Back to Basics, A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills

When I was a kid I was indelibly marked by the illustrations in one particular camping book I had; I still feel a wash of incredibly powerful, positive emotions when I think about the neat line drawings that illustrated how to use a triangular stone to dig a trench around your tent to keep dampness out, how to make a twig implement for cooking your just-caught trout on an open fire, and how to pour plaster-of-Paris into a homemade ring mold (crafted from a tin can, perhaps?) in order to make casts of animal tracks.

It was with a thrill of familiarity, then, that I opened Back to Basics, the third edition of Abigail R. Gehring's delightful manual of low-tech life skills. By my late teens, I had already attempted numerous projects along the lines of those described in the book: making natural dyes, rug hooking, canoeing, fishing, candlemaking and (like the fabled Lumberjack) pressing wild flowers. As I still seem to be trying to grow up to be a farm lady of 1835 or so, I was delighted to find that Back to Basics also covers such indispensable topics as scrimshaw, beekeeping, wattle fence construction, wood splint basketmaking, trapping crayfish, installing a water wheel and (so useful for those long winter nights!) building a dulcimer.

Beginning, confidently, with the steps needed to buy a piece of land in the country, Back to Basics proceeds to outline the rudiments of home and barn construction, as well as the establishment of a water supply and necessary paving and fences.

It canters cherfully in Parts Two and Three through the essentials of providing a green energy supply and how to raise your own livestock and produce. Part Four is a substantial primer on food preservation, including root cellaring, canning, freezing, fermenting, curing and smoking. There are recipes for jams and pickles, instructions for cheesemaking and of course the lowdown on ice cream, maple syrup, bread, cider, wine and beer – not to mention cookery on an open fire or a wood stove.

That leaves only (in Part Five) traditional textile crafts (spinning, weaving, dyeing, quilting), smithying, furniture making and so on, plus an array of antique recipes for home cosmetics and cleaners, and (Part Six) recreational activities ranging from cat's cradle to country dancing, building an igloo, tying a fishing lure, and, of course, elementary first aid.

Most surprisingly, although Back to Basics does cover projects like making a coonskin cap and shoeing a horse, it does not offer knitting instructions!

The entire text is full of the types of photos, charts and – yes, neat line drawings – that evoke for me the same deep pleasure I got from my childhood camping book. In fact, those illustrations of a keyhole campfire, and the hand fileting the fresh-caught fish are so very evocative for me that they're almost spooky.

Lest you leap to conclusions, know that this 456-page compendium may not be enough to save you should you suddenly be hurled through time and space onto an abandoned farm in the 19th century. In a book of this size and scope, Gehring is only able to devote about as much space to Small-Diameter Well Construction as she does to Sprouting Seeds for the Dinner Table (half a page, if you want to know).

"While Back to Basics is a book for doing, it is also a book for dreaming," state the editors in their introduction. It may not teach you everything there is to know about the many skills and crafts it describes, but it might well start you on the journey to find out more.

The Kitchen Gardener's Handbook

There was a discussion at Doris and Jilly Cook the other day about the divide between "preservationists" and "artisans", in which (if I've got it right) preservationists are those who grow, cure, can, pickle and dry foods for socially, economically and environmentally responsible reasons, while artisans are those who are merely interested in the aesthetics of the food they produce and preserve.

In this context, I fear I must confess to a weakness for "artisanal" pleasures, and books like garden designer Jennifer R. Bartley's The Kitchen Gardener's Handbook aren't doing anything to help. As soon as you start talking about your "potager" instead of your "truck garden", "vegetable patch" or "allotment", you're on the slippery slope to artisanism, and I fear I'm sliding along with you.

Yes, The Kitchen Gardener's Handbook is a gardening manual and a cookbook. It's partly about creating sustainable edible gardens that yield throughout the seasons. But it's also a mouthwatering picture book, from the absolutely gorgeous magenta radishes against their bitter chartreuse plate on the cover to the plentiful close-ups of swelling fruits and berries and the numerous brilliant bouquets of "whatever was in bloom at the time", artfully presented in ostensibly spur-of-the-moment containers: galvanized buckets, earthenware, pressed tin.

