Be Thankful for the Whole Bird: Make Turkey Stock

We at Hounds in the Kitchen have many things to be thankful for this year: family and friends, a garden that filled our pantry with home canned goods, a dog finally healed, and new projects like cider pressing.

On Thanksgiving, especially, we are thankful for animals that give their life to feed us.

In turn, we use every bit of the nutritious goodness in each animal we cook. When we buy, brine, cook, and carve a turkey, we first enjoy the meal.

Afterward, we consider the gift left in the carcass: turkey stock makings.

To release the final delicious tastes and nutrients from the bones, use a cleaver or kitchen shears to chop the bones into manageable pieces. Break the breastbone, and un-joint all previously joined bones. (If you aren't ready to make stock, bag all the bones in a ziploc and store in the freezer until you want to proceed.)

Brown them in a large stock pot (or roasting pan or deep skillet) over medium heat with a little olive oil for fifteen to twenty minutes.

Add water to cover, one to two roughly chopped onions, a few bay leaves, and a tablespoon of salt. (If your bird was heavily or lightly salted to begin with, adjust salt here.) Bring to a simmer.

Move the pan to the oven and cover it. Cook at 200 deg F for six to ten hours or overnight. The oven is preferable to the stove top because it keeps the water just at simmering.

Cool and strain the bones, herbs, and onions from the bone broth This stock method releases the gelatin from the bones, creating a stock with creamy smooth mouth feel and rich deep flavor.

Keep broth refrigerated and use within a week or freeze for an indefinite time period. We freeze stock in two to four cup portions to always have a ready source for soup and braising recipes.

Homemade turkey stock is not only useful and delicious, it is the best way to show thanks for the whole bird.

From our family to yours, Have a very happy Thanksgiving

Columbus Winter Farmer's Market New Digs

After profiling Columbus Winter Farmer's Market last year, I returned last weekend for the opening of their 2010-2011 season in a new location, the Clintonville Women's Club at 3951 N High Street.

With the change of venue comes a large uncrowded parking lot, a beautiful stage with sound system for musicians, and larger hospitality area where visitors can sit and enjoy their purchases.  The market will be open this Saturday, November 13 from 10 am - 1 pm.  Future dates, two per month, are published on their website.

I chatted with one of the market's founders, Cathy Krist of Carousel Watergardens.  She emphasized that the Columbus Winter Farmer's Market was started "by farmers for farmers and funded by farmers to direct market their value added farm products to their consumers in the Columbus area."  She added "Our move to the woman's club has enabled us to offer lunches and beverages to our customers catered by the club. The chef has some scrumptious menus planned throughout the market season."

Though I do hope the market gains visitors as the season progresses, I loved shopping when traffic was light at midday and I could chat with the vendors.  Beyond superior quality products and the greater economic impact of shopping farmer's market versus grocery store, the best benefit to me is being part of a community built around food.  In less than an hour this week, I talked with a half dozen vendors and learned:

• Brezel Power pretzels is the newest addition in the North Market!  Congratulations!
• You can get free soap at the market by being the first visitor or two to correctly answer Oh Lather!'s trivia question.  I did not correctly answer "Who was elected governor of the confederate states on this day in 1861?" (Answer: Jefferson Davis)
• Luna Burger is attending the Fabulous Food Show in Cleveland this coming weekend.  Good luck spreading the vegan local burger love, ladies!
• The owner of Honey Health Farm, absent from last week's market, is ill with heart issues.  My thoughts are with him and his family.
• Osage Lane Creamery has a new goat cheese CSA program and a goat's milk herdshare.

With coffee, produce, meat, cheese, baked goods and more available, the Columbus Winter Farmer's Market is an ideal place to buy holiday gifts, shop for local foods, or meet a friend for lunch.  As Cathy says, "enjoy the atmosphere, the food, the products and plenty of down home farm hospitality."

I'm Eating Meat Again

After a dozen years as a vegetarian, I have returned to an omnivorous nature. It all started after we killed and butchered Red the pig. The meat was so honestly procured and preparations so delicious smelling that I could not resist a few bites of bacon, then guanciale, then ribs and more.

