard-shelled eggs (we had a few eggs that were just a soft membrane without a shell), we took to maintaining the record. Three hundred forty-eight eggs, and counting (as of this writing). Why would I keep an accurate record of egg production? I guess it is just how I am; I like data and I like to know things; combine the two and you get a clearer picture of the world around you.
By collecting data, we have learned that the production curve, when put onto a ten-day moving average, followed the curve of the amount of day late as the winter solstice approached, occurred and passed. This is a well established characteristic of chickens and their laying patterns; less day light will usually correlate into fewer eggs laid. Even with all the theory and general rules, we are currently getting nearly ten eggs each day and we only have twelve hens. With 83% of the aggregate hens laying each day, and the general rule that it takes a hen 26 hours to form an egg internally, squeezing out many more eggs creeps into statistical impossibility territory.
See Also: Complete Data Log on egg production.
Winter, astronomical winter that is, arrived on December 22, 2011 at around 12:30 AM CST. Fast-forward a week, and we do have a tiny amount of snow and the ambient air temperature is often below +32 degrees F (0 C), but it honestly does not feel like winter. There are things such as snowshoeing, snowmobiling and ice fishing which northern minnesotans usually partake in during the winter that hasn't been possible thus far. For the Jokela household we do not snowmobiling (fumes & noise) or much ice fishing (not enough time and equipment) but we are fans of snowshoeing. Hopefully sometime in the next few weeks we will get enough snow to be able to enjoy this season called winter. The snowshoes, skijouring harness and dog booties are all ready to be used. The new dog-hauler is ready to rolls, as well.
Even with a tiny bit of snow here in Proctor, it feels more like late fall than actual winter. On Christmas day, however, headed up the shore of Lake Superior to Judge C. R. Magney State Park (see Devil's Kettle - Snowshoeing the North Shore for my last visit to this gem of Northern Minnesota). Along the way to the park, we made our traditional Christmas day stop in Grand Marais, MN. We had the hounds in tow with us this year as we now have a swanky hound-mobile with room for all four dogs. Windy and colder than at our southern end of the North Shore, but gorgeous none-the-less.
Right next to viewing the Devil's Kettle in Judge C. R. Magney Park, as far as my favorite sights of the North Shore, is being able to look down (south) from Grand Marais and see the Sawtooth Mountains cut across the horizon. It is particularly spectacular as sundown is nearing.
Even with the great sights of Grand Marais and the strangeness of being in a town on Christmas day that appears to be completely empty and the only things working are the one or two stop lights; the whole region - from Proctor in the south to Grand Marais in the north, does not feel like winter. Maybe by Valentine's Day we will winter, maybe?
The road to Baconwaldia started with a piglet and ends with thick cut, incredibly salty and smokey bacon. In short, you feed and water the hog until slaughter; the carcass is either butchered on site or taken to a butcher. With the latter, you receive back a box of difficult cuts of meat, all neatly wrapped and marked. "Pork Chop." "Pork Steak." "Shoulder Roast" "Pig Feet." "Bacon, Fresh." The last cut is what we are after, the pig's belly. In the world of commerce, pork bellies are a commodity and are traded via futures contracts not unlike frozen concentrate orange juice, cotton, rice, wheat, coffee, sugar and many other bulk items.
That said, Baconwaldia does not involve futures contracts or traders in general. It involves a dedicated farmer to care for & manage the pig; a cold morning with fresh water, hot coffee, sharp knives and good company is also needed to send the hog off onto its voyage toward Baconwaldia.
Traditional, old-school bacon, the bacon of Baconwaldia, would have been created by a skilled charcutiers. The meat would have been salt (sodium chloride) cured for many days, and then cold smoked with hardwood smoke to add further shelf life to the pork belly. The cured and smoked meat would have been wrapped in muslin and hung in a larder or dry cellar; without refrigeration, a properly cured and smoked pork belly would survive most of the winter.
With the discovery of how to produce nitrates and nitrites at the turn of the twentieth century, the onset of mechanization and modern, mass production of foods and the modern practices of animal husbandry, the charcutiers of yore were factored out of the bacon-equation. Machines remove the skin, a brine mixture of salt (sodium chloride), nitrates (sodium nitrate) and liquid smoke are needle-injected into the slabs of meat. Later, the slabs are showered with yet more liquid smoke. The meat is then slow cooked in an oven then frozen. More machines trim the frozen slabs into uniform sizes. I think it is a shame that the pork belly's modern voyage involves not a whiff of smoke nor a lick of flame.
The wagon-wheel-rutted-road to Baconwaldia that I took did not involve sodium nitrate, liquid smoke or inject-needles. Instead, the process was hands one, and craft-like. Craft Bacon, not unlike Craft Beer. My ingredient and materials list was pretty simple:
- Pork Belly
- Salt (a pink, Bolivian salt)
- Brown sugar
- Kentucky Bourbon
- Local apple & pear tree wood
- One (1) medium steel trash can - to make our smoker
- A short length of steel rod
- Four (4) steel "S" hooks
- Inexpensive meat thermometer
- Resealable plastic zippered bags
Clean the pork belly; removing any dirt, grit or grass (as in my case) from the piece. Also, remove any membrane-tissue or extremely soft fatty tissue. Cut the piece into equal-sized pieces. Coat all sides of all pieces with a heavy layer of salt; group pieces in twos and place into plastic bags. Put the bagged pieces into the refrigerator (even though it is entirely possible to do this whole process sans-refrigeration, it is there, so you might as well just use the damn machine to keep things cool). For the next four days, each day, rinse the pieces and rinse the bags. Re-salt all the pieces and place back into the bags and refrigerate. This whole process is called dry curing. You are drawing out the moisture from the meat at the same time leaving salt in the meat (and fat). If you notice the first photo (above) and then the second photo (above), the fat and meat in the first photo appear "looser" and has an appearance of containing more water than that in the second photo. The second photo is from after several salt changes. Each salt change, your bag will have liquid in it. After round one, you will have a salty, blood-colored mixture. Progressively, the liquid gets more and more water-like after each salt change.