Picking it up at this time of year, the last gasp of Canadian winter, I'm so starved for colour that I find myself almost drooling over the vivid crimson of spring strawberries, the manic orange of fall squash and the melting mauve and olive of autumn artichokes. When I can tear my eyes away from the photos, I find that the book in fact offers a practical capsule description of scores of useful edible plants, along with instructions for seasonal garden design and lots of recipes of the type I like best: simple ones that let the ingredients shine, like Tomato and Basil Quiche, Sweet Potato Muffins, Rustic Cherry Tarts, and Spring Peas with Mint Cream.

A warning for new gardeners in Canada: Bartley is based in Ohio and writing mainly with Americans in mind, so not all of the plants she mentions will thrive in the same way here. But the book has inspired me to take a little thought this year about the appearance of my community garden plot – not just how many plants I can crowd into the row, but also perhaps what they'll look like. (Some gratuitous nasturtiums, maybe?)

To that end, I do wish Bartley had offered some instructions for a couple of absolutely ravishing rustic trellises she has photographed... but I bet I can figure it out with some leftover bamboo stakes or windfall branches and a few yards of spare grapevine.

"The goal is to pick something for the vase or to munch on throughout the year" writes Bartley. Not quite a preservationist manifesto, one must admit, but there is something to be said for enjoying beauty as well as utility. Now pardon me while I run over to cut some of my mom's forsythia for forcing before the weather warms up...

David at Foodwithlegs offers a thoughtful analysis of this book too.

Smoked Salmon for Charcutepalooza and Deus Ex Machina in the Guise of Chef Wendy

I don't know how many times I've told my students to be sure to read the whole assignment through carefully before they start working. So I can't explain how it was that I only noticed that Michael Ruhlman does not recommend hot smoking salmon until I was already curing a big chunk of wild-caught B.C. Sockeye. I had been planning to smoke mine in my friend Harriet's "Big Green Egg", but feared it would be hard to keep it below the requisite 90°F; I was, in short, dismayed.

But fate works in mysterious ways. During the one day I had to sort out the problem, I attended a trip to the Stratford, Ontario area (yes, the home of Justin Bieber) to learn about maple producing and cooking. To my surprise and great delight, part of the day's activities included a demonstration by Chef Wendy Seguin at the restaurant and dessert cafe called Let Them Eat Cake of maple recipes – including a cheater's way of smoking fish!

As you can see, from the photo above, with inspiration from Chef Wendy, I have achieved smoked salmon. Today I am taking my cue from all the Scandinavian crime fiction we've been reading around here, so it's served on a Finnish cracker atop a Swedish plate (from Ikea, of course!) As an ex-Montrealer, my very favourite way to eat smoked salmon is on a halved Montreal bagel over cream cheese with just a scattering of julienned green onions and a few drops of lemon juice. As for Jonathan, he likes to toss chunks of smoked salmon into his Kraft dinner (truth!)

Chef Wendy presents her dollar-store smoker.

But back to Chef Wendy Seguin's process. The fish in question was a trout; she suggested curing it for 12 to 36 hours in a mixture of 1 part coarse salt to 2 parts sugar, with spices to taste (no nitrites). She also brushes the fish with maple syrup before smoking.

She gave numerous practical suggestions, such as:

• Slash the skin in a few places to help the cure penetrate.
• Use less cure at the tail and any other thin places.
• If the fish is to be served as an appetizer, it needs little rinsing after curing, but if it is for cooking into recipes, it should be soaked for 10 minutes in warm water to release some of the salt.
• If there isn't enough time to let a pellicule form over several hours of drying in the fridge, the fish can be set on the counter in front of a small fan for half an hour.
  
• The rack upon which it is to be smoked should be brushed on both sides with oil.

She prefers hardwood chips, but not in the rather large chunks that one gets from commercial BBQ suppliers. Instead, she commissioned her husband to request a leftover block of dry but non-chemically treated hardwood from a carpentry shop, and he simply planed it down into an almost hay-like consistency (it must have been rather like a cross between zesting a lemon and grating a carrot).

Instead of a half-hour soak to dampen the wood chips, Seguin simply pops a cup of her wood shavings into a plastic bag with 1 tablespoon of water, and shakes it around until it fluffs up.

Cold smoking maintains a temperature below 90°F. Chef Wendy says one can also hot smoke fish, including salmon, (at 145°F to 175°F), and her method does produce a hot cure. She starts with two large aluminum roasting pans from a dollar store. The damp chips go into the bottom, and a metal rack (also from a dollar store) sits about 2 inches above them, supported by large loose balls of tinfoil.

