Trust me...I will one day finish the other thread. I'm waiting on pictures from a lady who seems to always be out of town. Her child is home-schooled, so I think that means that they vacation every week. Anyway, instead of quartering and smoking the second pig from the original purchase, we decided to have him processed. He was eating, but not growing very much, so my economics professor would call that the law of diminishing returns. It was time to end this charade.
I took him to a processor in Trenton, TX (Jack's Wholesale Meats), but only after I called to make an appointment. Yes, I had to make an appointment to have my pig killed, like it was a haircut or a teeth cleaning. I drove the trailer up there that day, backed it up to the chute, and the man working there ran the pig out of the trailer. We went around to the front, and he started asking me a bunch of questions about how I wanted the pig processed (he talked a lot like Carl from Slingblade), and I just answered yes to most of them since I didn't know what I was doing and I didn't understand him very well.
From what I could understand, he was going to cut my pork chops 1/4 inch thick, he was going to cure and smoke my hams and jowls and bacon. We were getting medium breakfast sausage, and the ribs would be cut in half. I was told that they fresh meat would be ready in a week, and the cured meat in three weeks.
He had commented that the pig wasn't very big, so I shouldn't expect much meat off of it. So, imagine my surprise when I go to pick up the pig, and there are about 20 wrapped packages that looked like pork chops, six big packages of breakfast sausage, and 8 or so packages of shoulder roasts. That didn't include the ham, bacon, or jowl.
Well, I get home and I realize that all of the wrapped packages weren't pork chops. Three of them were labeled "Liver - Not for Sale" (like there is a huge market for pig liver), one was labeled "Heart", and three packages were labeled "Neckbones". I had no idea what I was supposed to do with these cuts of "meat", so I started an internet search.
Funny enough, heart and liver are used in boudin, which I absolutely love. Sausage is the meat of poor people, and you use the heart and liver because no one else really wants them. You boil, grind it up, mix it with broth and rice to make it stretch further, and stuff it in casings. I figure I would give that a whirl, and this weekend is boudin weekend. It was supposed to be OU weekend, but I had diarrhea.
So, I needed to find out what to do with neckbones. If you type in "pork neckbone recipes", your search will populate with several results, from southernsoulfoodcooking.com to deltafood.com (or something like that). Among a segment of our population, a dish called "neckbones and rice" is pretty standard fare. I thought I would give it a try for dinner the first night.
Basically, you boil the neckbones in some water and spices and onions, then you combine it with some uncooked rice and let it simmer. The end result is a rice that tastes like dirty rice and a cut of meat that tastes like ribs but with more bone. I swear you would have to be Jewel to get some of the meat off of a neckbone.
Since then, we have had pork chops baked in the oven with a homemade "shake and bake", countless breakfasts of sausage or sausage gravy with biscuits, a pork shoulder roast with potatoes and onions (outstanding), a stew made of the bone that was left from the shoulder and some of the meat that was left on the bone, and last night, we had one of the hams that had been cured and smoked. It deserves its own paragraph...
This might have been the best thing that I have ever eaten. I wasn't sure how to cook something that had already been cured and smoked, so I called Slingblade's wife, and she told me how to prepare it. Thirty minutes in the oven per pound at less than 300 degrees. So, I rubbed it in brown sugar heavily, wrapped it in foil, and stuck in the oven before I went to work. My wife took it out later in the day, and transferred it to a crockpot to cook on low until dinner time. When I got home, I mixed pineapple and brown sugar in a saucepot and let it reduce down. When I took the roast out of the foil, I did it over the crockpot so I could capture the juices from the ham. While the ham was resting, I mixed the juice with the brown sugar/pineapple mixture.
Combined with a good salad and homemade macaroni and cheese, we proceeded to devour this ham. It was fabulous. I may have eaten a pound of ham last night.