I noticed that when I ate Red's meat, my tummy stayed full for a long time. I didn't eat extra starches. I wasn't hungry for a snack two hours later, a lovely feeling.  If I want to lose weight (a mere five pounds would bring me back to my high school weight) eating meat to stay full might be the way to do it.

I have never explained my reasons for being vegetarian on this blog because it is complicated. I initially started down the path because friends were vegetarian. Then I came to dislike meat because of the environmental degradation factory farming can cause. I couldn't quite stomach mistreatment of animals either.

Ultimately, my views have not changed, which is why I'm now a 'picky' meat eater. My self imposed dietary guideline is this: If honestly acquired, pasture raised meat is available, I will eat a small portion. I'll enjoy it in reverence for the animal's life and the hard work of those who raised and slaughtered it.

For the most part, this means I will remain a vegetarian restaurant diner.  As I don't want to be that annoying person who asks the source of every ingredient in a meal, I will still choose meatless options when dining with friends or family.  Even at home, we cannot afford high quality meat for meals every day so animal protein will remain limited in our meal planning.

As change is the only constant, I anticipate that my meat eating habits may be different at another time in my life.  Where are you on the meat/meatless spectrum?  How did you get to this place on your dietary path?

PS.  Today is the last day to vote for me to win a conference ticket to Asheville NC.  Will you please vote for @racheltayse?  Thank you!

Added to Two for Tuesdays real food blog hop.

Luminescence

When one prepares an ingredient from raw to plate, one learns all the secrets: where succulent flesh gives way to stone, the bitterest part of the leaf, how light shines through fat. It's a gift, to know a thing through and through.

Algonquin Provincial Park Canoe Trip

In less than four weeks, Alex, Lil, and I will leave our homestead in the good care of neighbor Jan and drive north through Toronto to Algonquin Provincial Park in Canada.  We will rent canoes and stay the first night at Northern Wilderness Outfitters.  From there, we will canoe two days through North Tea Lake to Biggar Lake where we will camp for two days before taking a return trip. We are traveling with my parents and three sisters, Alex's parents, brother and soon-to-be sister in law, my Uncle Mike, good friend Krash and his girlfriend, my cousin Todd and two of my younger cousins.

This is a trip my father has taken seven times before, three with his now deceased father, starting in 1970.  Uncle Mike attended six trips; everyone but the young cousins, Krash's girlfriend and Lil have been at least once.

Because the canoing includes several portages, we must plan equipment and food carefully to avoid excess weight.  I started preparations last fall when I reserved four bags of dried gold rush apples for this pilgrimage.  I know that these special Charlie's apples will be a delight to our tastes after a few days of eating packable camp food.

The cooks in the family (and there are many) are each planning a night's dinner and co-planning lunches and breakfasts.  Alex has cured many meats to take along including bacon, pancetta, saucison sec, and dried fish (cod or salmon, to be determined).  My meal, one of the last and therefore least fresh, will be rice and madras lentils with chocolate pudding for dessert.

We hope to see moose, loons, and the northern lights. We hope to be minimally sunburnt and bug-bitten.  We hope to return refreshed from days with family and without electronic interventions.

Are you taking a summer vacation?  What are your hopes for time away from home?

Basement Charcuterie

If you home cure meat, this might be a familiar site:

Five pounds of saucisson sec and a fifteen pound serrano-style salted air-dryed ham hanging in our basement.   Both are made from the meat of Red, the hog we slaughtered in April.  The saucisson sec will hang for three to four weeks and be taken on our long back country canoe trip in July.  The ham will dry until the fall at the earliest.

Curing meat hanging from drop ceiling stringers is just one of the pitfalls of home charcuterie.

If you take up charcuterie like Alex has, you might also find yourself with hundreds of feet of dried hog intestine, i.e. casing, in the fridge, pictured above.  You'll probably have a stash of pink salt, that nitrite containing bacon flavoring good stuff.  Michael Ruhlman's Charcuterie book will be nearby for recipes and advice on all types of curing.  You will have a meat grinder and possibly several other sharp and dangerous tools.