She cuts a small hole in the second roasting pan, which acts as a cover. The two pans, which now resemble a giant rectangular clam, are sealed with more tinfoil (leaving the top hole open, of course!) She sets them directly on a gas burner on medium heat; as soon as smoke begins to emerge through the hole, she turns the heat down and lets the fish smoke for about 10 minutes per inch of thickness until it reaches an internal temperature of 145°F. (She has done this enough, reading the temperature of the cooker when she opens it, that she can do it by feel now.)

She smokes her fish indoors, either turning the kitchen hood up to full blast or opening windows (the windows must be open if the stovetop hood does not vent outside). She recommends leaving a sticky note to remind oneself that the battery has been temporarily removed from the smoke detector. If commercial wood chips are being used, it's also important to read the bag in case it notes that they are only safe for outdoor use.)

Chef Wendy estimates that her whole kit costs about $10; she saves the pans and foil for future reuse.

The electric wok as salmon smoker.

Since it's still too cold here to open the windows (as evidenced by the icy snow on the picnic table), I modified the Seguin method a little. I had no dry hardwood, so I did buy a bag of applewood chips from the local fireplace shop and soaked them for half an hour.

Having cured the fish using the Charcuterie recipe for about 40 hours with a stone weight on top of it, having soaked the salt off for 10 minutes, and having let it air-dry in the fridge for about six hours, I greased a dollar-store spatter guard (with the rubber handle removed) as the rack for my fish. I put a layer of tinfoil inside my electric wok and laid the damp chips on top, then sat the fish rack on tinfoil balls, à la Wendy.

I temporarily removed the handle from the top of the wok to create an air hole and sealed the wok with tinfoil, as per the photo above. Since the weather was very cold, I simply took a blind guess and turned the wok to about 150°F, imagining that the chilly air would keep the fish from reaching more than 90°F. This seemed to work out just about right, by sheer fluke.

The resulting smoked fish was an honorable first try; nowhere near the quality of our wonderful neighbourhood shop Kristapsons, or the fabulous salmon I've brought sometimes brought home from Nova Scotia smoke shacks, but worthy of eating. The level of saltiness and the colour are just fine. The texture is a little soft, and the smoky taste is too subtle.

I think another time I would give the pellicule more time to form, so as to increase the smokiness. I would also like to experiment with different types of fish, and to grate up my own wood chips. I will certainly also try the recipe without the sodium nitrite, since the salmon's pink enough without it and, frankly, around our place even mediocre smoked salmon won't be around long enough to worry about having it spoil!

Toronto Joins the International Movement of Bake Sales for Japan

As soon as I started writing this piece, I realized that it was going to be hard to avoid analogies that sound like "too-soon" humour; suffice it to say that a whole lot of people across North America are getting together online and in real life over the next few weeks to hold bake sales to help support those affected by Japan's recent earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor crisis.

Our local edition, Toronto Bakes for Japan, takes place on Saturday and Sunday, April 9 and 10. The Saturday component runs from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. during the Farmers’ Market at Evergreen Brick Works. From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sunday, folks will be selling their wares at Liberty Noodle (171 East Liberty), The Rivoli (334 Queen West) and Cafe Diplomatico (594 College), with a possibility of additional venues to be added later. All proceeds go to the Japanese Red Cross Society.

Toronto Bakes for Japan is being organized by Heena Punwani (above) of Tiffin Tales and Niya Bajaj (below) of Destiny, Domesticity and Dirty Secrets. Punwani was initially moved by images of destruction and suffering following Japan's triple tragedy, then inspired by two recent projects: The Great Kiwi Bake-Off, which raised $16,420 after the Christchurch, New Zealand earthquake, and Samin Nosrat's BakeSale project, based in the San Francisco area, which raised $23,000 for Haiti last year.

Punwani got in touch with Nosrat, and Toronto is now a sister event with Samin's latest project, a US-wide Bake Sale for Japan, which at last call had attracted participants in Portland, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, NYC, Chicago and Austin, as well as Utah, North Carolina and Hawaii. No doubt new cities will still be joining up.

Samin Nosrat. Photo by Bart Nagel.
And that's not the end of it! Akron, Ohio is holdiing another sister event, a Vegan Bakesale for Japan, also scheduled for April 2. The SF blog Eat the Love is holding a Vitual Bake Sale for Japan. And on March 30, Sabrina Modelle of The Tomato Tart is hosting an online Bake Sale for Japan that has already attracted the support of more than 60 food bloggers.

