While I’m very excited about the prospects of getting the garden and livestock going at my (hopefully) soon to be homestead, I want to make my life somewhat more well rounded than that. In addition to growing my food I also want to cook and eat it! As this site progresses I hope to be adding video clips, photos, and blog posts about what to do with the end product off all this hard work.
I love to bake bread and I’ve had a few request from some friends to document my process so as winter marches on, look for a video or two about that. I bake with both yeast and a sourdough starter so I’ll try to make some videos about the processes that I use to get bread without much work or time invested. Bread flavor is all about time, but that doesn’t mean you have do anything to it. My favorite yeast bread takes about 20 minutes to make and I spread that out over three to four days!
I also recently bought a 1/8 share of a cow from a friend of mine. It’s a tremendous amount of meat and I was careful to request cuts of meat instead of ground beef wherever possible. I hope to be able to cook some cuts of meat not normally found in the grocery store, or at the very least, try some amazingly well raised, grass fed american beef. When I was filling out the paperwork for how the beef would be processed, in most cases the best parts were defaulted to be ground instead of left whole. I would rather have a piece of meat for braising or roasting then huge amounts of ground beef. When you get down to it, I can grind the meat later myself if I end up wanting it ground, but I certainly can’t un-grind those cuts later!
We even have a massive heart, tongue and pounds of liver… a friend of mine is more keen to try those cuts though so I’ll be deferring to him on that front. I’m 100% willing to try anything, I’m just not sure what to do with it! The meat only came back from processing a few days ago so I’ve only managed to eat a single steak. It was really great. It has much deeper flavor and amazing marbling. I’m going to have to find a way to sponsor a cow for a few years until I can manage to raise one myself.
So, between this post, and the last one, that’s an idea of where this blog is heading. What else would you like to see? What aspects of this project would you like me to take extra time to document and discuss? If you have some experience in this sort of thing, do you have any tips or tricks for me?
Robert