Of course you will also have the rewards:  spicy delicious chorizo, home cured guanciale (jowl bacon pictured above), salt cod, fresh breakfast sausage and the experience to preserve whatever comes your way.

Reflections on the Pig Slaughter

Last week I shared our method for slaughtering a pig by hand.  Previously we shared why we wanted to slaughter. Today's final post is reflective of the whole experience.

Work to Be Done

Rachel: Once Red was dead, we all worked quickly to process her body.  There was no spoken communication, but there was a shared feeling that part of honoring her life was to finish the work.  There was a sense that to raise and kill an animal, we ought to use every part.  I feel the same way about seeds I plant at home; we try to use every fruit and edible part of our garden plants to justify our use of water, land, and sunlight in their growing.

Ease

Alex: It was a whole lot easier than I had imagined. There was almost no struggling by the animal and I think it was as pleasant an ending as could be hoped for. I found the pig anatomy fascinating. I've never been in an anatomy lab, but I understand pigs are very similar to humans in that department. The organ layout was very interesting, and I was not grossed out at all by what I was seeing.

Graphic Pictures

Rachel: During the kill and slaughter I was not emotional.  I downloaded the pictures that same day and did not come back to insert pictures into the post until Saturday night.  Looking through the images, my heart wrenched and my stomach turned several times.  The images, out of the context of physically doing the hard honest work, were more emotional.  I guess that's why we say "a picture's worth a thousand words."

Responsibility

Alex: I like taking responsibility in my life and doing things myself. For this reason, I am happy I slaughtered a large animal and got to experience the processing of it from start to finish. I feel more connected to my food after this experience and have a greater appreciation for what incredibly hard work meat-packing must be. After watching Food, Inc., I am even happier to be attempting to wean myself away from factory meat production.

Vegetarian Pig Killer

Rachel: "Aren't you a vegetarian?"  I get asked this a lot, especially considering that my most popular posts have to do with meat.  I am a vegetarian.  I don't order meat entrees at restaurants and I don't cook meat for myself.  After more than ten years, I simply do not enjoy the texture of meat.  However, I have no beef with people who want to eat meat.

I actually do enjoy the taste of some meats (hello, bacon!).  When Alex makes a meat dish he's particularly proud of, I taste it.  In the interest of not being a bother, I eat soups and sauces that may contain meat stock in restaurants.  I suppose some would revoke my vegetarian card for eating this way, but I try to not concern myself with what other people think.

In the early days of my vegetarianism, I did not want to handle meat and some parts grossed me out.  Over the years of living with Alex the meat lover and raising a omnivorous child, my view has changed.  I now have no problem scaling fish, cooking chicken breasts, or skinning a just-dead pig, so long as they were raised and killed ethically.

Lessons Learned

Alex: 1. I would definitely bring more knives or a proper sharpening stone. Butcher knives or a skinning knife with an up-swept blade would be a plus as the one I had seemed to work incredibly well for most pig-chopping jobs. I had no idea that chopping through the skin and skinning the pig would dull the knives as quickly as it did. In addition, I would purchase a proper butcher's hacksaw for going through bone. The hardware store model worked fine, but the painted blade left a yellow color to some of the bone.

2. For killing the pig, I would use a pistol next time. The rifle worked fine in the end, but it was unwieldy and tricky to manage while trying to wrangle the pig. I would also take a slightly larger caliber as I was nervous the 22 might not do the job properly. Even though it worked, it is not a very potent caliber, and I would be nervous about getting a deflection off of a thick part of the skull. I think something along the lines of 22 Hornet or 5.7x28 would work exceedingly well.

3. The hoist. Thankfully Denise had a block and tackle. However, I think it was sized for the lambs she more often slaughters. As such it was somewhat strained under the weight of Red. For slaughtering an even larger animal (cow, bison, etc...), I think it would be hard to do it without a motorized winch.