I'll be adding my humble efforts to our Toronto edition, alongside such awesome and formidable baking masters as Vanessa Yeung of Aphrodite Cooks, Brick Street Bakery, Gabriella Caruso of Cake Bites, Cake Star, Cat of Sugar Baking, Bonita Mok of Bon Eats, Kristin Dorsey of Cake or Death and Mardi Michels of Eat Live Travel Write.

The Toronto Bakes for Japan blog will be carrying updates as they develop. Please spread the word, and remember: somebody has to buy and eat all this floury, sugary goodness!

If you somehow manage to miss out, you can still buy baking for Japan at Yoshi's Sweets (2359 Queen Street East), and also at Pickering's The Cupcake Place, which is making these most excellent Japanese flag-inspired goodies.

Homemade Corned Beef Sandwich on Rye for Lunch and Charcutepalooza

It may not be immediately apparent, but this lunch is a trifecta of food preserving. It's not just any old corned beef on rye, but corned beef cured in my very own fridge for the March Charcutepalooza challenge, topped with awesome Tarragon Mustard made with local wild garlic by Dawn of Dawnabelle's, via the Well Preserved jar swap, and a side of my own Spicy Pickled Carrots from Tigress' Can Jam of last year, more than a year old and still as crisp and sweet as the day I put them in the jar. (Of course, I was longing for a dill pickle to accompany this sandwich, but I never ended up making them last summer.)

Just one shadow to dim the pleasure of this feast: when I sliced the corned beef, I noticed that there was a strongly defined grey section in the centre. As far as I can guess, this must mean one of two things. Either the salt cure did not penetrate a four-pound brisket within seven days, or the heat from the simmering pot did not penetrate the centre in four hours.

Either way, I mercilessly sliced my corned brisket in half and excised the grey part and a good bit of the pink around it. I don't want to take any chances. I would be very interested to hear whether any other Charcutepaloozans found similar manifestations within their slabs of meat.

My Favourite Bacon Recipe for Charcutepalooza

Well, now I know how to cook potatoes just the way my sweetie Jonathan likes 'em. They have to be local and organic to start with, parboiled, then cooked with garlic, large chunks of onion and – the kicker – homemade bacon. I don't think he noticed the Swiss chard, which was for me the main point of the exercise. But he did tell me that tonight's dinner featured the best potatoes I've ever cooked (in more than a dozen years together!)

Above you see my bacon, brined for eight days, waiting to go into the oven for a short roast at 200°F. Below, you see it after cooking: nice solid slabs.

We had bacon two ways tonight. I fried up a few rashers of the maple bacon with a couple of eggs over hard for Jonathan. I did blanch the bacon first for 60 seconds because it seemed a bit salty to me. However, I hardly eat any salt at all, so I may not be a fair judge. After it was blanched and fried, Jonathan ate all his. At first he agreed that it might be too salty. Later I heard him mumble something like "Maybe I'm just getting used to it" between mouthfuls. I did distinctly hear him say: "You did got the crunchy part just right."

I had half a rasher of the maple bacon (who could resist?), but the main part of my meal was a recipe I was given verbally at the community vegetable garden last summer, which featured some of the bacon flavoured with garlic and pepper.

Sorry for the poor image, but my old camera only takes decent photos in daylight now.

Swiss Chard with Potatoes

Serves 2-3

• 6 medium potatoes
• Olive oil
• 3 cloves garlic, finely minced
• 2 medium onions, chopped into chunks
• 2 slices of bacon, choppped into chunks
• 1 big bunch of Swiss chard, washed and chopped into large pieces
• (optional) Salt, black pepper, crushed hot peppers, cumin to taste

1. Wash the potatoes. If you have time, boil them in their skins until they're somewhat soft and let them cool, then chop them into large pieces. If you're short of time, chop them into pieces first, then parboil them. (Peel them only if you think they need it.)
2. In a large pot over medium heat, cook the garlic in a few tablespoons of olive oil for about one minute.
3. Add the onions and bacon, and cook them until the onions are transparent and the bacon has lost its raw look.
4. Add the potatoes and stir to wake them up. Add any spices at this point.
5. Add the Swiss chard, toss the ingredients together and cover. Check and stir occasionally to make sure nothing is sticking to the bottom, burning or being left undercooked. When it has all heated through and the chard has wilted into the mix, it's ready.

I would serve this as a one-pot meal, but it could also go along with other dishes.