This morning, I took some small slices from it, fried them in the pan, took some of the leftover fat and ham juice, and made a gravy in the skillet. With some fresh, hot biscuits, it became the breakfast I want on my last day of life.
The moral of this story is to raise your own pigs, kill them, and eat them.
I took him to a processor in Trenton, TX (Jack's Wholesale Meats), but only after I called to make an appointment. Yes, I had to make an appointment to have my pig killed, like it was a haircut or a teeth cleaning. I drove the trailer up there that day, backed it up to the chute, and the man working there ran the pig out of the trailer. We went around to the front, and he started asking me a bunch of questions about how I wanted the pig processed (he talked a lot like Carl from Slingblade), and I just answered yes to most of them since I didn't know what I was doing and I didn't understand him very well.
From what I could understand, he was going to cut my pork chops 1/4 inch thick, he was going to cure and smoke my hams and jowls and bacon. We were getting medium breakfast sausage, and the ribs would be cut in half. I was told that they fresh meat would be ready in a week, and the cured meat in three weeks.
He had commented that the pig wasn't very big, so I shouldn't expect much meat off of it. So, imagine my surprise when I go to pick up the pig, and there are about 20 wrapped packages that looked like pork chops, six big packages of breakfast sausage, and 8 or so packages of shoulder roasts. That didn't include the ham, bacon, or jowl.
Well, I get home and I realize that all of the wrapped packages weren't pork chops. Three of them were labeled "Liver - Not for Sale" (like there is a huge market for pig liver), one was labeled "Heart", and three packages were labeled "Neckbones". I had no idea what I was supposed to do with these cuts of "meat", so I started an internet search.
Funny enough, heart and liver are used in boudin, which I absolutely love. Sausage is the meat of poor people, and you use the heart and liver because no one else really wants them. You boil, grind it up, mix it with broth and rice to make it stretch further, and stuff it in casings. I figure I would give that a whirl, and this weekend is boudin weekend. It was supposed to be OU weekend, but I had diarrhea.
So, I needed to find out what to do with neckbones. If you type in "pork neckbone recipes", your search will populate with several results, from southernsoulfoodcooking.com to deltafood.com (or something like that). Among a segment of our population, a dish called "neckbones and rice" is pretty standard fare. I thought I would give it a try for dinner the first night.
Basically, you boil the neckbones in some water and spices and onions, then you combine it with some uncooked rice and let it simmer. The end result is a rice that tastes like dirty rice and a cut of meat that tastes like ribs but with more bone. I swear you would have to be Jewel to get some of the meat off of a neckbone.
Since then, we have had pork chops baked in the oven with a homemade "shake and bake", countless breakfasts of sausage or sausage gravy with biscuits, a pork shoulder roast with potatoes and onions (outstanding), a stew made of the bone that was left from the shoulder and some of the meat that was left on the bone, and last night, we had one of the hams that had been cured and smoked. It deserves its own paragraph...
This might have been the best thing that I have ever eaten. I wasn't sure how to cook something that had already been cured and smoked, so I called Slingblade's wife, and she told me how to prepare it. Thirty minutes in the oven per pound at less than 300 degrees. So, I rubbed it in brown sugar heavily, wrapped it in foil, and stuck in the oven before I went to work. My wife took it out later in the day, and transferred it to a crockpot to cook on low until dinner time. When I got home, I mixed pineapple and brown sugar in a saucepot and let it reduce down. When I took the roast out of the foil, I did it over the crockpot so I could capture the juices from the ham. While the ham was resting, I mixed the juice with the brown sugar/pineapple mixture.
Combined with a good salad and homemade macaroni and cheese, we proceeded to devour this ham. It was fabulous. I may have eaten a pound of ham last night.
This morning, I took some small slices from it, fried them in the pan, took some of the leftover fat and ham juice, and made a gravy in the skillet. With some fresh, hot biscuits, it became the breakfast I want on my last day of life.
The moral of this story is to raise your own pigs, kill them, and eat them.