4. The hide. Next time I would like to save skin for either cooking or leather purposes. This means reading up on tanning or finding an appropriate hair-removal method for the carcass.

Next Time

Rachel: Will we slaughter an animal again? Probably. Not only did slaughtering save us money over sending the animal to a processor, it was not difficult. Knowing how to gut and process an animal is a life skill I'm glad we now have. Alex plans on hunting deer this fall, we may eventually slaughter one of our backyard chickens, and Denise knows we will happily help her dispatch 2Silos animals.

How We Slaughtered a Pig

Meet Red.  She's the pig we slaughtered last Saturday with the able assistance of another meat lover, JR, and Red's owner, Denise of 2Silos farm.  Earlier I published why we wanted to slaughter a pig. What follows is a factual account of how we humanely harvested this meat animal.  It was hard manual labor that we attended to with reverence for the life we took.

I have included pictures to illustrate exactly what happened.  Some readers may find this subject and the photographs graphic.  If that's the case for you, you might want to wait to read a reflective and less intense post I will publish next week.  Intrepid readers, keep on.

We arrived at 2Silos farm early Saturday morning.  We met Denise's pigs and plethora of chickens, sheep, and geese housed in and around her gorgeous two siloed barn.

Red was allowed out of her pen and into the chicken yard.  She was wiley and escaped for a quick jaunt around the farmyard before we corralled her back into the pen.  The plan was to shoot her centrally between the ears and eyes to instantly stop brain function.  Alex, who won a marksmanship award while in Army Basic Training, manned the 22 long rifle.  He took his time to corner and aim because a miss would cause the animal to suffer unnecessarily.

The kill shot was perfect.  Red fell with not so much as a peep.  She convulsed involuntarily for about a minute as all large animals do.

We loaded her 250 pounds into a wheeled cart and pushed it up the hill into the barn.  After several attempts, we finally strung her up by her ankles over a roof beam.

Denise felt for the juglar and cut a slit in the throat to drain the blood.  The blood was drained into a sterile bucket so that it could be used in making blood sausage.

It took nearly a quarter hour to capture the blood.  When the stream finally slowed to a drop a minute, we moved on to gutting.

Denise ran a sharp knife carefully through the center line.  She was aiming for just through the skin but accidentally made a small cut into the small intestine.  Small intestine contents smell and are a source of bacteria so we worked quickly to clean up the mess and remove the guts.

We discarded the intestines.  Though they can be used for sausage casing, we had neither the skill nor time to process the intestines as carefully as is required for use.  Other organs (liver, kidneys, pancreas, heart) were reserved for offal recipes.

Alex cut around the anus so that the colon, uterus, bladder, and connective tissue could be removed.

Then skinning began from the legs down.  We took turns running sharp knives halfway between the skin and meat so as to retain as much fat as possible.  It took almost 45 minutes to completely skin the pig.

Another option is to place the carcass in boiling water, scrape off the hair, and retain the hide for leather making.  Denise did not have the facilities for this process and we did not have an interest in curing the skin, so we discarded it in the way described above.

When the pig was finally skinned, Alex sawed off the head.  JR kept the head for head cheese making, giving Alex a jowl for guanciale (a cured dried bacon, similar to pancetta).

Denise and Alex then sawed through the backbone to split the pig into two halves.

The halves were rinsed with fresh water.  From there, JR and Alex cut the pieces into appropriate primal cuts and packed them in ice filled coolers.

We carted the coolers home for further processing.  Alex butchered while I ran the Foodsaver, resulting in a freezer full of honestly raised honorably killed pork.  The belly, jowl, and ham were kept fresh for curing and smoking.  If y'all make a fuss in the comments we can write more about the exact cuts we made and how we plan to use the parts of the animal.

There you have it, the story of Red's end.  The experience was profound and fascinating.  Please return next week for our reflection on how it felt to slaughter a pig and the implications of doing so.

Due to overwhelming response, I'm linking this to April 23rd's Food Renegade Fight Back Friday.