Eating Meat Consciously for Heart Health and Weight Control

I've been meaning to write about this for a while, and since I noticed that Canadian Beef is offering to pay the entry fee to Eat, Write, Retreat in Washington this coming May on behalf of a certain number of food bloggers who write about beef, I thought I'd take the bull by the horns (or, more likely, by the short ribs) and write something about the food reflections I've been having over this past year.

You see, I now weigh just about 40 pounds less than my top-recorded weight, 30 of which have come off over the past year (while I was cooking 100 pots of jam, attending numerous wine tastings and eating out at a lot of restaurants!) I've also reduced my LDL ("bad") cholesterol by about 15%. The big secret? I started to see a nutritionist regularly, and to really pay attention to the nutritional value of whatever I put in my mouth. I certainly haven't stopped eating fatty meats, baked treats and sugary sweets, but I have been paying a lot more attention to the proportion of them in my diet.

I would have said I knew quite a lot about nutrition, but I have been finding there's more to know, and it can get complicated. In order to make it easier, besides teaching me more about things like glycemic index, the risks of skipping meals, and the roles of calcium and fibre in lowering cholesterol, the wonderful Julia pointed me to a very useful chart at BeefInfo.org (which is coincidentally the site of Canadian Beef). It gives the nutrition breakdown for 100-gram portions of numerous beef cuts. The really salient ones for me are fat content and calorie count.

The page lets you check from among a wide number of choices, but you can only display four nutrition labels at a time. The interface does, however, allow you to toggle between raw and cooked nutrition figures; it's amazing how many calories some cuts gain in the pan! On another page, there's also a handy comparison of beef with chicken and fish.

Pork Marketing Canada's site, PutPorkOnYourFork.com, has a similar chart showing the nutritional value of various 100-gram pork cuts, which is handy to compare with the beef information. It's all available at a glance, but doesn't give raw versus cooked figures.

The Canadian Sheep Federation's site, FreshCanadianLamb.ca, doesn't package their data so neatly, but does post clickable nutrition labelling of 100-gram lamb cuts as PDFs.

The Chicken Farmers of Canada's newly revamped Chicken.ca offers lots of recipes and quite a wealth of health information, but – unless it's so hard to find that I actually couldn't spot it – they don't seem to have the same type of basic nutrition facts for chicken cuts. (There is a comparison of white and dark meat, but you have to do some arithmatic to match the 100-gram figures on the other sites.)

In these days of nose-to-tail eating, it's too bad that none of these sites even mentions liver, let alone any of the more obscure parts of the various beasts under discussion.

As I enjoy the wafting aroma of two slabs of pork belly roasting themselves into bacon that I'll be sampling for dinner tonight as part of my Charcutepalooza February challenge, it seems like a good moment to share some of the nutritional information that can be learned from these sites. You'll notice that, whereas chicken is generally a good choice, there's quite a difference between white and dark meat. Meanwhile, although you may have thought of beef and pork as fatty meats, some of the leaner cuts, grilled or roasted, come in at 5 to 6 grams of fat or less per serving, which is pretty good.

The luxurious cuts like tenderloin are generally pretty lean. The big red flag goes up for ground meats, though; even the leaner ones are high in fat, and when you're cooking it into chili or spaghetti sauce it's very hard to control how much fat you're getting (unless you chill it for serving the next day, when much of the fat will rise to the surface and can be lifted off).

Fat and Calorie Content of Various Meats

The sites above give these figures for a standard 100-gram serving (roughly the size of the palm of your hand), cooked as lean as possible. Please be sure to double-check the numbers I give here against the sites mentioned above in case I've introduced an error in retyping them!

Beef

• Eye of round: 2.8 g of fat, 204 calories
• Sirloin tip: 5.1 g of fat, 209 calories
• Top sirloin roast: 5.9 g of fat, 178 calories
• Rib: 10.9 g of fat, 244 calories
• T-bone steak: 12.3 g of fat, 247 calories
• Medium ground beef: 15.1 g of fat, 257 calories

Chicken

• White meat: Skinless chicken breast (raw?): 2.3 g of fat, 148 calories (my calculation; the CFC gives figures for a 130 g serving)
• Dark meat: Baked or grilled leg: 5.4 g of fat, ??? calories

Lamb

• Whole leg of lamb: 3.5 g fat, 120 calories
• Ground lamb: 17 g of fat, 230 calories

