Making Bacon ... Literally

I've been a busy gal as of late, but please refrain from using the term "bringing home the bacon."

Instead, I've actually been making bacon.

This is a new level. By that I mean the gateway drug was making homemade soap, then jam, then homemade wine and blackberry cordial, then on to pickles and now ... bacon. Curing meat ("ooooooh" my inner chemist cooed).

Me & My Bacon. Image by Forrest Clonts

Granted, I don't know how much I will do this moving forward, but I was not going to pass up the opportunity to learn, especially from such a talented meat curer as Tim Peters. And it was fun! Curry, fig, fenugreek and sorghum bacon ... I'll let you know how it tastes when it comes back from the smoker in a couple of weeks.

Until then, read my blog for The Local Palate here. Then get adventurous in your own lab ... uh, I mean kitchen.

I make pickles on Friday night -- don't you?

This weekend, I needed to spend a little time in my little kitchen, doing a little project to take my mind off some things.

I chose Dilly Beans.

I had some of the last green beans of the season in my fridge, and it was time to either use them or freeze them. So I decided it was time to face the pickling process again. During any summer the past few years, you'd find some fresh refrigerator pickles in my fridge, sometimes with radishes or a jalapeno thrown in. But the process of processing pickles hadn't gone that smoothly before.

I didn't have one of those jar lifter thingys --

yep, one of these, and I didn't realize how important they were until I had a death grip on a hot jar with my restaurant supply tongs. I didn't have a rack to sit in the bottom of the pot to keep the jars steady, so they started bouncing against each other, which you can imagine isn't a good thing for glass.

But on Friday night, I still didn't have those things, but I knew what I was getting into. I put a clean dish towel in the bottom of my big stock pot and covered it with water. I prepared myself for a two-handed tong grip once the jars were ready. And I picked out pretty jar rings for the holiday.

The result:

Three jars for gifts and one jar for B. already in the fridge. And the fear of the process gone.