mangalitsa

dreaming of pork part 2

I think I remain on the Heritage foods listserv just to torment myself.

Last year around holiday time, Trung and I braved the mega-hipster crowd to get heritage pork from the Pork Prom over at Blue Bottle in Jack London (that's hipster to the third power!). We were in self-snaking lines for an hour. But, we ate Mangalitsa. That's right, the hungarian curly pork I salivated over.

my fave is still Red Wattle. Nyum nyum.

i ♥ pork

if it wasn't abundantly clear, i love pork.

and i was finally able to manifest my dream yesterday. heritagefoodsusa.com is having a 20% special on quarter hogs, and i had a 15% off new subscriber coupon (ok so i actually had to use our family email to re-subscribe to get the coupon but you get the idea.)

going in with two other households (Hun & Lily-Tommy), we bought a quarter hog of red wattle--the rarest and most endangered and most succulent porcine breed that we have to eat in order to save from extinction. eat the pig, save the world. google it, but don't cute overload yourself into vegetarianism. red wattle makes niman ranch look like trichinosis. only eating unicorns could be better than this. ok, or maybe an acorn-fed ossabaw.

having limited freezer space, the only way Lily & Tommy could go in for their portion (~12 lbs) was for Lily to start slangin' pork on the side. word got out on the street that we had exclusive, high-quality product, and to make a long story short, now there's folks who want in on the next shipment. it's the urban hustle to survive. over vacation, i'm going to work on setting up a community sponsored agriculture co-op for organic heritage pork. something else to add to my eclectic resume. so you see, your honor, i started with good intentions and that is how i became a dealer. to paraphrase Nancy Botwin "I'm a pork dealer , there, I said it, I'm a f*cking pork dealer"

as for Hun, weo i think he sleeps with his pork under his pillow. he misses Sylvia. she misses the pork. though i'm sure the pork in cambodia is quite tasty.

separately, T & i also got some trotters to make soups. vinamese people believe that pig's feet soups increase milk production in breastfeeding mothers. you ever hear of a sow who doesn't have enough milk for her piglets? so this is my personal lactivism in action.

the pork was delivered FRESH in a cooler on ice. T. is still confused by the physics of that. on sunday, that hog was in pasture; on monday, it fulfilled its' life's purpose; and by wednesday, it was in our bellies. as animal-likers, we won't dwell on the former two aspects. the movie BABE is also being banned from our house and will be added to the n2 contraband list.

it was mostly packaged individually by cuts; the smaller ones in smaller portions, the roasts in huge chunks. i won't get into the listing of cuts. we really should have take a photo last night at the carnage.

so since this is the best pork i have ever had up to now, i figure i will chronicle our eating of it.

last night, using a recipe that i got from Bruce Aidells's Complete Book of Pork: A guide to Buying, Storing, and Cooking the World's Favorite Meat (henceforth referred to as the pork bible) that T got me for my birthday one year, i made Pearl Balls--a pearl-ly rice-encrusted meatball. a lovely dim sum-like dish flavored with shallots, minced ginger, sesame oil, bragg's amino acids (essentially a healthy soy sauce), brown sugar and fresh ground malaysian black pepper with your basic soy sauce, rice vinegar, & hot sauce condiment. we ate this with a vegan butternut squash soup grown by T's mom's neighbor; i modified an america's test kitchen recipe for this and hand-milled the squash for a rustic texture (i learned about this from too much Food Network channel while on maternity leave from Ina Garten) and a brown and sweet brown rice mixture inspired by my venture into kimbap-making for work. T. made pea sprouts.

the flavor of the pork was umami and distinct without being gamey or cloying. not that slight baconish porky like niman ranch porkchops (which are also mighty fine) but another kind of pork flavor that was tantalizingly delicious. can't wait to try the next one.

may the pork be with you.

dreaming of pork

what is it that Americans and approx 20% of the world have against pork?

T & i and others of our ilk been bemoaning the lack of high-quality, relatively inexpensive organic pork. at least with chicken we can go to a halal store and get humanely treated, non-drugged chicken for comparable prices to a regular grocery store. but no one does "halal" pork and it's considered an insult to even inquire. when we were in Viet Nam, the subtle flavor of the pork, just couldn't compare with anything we could get here at a typical grocery stores. and even when we go to that organic grocery store, all they have is pork chops. while delicious, you can't find the cuts--from the rooter to the tooter--used in vinamese cooking. what happens to all those organic pig trotters that could be the base for practically every vinamese noodle soup? (fyi non-vinamese people, pho is the only aberration. all vinamese noodle soups are made from pork bones even that wierdly named Bun Bo Hue|Hue-style beef noodles.)