Pork

• Roasted pork tenderloin: 2.5 g of fat, 144 calories
• Lean deli ham: 2.9 g of fat, 110 calories
• Grilled centre loin chop: 3.8 g of fat, 174 calories
• Lean roasted ham: 5.4 g of fat, 125 calories
• Pan-fried back bacon: 16 g of fat, 182 calories
• Medium ground pork, pan fried: 22 g of fat, 299 calories
• Roasted back ribs: 27 g of fat, 365 calories

Unfortunately, making good food choices is not as simple as reading a nutrition comparison chart. One must remember, for instance, that fat content is not the only determining criterion; fresh meat is generally better for you than meat preserved by any method (sadly, including charcuterie). The fats in fish are "healthy" fats, so a higher fat content can actually be desirable if the calorie count's not too high.

However, it's also useful to bear in mind that so far the naturally occurring trans fats found in meats and dairy products have not been shown to have the same bad effects on heart health as synthetic commercial trans fats. So as I work my way through the Charcutepalooza Year of Meat, I will continue to indulge in everything I salt, smoke and cure. I just won't be having it at every meal.

Lemon Confit: A Charcutepalooza Add-on

When I was working on my canning book, I called up Joel of the blog Well Preserved to ask whether he had a recipe for Moroccan-style salt-preserved lemons that he felt he had the right to share for publication. There was a pause. Then he asked: "Who owns 'Slice crossways into a bunch of lemons. Bury them in salt. Be sure they don't touch'?"

I never ended up using a Lemon Confit recipe in the book, but I've finally decided to try making them myself. These lovelies have been resting in their salty bower for about six weeks now, and they've reached a very mellow, aromatic flavour without the top note of sourness that you get with fresh lemons. I plan to report back when I use them in something worth writing up.

I have essentially employed David Lebovitz's recipe, which calls for a few spices to be tossed into the jar. There is also a recipe for Lemon Confit in Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's Charcuterie, and Ruhlman has recently written about it on his blog too.

Homemade Corned Beef for Charcutepalooza

When I first purchased Michael Rulhman's Charcuterie cookbook a year or so ago, the recipe that most intrigued me was corned beef. Growing up in Montreal, with its vibrant Jewish deli scene, corned beef (always refereed to simply as "smoked meat"), was a staple. You could take the trip downtown to order it at one of the city's renowned deli palaces: preferably Schwartz's, but possibly Dunn's, or the late lamented Ben's.

To tell the truth, though, I most often ate the humbler home alternative: Coorsh brand heat-and-serve smoked meat, which came in a plastic envelope to be dropped into boiling water and cut open when hot. Either way, it was served between two slices of rye bread; the correct presentation involved a hefty mound of meat atop which the bread halves balanced precariously. That is, the meat should not be enclosed by the bread, but, as it were, garnished by it.

It is a Toronto joke that expat Montrealers, of whom I am one, are always whining about their inability to get enough of several beloved items: including real bagels, of course, and what's known here as "Montreal smoked meat". However, I hesitated to try making my own corned beef from Ruhlman and Polcyn's recipe, for two reasons: first, because I was daunted by the challenge of acquiring pink salt. (I have now overcome that obstacle.) The second thing was that I'd heard in discussion with other Toronto food experimenters that the five-day brining period suggested in the book might be too little.

Motivated by the Charcutepalooza March brining challenge, I decided it was time to get going and corn some beef. I consulted with local charcuterie hero Zane Caplansky of Caplansky's Delicatessen (he whom Adam Sachs of the NY Times Style section named "among the farmers, chefs, butchers and restaurateurs credited with turning the city into a carnivore's dining destination"). He says to brine a five-pound brisket for seven days, so that's what I'm going to do.

Here's the beef.

Because I am such a newbie, and as with the bacon, I am otherwise going entirely by the book. It started with the acquisition of a four-pound piece of beef brisket raised by a Mennonite farmer near London, Ontario (which is to say: locally). Rowe Farms being out of brisket, I went instead to another worthy butcher: Meat on the Beach.

I spent a little time figuring out how to refrigerate the meat for the requisite week. For reasons of economy, philosophy and practicality, our household has only a dorm-sized fridge, like they do in Paris. Given that the veggie crisper is still full of jam and pickle jars being used up from all the recipe testing for my canning book, and that I already have three pounds of bacon salted away in there (literally), there's no way a pot of brine will fit too.

