Trotters, Liver, and Lard

While Phil drove our chipper to the fix-it shop, I determined to process the parts of the pig we took home.

First, the trotters, or feet. In San Francisco's China town, pre-children, I had pig's feet soup (the waiter seemed surprised that I ordered it). I remember it was delicious, at least until I began to wonder if the floating globules were fat. I ate most of it, though. (No, the floating globules were not fat, but gelatin.)

Before I could eat the pigs' feet, though, I needed to clean them. Disgusting. I scrubbed them to get the dirt and blood off. An online site said to scald four times. After the first scald, the smell was so foul, I wanted to give up. I tried scraping the skin, but the bristles, though, somewhat loosened, made me want to tear out my own hair—I'm too impatient to spend half a day scraping pigs' feet, when we might not even like the eventual soup anyway!

Another book claimed that, after scalding, simply twist down, and the hair would come off. Ha!

I gave up.



Next I started to chop the liver. But there's something about the texture of liver, and the quiver as I cut, that makes my insides shiver. I stopped.

Bypassed the kidneys, spleen, and heart for the time being, though I did put the hearts in the freezer for potential sausage later, and the kidneys in the freezer for steak and kidney pie.

That left the cheeks, er, jowls. I weighed them, and the four jowls came to over six and a half pounds. Wow!

Maybe a pound of it was membranes, happy food for Chloe and not for me. I got about three and a half pounds of stir-fry meat. And I got a goodly amount of fat (some people have jowl bacon--I could have done that, but I want the lard more).

When we first purchased a half cow (located through the handy eatwild.com website), I tried to render the fat. Tallow had many uses for the pioneers, I think. But my fat didn't render.

Today I got to try again, this time with lard. It took a ridiculously long time—maybe two hours. I may have started off with too much water (the instructions I used called for two cups of water for half a pot of fat. I used the water, with much less fat, because I was so paranoid about burning the stuff). But in the end, my barn smelled like a healthy fast food joint (which is to say, greasy but enticing), I had a jar of cracklings and a jar and a third of pure lard.



By this time, Phil was home. We tried Ara's recipe of sliced liver and onions wrapped in the "spiderweb" fat near the spleen.



We all tried it. I think it was LOADED with vitamins, because it made me feel like I'd had five cups of coffee. (Or maybe that was just the realization that I had liver in my mouth that made my heart pound oddly.) Phil said it was the best liver he'd ever had—but it was still liver. We both managed a few more bites, but that's it.

We'll give the spleen and liver to the dog.

I went back to the trotters. Once cooled, I was able to strip the skin off fairly easily with my fingers. And, with a little more effort, I popped the toenails off. Chloe loved the skin, but not the toenails. This took a good bit of time and a good bit of strength, so I did two trotters and am saving the rest for tomorrow.

In the afternoon, Phil planted four more trees, almost single-handedly (I helped hold them in place in the hole while he shoveled dirt). And he watered the 41 trees already planted. We should probably get some irrigation going, because hand watering 400 trees every week isn't going to be much fun.

I planted peas: Sugar Snap peas, snow peas, and shelling peas.

It was the most satisfying garden event in my life to date.

In Boulder, I had a very limited garden space. I purchased a large packet of sugar snap seeds and dutifully wrote on the outside of the package: "used 20." Which left me with about 380 unplanted seeds. There just wasn't space.

So today I went crazy. I have cattle panel fencing I can use as trellising, so I planted the remainder of that package of seeds, and the entire (smaller) packages of the rest. I just dug a little trench with my claw, dropped them in, covered them up, stepped on the row (which many books say not to do, but my gardening workshop man said should happen), and mulched with some hay.

But this I say, He which soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly; and he which soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully.

After the months when we didn't have sun, when we couldn't see the earth, the chance to plant bountifully, to work with our hands in the sun, to hear the children laughing and playing, riding bikes and holding kids—this was a great day.

We even got to eat turnips planted last fall that overwintered pretty well. Wow!