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Welcome
to Cook’s Corner at California Gardens!
CharcutePalooza
It's not in line with my usual recipes -
though technically livestock can and has been grown in my garden - but I
read about this challenge
from Mrs. Wheelbarrow's Kitchen
and couldn't resist. I bought Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting,
Smoking, and Curing by Michael Ruhlman for my dad when it first came
out. We made a couple of batches of sausages (mmmm rosemary apple
chicken sausage) but never got much more adventurous than that. We
read through some of the recipes and said to ourselves, "Oh, pink salt
and pork belly? The grocery store doesn't carry that, we'll have to
special order it someday." Someday was quickly forgotten and the book
sadly started gathering dust.
I'm also embarassingly squeamish about
cooking meat. Well, maybe not the cooking as much as the touching and
cutting. It's a serious shortcoming and I need to get over it.
I'm not a vegetarian by any means, but somehow I ended up learning to cook
like one. I'm more than willing to eat it, as long as someone else
will do my dirty work. Now that J. is an intern and has no time to
cook yummy things for me, I'm really starting to miss things like steak and
roast chicken. It's time to get past it and start branching out
my cooking instead of waiting for someone to feed me.
The plan is to throw myself into the
fire and do all twelve charcuterie challenges this year. Whenever
possible I'm going to go as far out of my comfort zone as I can and by the
end of the year I'm going to be a meat cooking maniac!
January
Challenge: Duck Prosciutto
February
Challenge: Bacon
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