I admired some fine $20 glass pans with lids in a kitchen store, but none was big enough. I ended up buying a $2 plastic lidded container from a dollar store (it's actually labelled as BPA-free, to my surprise!), which just fits in the top of the fridge along with the bacon and enough space left over for a bit of broccoli and one condiment jar. If I enjoy this experiment and make more, I may well invest in a couple of the glass containers, though. Who knows what besides BPA will be leaching into the meat along with the salt?

Here's my pickling spice, ready to go.

I assembled my own pickling spice according to the proportions given in Charcuterie (one of the nice things about being a middle-aged householder is tending to have all those spices on hand, and fairly fresh). The top photo shows them after toasting in one of my favourite cast-iron frying pans. They smelled great.

And when I poured the salt, sugar, garlic and spices into the pot, the steam that wafted up took me straight back to my Montreal childhood: it was exactly the right bouquet, so redolent of those hot, squishy packets of fatty meaty goodness that we used to slice open for our weekend lunches. I await the final result with excitement.

Meanwhile, I also took up the challenge to brine something besides flesh this month, so I have a glass jar full of salted lemons maturing on the kitchen counter. They've been marinating for several weeks now, and may be ready, but I suppose I'll have to make some Moroccan food to test them out. I've been eyeing the Chicken Tagine recipe from David Lebovitz's new Sweet Life in Paris book, a companion to his wonderful blog, where he offers a similar recipe with lamb.

But first I think I'll have to cook up some bacon and eggs. And some corned beef hash. And maybe some corned beef and cabbages. And of course, a good old-fashioned smoked meat sandwich on rye. With yellow mustard. And a kosher dill.

(And here's the sandwich!)

A McIntosh Apple for the Great Big Crunch #GBC2011

I'm tweeting my own CRUNCH!!! for the Great Big Crunch 2011, which is all about getting students involved in good nutrition through the satisfying crunch of a crisp apple. Here are my George Brown College colleague Kate Lamorie (left) and me (right). Fittingly, our apples are McIntoshes: not only a Canadian apple, but one that originated not too far away from here in eastern Ontario 200 years ago. Happy 200th anniversary, McIntosh, and happy Crunch day!

Thanks to Preethi Gopinath for the photo!

Makin' Bacon – Finally! – for Charcutepalooza

Well I finally feel as though I'm on track with the meat fest, or pork party, known as Charcutepalooza. It took me a long time to get my hands on the curing salts. (You may recall, gentle reader, that they hadn't arrived by the bacon deadline, so I posted instead about sodium nitrate, hoping that would count as my February submission in the monthly Charcutepalooza roundup.) Now I have enough nitrites to cure a piece of meat the size of a Volkswagen, and here are my two 1.5-pound slabs of pork belly, curing themselves into bacon, from Rowe Farms, who got them from a local Mennonite pig farmer.

I have had some very interesting conversations around town about meat curing in general and bacon in particular. Kyle Deming, the chef at Toronto oyster restaurant Starfish and its sister establishment Ceili Cottage, was especially enlightening. He's planning soon to open a retail outlet for his business Sausage Partners (how does he have time? He also has a small child!) As you might guess, Sausage Partners is about the foods he creates with raw ingredients from Kawartha Ecological Growers. His shop, which may be located near Queen Street East and Greenwood, will offer preserved foods of all kinds, including charcuterie.

But back to the subject at hand... After all my travails in acquiring pink salt, Kyle D. informs me (as does Michael of Hand Crafted) that bacon can safely be made with no nitrites, as it is cooked before eating. (Twice-cooked, actually, if you smoke or bake it, then fry it.) I suppose boiling it would not kill botulism, though, because boiling soup or stew only reaches 212°F, whereas botulism survives up to 240°F; this is the problem with hot water-bath canning of low acid produce... but I digress once more.

Since I'm a bacon newbie, I went straight by the book. One of these batches (the one on the right) includes maple syrup; the other is Ruhlman's suggested blend of bay leaves, peppercorns and garlic, which I smashed up coarsely together in a stone mortar and pestle. Jonathan will no doubt want to fry some of this up for breakfasts when it's ready; I have dreams of a French Canadian pea soup to honour the Habitant quarter of my gene pool.

Just an aside: having read of the dangers of ingesting large quantities of sodium nitrite, seeing that the curing mix really does resemble something that might go into morning coffee, and having a remarkably forgetful husband, I am taking no chances!