It's BACON!!

We have finally finished our batch of bacon from the pig we butchered last week! I was getting really nervous about this because I didn't have the cure mix that I like for hams...so I decided to wing it with a different method. I used 2 Tablespoons brown sugar and 1 Tablespoon Tender Quick per pound, and did a dry cure method. I rotated the meat daily and we kept it in the cure for 6 days. Yesterday I pulled the meat from the cure and gave it a good rinse in cold water, then patted it dry.

Once it was dry, I handed it off to Bob to go into the smoker. There are 4 good slabs plus one small slab...that was an oops while cutting the carcass.It cold smoked for 3-4 hours using pecan wood.

Then it went back into the fridge overnight to cool and tighten before slicing. I am all about the tools when it comes to kitchen gadgets. I LOVE it when I have the right tool for the job whether it is pitting cherries or slicing meat. I try to get manual machines rather than electric, because I like to know that the tool is useful even if we have a power outtage. However, this meat slicer is an electrical appliance. Without it, I would not be able to cut the nice straight thick slices of this wonderful bacon! This is my newest appliance, I bought it earlier in the year for slicing large chunks of cheese and my home made pastrami and bologna. Today it got to taste bacon as well!

We cut nice thick slices...not the way the grocery stores sell it, but a nice piece of meat to go along side some fresh eggs fried up sitting next to a slice of homemade bread toasted to a golden brown, slathered in fresh butter and home made jam. Sorry. I got carried away.

Which is exactly what happens when you bite into one of these tasty morsels!It took a lot of work to get to this point. We bought the pigs on March 12, and butchered the boar on August 22. The gilt is still here, we are hoping to get a litter of piglets sometime within the next 3 months; but for now....I'm ready for breakfast!

209 Pounds of Pork

With the pigs getting out of their pen a couple of times over the last week, and the onset of cooler weather for the weekend...we made plans to butcher our boar pig this morning. We have raised them with very little commercial feed (unmedicated feed), and we managed to get them to this point with only having to buy 300# of feed so far. They have been primarily fed kitchen scraps, fresh eggs from our hens, and milk from our goats....about a gallon of milk a day for each pig.

There was very little fat on him, in fact there is no place on the bacon with fat over 1/4" thick!

We chose to skin him rather than scalding, the skinning took about an hour, then it took about 3 hours to cut the carcass into quarters, separate the hams, cut off the hocks, bacon, and trim the ribs. It's all either packaged and in the freezer, wrapped and in the fridge, or cooking now.

We'll cut the chops tomorrow....our band saw is broken so all the chops have to be hand cut. We'll mix up the dry cure for the bacon and the brine for the hams.

Tonight I'm tired, it has been a long hard day and there is still plenty of work to do. There's a rack of pork ribs on the grill, and some chops that are too beautiful for words...

The Great Chixperiment Continues

It looks like the first round of our incubated eggs have finished hatching. Our live chick count is 12 Rhode Island Reds and 7 Cornish Cross. It looks like we've been successful with breeding a fast growing meat bird.

Here is a 5 day old RIR chick....weight is 2.4 ounces

And a 5 day old Cornish Cross...weight 3 ouncesThe CC has a much wider stance, thicker legs, and wider chest. Every CC chick that hatched kept the white color of their mothers. The rooster is a black Americana/RIR cross. These chicks are all within 3 days of each other in age. The largest of the red chicks hatched the same day as the white CC, you can already see a size difference.

On the left is a 5 day old CC.....and on the right is a CC that hatched this morning.

We started another round of eggs in the incubator and will keep incubating every one we get from the CC hens.

Success!

Our eggs began to hatch yesterday, and as of this morning we have 4 RIR's and 2 CornishX chicks.

We crossed our Americana/RIR rooster with 3 cornish cross hens and are hoping to be able to hatch out chicks that grow quickly and have a lot of meat. We usually buy the CornishX chicks for meat each year, but are trying to get away from having to purchase birds year after year.

We are praying that this cross will be our solution and that they will reproduce these good qualities.

120 Jars

It's been a long week of canning, and mom and I managed to get 120 jars of food put up...not counting milk! We did:

42 quarts Potatoes

18 pints Chicken breast

16 quarts, 9 pints, 3 half-pint, and 5 quarter-pints of Marinara sauce

14 quarts Peach Pie filling

13 half-pints Apple Butter

Canning Season and Other Happenings

If you have been watching our totals on the right side of the screen, you will see that we've been canning something nearly every day. This week I was able to find potatoes on sale and we're in the process of canning them. 25 pounds are done so far with 50 pounds more to do. We also canned 12 pounds of butter, 10 pounds of chicken fajitas, and we're canning milk nearly every day.We have a friend with apple trees that produce more than she can use, so we will be canning apples later in the week also.

We had a crisis with one of our bucks this week, Ditto developed urinary calculi and we had to do a minor surgical procedure on him. He is battling an infection now, but overall is doing much better than we imagined. Praise the Lord that he has been able to pull through this, we lost a very nice buck last year to this problem. He is such a beautiful buck and we hope that he will be fit to breed this year, but of course it is all in God's hands.

The incubator is bulging at the seams now with 55 eggs. Most are RIR's that will be our layers for next year but several are the CornishX that we are trying to hatch out for meat. I have misplaced my egg candler so I am waiting for the new one to get here.

The pigs are getting bigger every day. I am sure the female is pregnant now and we will be dividing their pen before she farrows. Once cool weather sets in we will butcher the boar. We've never had piglets before so this will be a whole new experience for us!