T. dream-crushed my idea of raising our own vinamese pot-bellied pigs since he astutely surmised i would name the pigs, teach them tricks, and then recoil at butchering them. (rather, he has dream-crushed my idea of raising them to eat them; he hasn't dream-crushed my idea to raise them as pets cause the miniature donkeys would be lonely out back and what better company than pigs? smarter than dogs and can be potty-trained to boot.)

our friend Giang re-sparked my enthusiasm for acquiring a deep freezer. Giang & co. bought an organic 4H pig from the County Fair and it was delivered butchered into cuts, though unfortunately, american cuts. so no feet, head, ears or bones. darn!

i happened to find a source for organic, heritage pigs and practically every cut. heritage pigs are the breed of famed, succulent black pigs ghat are high in omega-3 fatty acids, that were all but bred out of existence by the commercial dry, anorexic pink pigs of factory farming.

better yet, you can get a whole pig (!) including shipping for about $300. and of course if you are a first time user you can 15% off. so for about $250 you can get a year's worth of pork! (or one fine pig roast. not that we ever finished installing the kalua pit in the backyard... there's always next year or la caja china.) pretty good price considering that non-organic, commercially produced heo quay|whole roast pig costs $150.

http://www.heritagefoodsusa.com/
*Ok and it cracks me up that part of their mission is the genetic preservation of endangered rare breeds, so their mantra is "If we want to save them, we must eat them! ." I can just see some chinese company breeding siberian tigers and sunbears to eat with exclusive Louise XIV VSOP cognac with that very mission in mind.

a pig is a pig

so lipstick on a pig is the major presidential campaign concern.

Riiiiight. Because cheating on and then abandoning your crippled-no-longer-hot former model wife after she stood by you & single-handedly raised your three brats for seven years while you were in the hole, with a younger, tighter, and richer woman is somehow NOBLE.

Question: What do you call someone who marries a trust fund baby and gets thrown a $450,000 face-saving bone annually from the father-in-law?

Answer: Apparently, you call him a Feminist.

ain't that some self-serving pork in a barrel? those with lipstick on their... ahem, collar, shouldn't be casting stones. it's like the 21st century and name-calling and out & out lying is really the most important issue in a presidential election? so asinine. can we get back to the real fracking issues?

people are dying under this economy. literally, dying. consumed as pearls before swine. it would behoove us to remember, All Animals are Equal, but Some Are More Equal Than Others.

this little piggy had none, and this little piggy
cried whaaawhaawhaa all the way---
biloxi in 2005. not much has changed.

oh weo, there a bunch of new casinos via where
these homes used to stand built via the eminent domain
of tragic circumstance. where are the people?
working for minimum wage in the casino.
what govt relief has been done for them?
weo, the govt subsidized the casinos. duh.

we've been sold a pig in a poke. the American economy is a house of cards built on trillions and trillions of debt and we've been dealt two ace of spades. it's like [warning stupid power analogize coming up], it's like the higgledy-piggledy house made out of straw; it's like the economy is a HOG being gavage-fattened* with cannabalistic swill comprised of putrefying animal by-products marinated in lard and cardboard filler derived from GMO corn-syrup which is itself over-produced and subsidized by the govt. oh, it turns out that porkbelly of debt has been carved up by the rest of the world. America is bringin' home the GNP bacon for China and like, every Western nation. aw, it so nice to know that my consumer debt is going to such humanitarian uses. i might just go finish up that PhD and contribute more interest points to world congeniality after all.

lament the death of "the true, wise friend called Piggy". with or without lipstick, any presidential candidate who cannot offer some real solutions is leading us down the real Bridge to Nowhere.

I-90 bridge in Mississippi destroyed by Hurricane Katrina (2005)

you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. all the name-calling in the world doesn't change that at all.

*pigs, left to their own innate farrowing nature would prefer to eat acorns & truffles, however a starving pig will eat whatever is in front of it, no matter how unhealthy to their constitution, given no other choice. kinda like american children and processed food. end result is the same too--obesity and imminent death. true story.

PORKAGE PROCLAMATION

i have lately been informed by Hun (fantacist inventor of such infamy and verbiage that could only be reasonably deemed HUN-isms such as "Wouldn't the world be better off if Stevie Wonder were dead?" and therefore deserving of only a one name moniker like Bono or Cher or Madonna or Pele or Homer. or at the very least, A Blog Of His Own. though not a woolf, doesn't a six foot over angsty krean otter yearn for as much?) that today is National Pork Day.

i have only this and more to say--GENIOSITY!

y'know today, this very afternoon, i did NOT know about this auspicious event and YET, unknowingly, in perfect cosmic harmony, i made a BACON sandwich on generic whole wheat with Grey Poupon. in the words of that 80s infomercial, one eyebrow cocked quizzically and shatneresque, "Co-incidence. OR. Super-Natural? YOU. Decide."

WHEREAS Pork is acknowledged for its contribution to Agricultural Ecology, enabling the building of the Egyptian Pyramids along with the invention of beer, elevating the science of Gastronomy, and verily inspiring Humanity itself,

WHEREAS Pork is delicious to eat with Green Eggs, on a box, or with a fox,

WHEREAS Pork is the Other White Meat,

FORTHWITH, We the People Proclaim that Today is a Good Day to eat Pork and furthermore shall it be declared that ever after Pork shall be eaten on this Day.

APPROVED on this day the First of March, Day of the Porcine, in the Year of Our Pork Two Thousand and Seven.

Sowheeeeeeeee.

Th-th-that's all Folks.