On day four or five, you can add in flavors, if you choose. I did one slab of bacon as "Salt & Brown Sugar" and one other as "Salt, Brown Sugar & Bourbon" In both with the brown sugar, I did 1 cup brown sugar. In the bourbon-ized bacon, I put in two jiggers of Wild Turkey.
By this point, I was running low on my Bolivian Rose salt, so, I let the bags of meat sit for three days more days without changing the salt or flavoring mix.
Smoking was the most enjoyable part for me; making the trash can smoker and having it actually work was thrilling. With a drill, I put several holes through the lid of the can, as well as near the base. I also happened to have an old wood stove from an icehouse (for winter fishing). I removed the door from this little stove and installed it into the trash can.
An inch or two below the lip of the can, I drilled holes on opposite sides and slipped the steel rod in; this was used to hang the meat. With a nice fire going in the can, the lid worked well to snuff out the flames, and the stove door was nice to regulate the amount of oxygen that did get into the can. The smoke was extremely pleasant smelling and even the dogs got into bathing in the wafts of smoke.
You will want colder smoke. I eventually settled in on a slightly hotter smoke than I wanted, but it seems to have done the trick. The smoker seemed to like the 180 degrees (F) area. Ideally, something around 150 degrees (F) would have been nice. Remember, the idea is to not roast the meat, it is to smoke it. The smoke penetrates and further dries the meat.
When all is said and done, you probably did not save any money by crafting your voyage to Baconwaldia, but you will have some damn fine Craft Bacon, a nifty trash can smoker, a partial bottle of Bourbon (unless you drank the rest while waiting for the meat to finish), and a neat story on meat preservation.
Including Jay Cooke State Park in the south, and Grand Portage State Park in the north, there are nine parks along (or very close to) the northern shore of Lake Superior. During the winter months, Lake Superior, the regions up and into its tributaries and its shore all have a certain elegance and harshness about them. While some folks try to escape the ice and snow of the region - heading to places where the sun shines during the month of December - I would rather take advantage of fewer people and a chance to see some of the North Shore's highlights in a different, physical state.
The winter solstice seems to have come and gone; I will admit, I missed the lunar eclipse on the solstice. I am somewhat disappointed in having missed something that last occurred in the year 1638. It is not like I had any pagan rituals planned, moreover, it is not like I had anything planned.
Somewhere between a Roman holiday celebrating the winter solstice and the birth of a baby (who would eventually have a religion formed around him), coniferous trees, garlands, cookies & milk, a whole lot of money spending, and the former Bishop of Turkey, e.g. St. Nicholas, all got involved with what is now known as Christmas. Eventually, and somehow, St. Nicholas went from being the Bishop of Turkey to being a fat man of western European descent who lived at the North Pole with elves and reindeer; his name also changed to Santa Claus. Some European cultures never advanced the idea of magical reindeer and elves; David Sedaris tells in Six to Eight Black Men that in the Netherlands, St. Nicholas roams from house to house with a small posse of former slaves to give good children small gifts and to kick and beat bad children.
With winter settling in on northern Minnesota - the wood floors seem to creak more - and, I have switched from doing things to planning things. Planning gardens, planning beehives, looking at seed catalogs, attempting to make soap, and going as far as contacting a realtor or two about empty parcels of land in the area. Trying to keep busy seems to be a bit of a challenge and a case of blues has settled in on me - nothing new, mind you, I have dealt with depression for a long while; it is part of me, so I will make peace with it, settle in, and ride it out.
Last evening, just before dark, you could hear gun shots in the distance. Much like war drums from a bygone era, the gun shots signaled what would start 30 minutes before sunrise today, November 6, 2010; the opening of the Minnesota Firearm Whitetail Deer season. Every November, on the first Saturday of the month, whitetail season, or more colloquially, just "hunting," begins, and goes for runs for a couple weeks. It is always precluded by a day or two of distant gun shots being heard; most likely, hunters who are doing last minute sighting in of their rifles - making sure they can hit the mark.
I probably first hit my fingers with a hammer when I was about four years old. It never deterred me from continuing to tinker, and later, making significant items like clocks, tables, and other furniture. I have also roofed buildings, remodeled houses and built outbuilding all before being able to legally drive. In the last two years, I have had twenty-two stitches. Seventeen in my leg from an angle grinder accident that nearly clipped my shinbone. My latest accident involved a table saw and my thumb. The resulting injury will leave a nasty scar and permanent nerve damage in my thumb. To the detractors who jokingly suggest that, when I injure myself while wood working, or metal working, that I should "stick to my day job as a computer programmer," I will say, "No, I am going to continue to make things."
