Wrapping things up

About a month ago, I got a call from Bob to say that my gun had sold, and I could come down for the money he owed me. He paid me in one hundred dollar bills. It felt funny to have that much cash in my wallet, because of the bigness of it, but also knowing it represented the end of something. I stuck it in the bank right away.

Bob told me that the new owner was a game warden, that the gun had "found a good home."

Meanwhile, the pig is still with us. I'm making pulled pork sandwiches tomorrow, and I still have enough shoulder meat for another meal of carnitas. I have sausages and liver left too. In case you're wondering, yes, we do have a freezer.

Another part of the pig has been in the freezer all this time: his pelt. When I came back home from the hunt, I had all the butchering and sausage-making to do, so I just salted and froze the pelt, with the plan that I would figure out what to do about a tanner later.

Later has arrived. Tomorrow, I am driving to a tannery in San Leandro with the frozen pelt. Most wild boar are solid black, but as you see, mine was dappled, so I want to get it tanned with the fur on.

When I wrote earlier that the pig is still with us, and then proceeded to list the meat that I still have, I was only accounting for one aspect of the pig's impact on me. I need also to mention the following:

• Before my hunt, I was eating only fish, and I had problems with borderline anemia. My iron level has returned to normal thanks to eating the meat that the pig gave me, so the pig has changed my physical self as I have taken him in.
• I feel connected to the pig every time I begin preparing a meal that includes some of the pig in it. I remember holding and handling the pig, and the meal becomes an extension of the promise I made to the pig to take care of and responsibility for him. So the pig has changed my spiritual and emotional self as I have taken him in.

The pig changed and is changing me. I will never be the same. I think that, once we have eaten all the meat that the pig gave us, the tanned pelt will be a wonderful reminder of this most generous creature.

Sausage making

A note on all the images in this post: if you want to see them larger, just click on the image.

John Stewart of Black Pig Meat Company gave a terrific demonstration of sausage making at the Eat Real Festival last Sunday in Oakland's Jack London Square. I am eager to learn this skill in advance of bringing home a wild boar, as I've heard that sausage is a common way to prepare boar meat.

Stewart began by sharing his sausage recipe:

• 15 pounds of pork (he uses pork shoulder)
• 100 grams of salt (he uses only kosher)
• 1 T. chili flakes
• 3 T. freshly ground black pepper
• 5-6 cloves garlic
• white wine to cover (though in the demo, he used red)
• and he also added water, which he said released the proteins in pork.
• 1 1/3 c. toased fennel seeds, pulsed in a coffee grinder

Sausage stuffer (l) and meat grinder (r)

For equipment, he used a hand cranked meat grinder and a hand cranked sausage stuffer. Both were home-sized and ordered from www.sausagemaker.com, a vendor he recommended for home cooks. I was glad to hear him advising the use of the two-machine approach, because I have my grandmother's meat grinder, and snap-on sausage stuffer accessories are not available for antique grinders.

Cutting the meat

His first step was to cut the meat away from the bone and into strips the right size to fit into the meat grinder. At this point, I asked if he ever used wild boar. He said yes, adding that wild meat is almost always lean, so you need to add some commercial pork to get the fat content up. He likes about 20% fat for a tasty sausage.

Grinding the meat

Then, he started grinding.

Mixing the meat & spices

After the meat was ground, he took the other ingredients and mixed them with a hand-held mixer. Then, he poured them over the pan of ground meat. He hand mixed it all together, wearing surgical gloves.

At this point he said "If what you want is breakfast patties, this is sausage!" However, if the goal is "true" sausage, the next and final stage is filling casings. For fresh (uncured) sausage, he recommended natural casings. These are also available from sausagemakers.com.

Rinsing the casing

Natural casings are packed in salt and must be rinsed inside and out. I asked if he ever made his own casings (which are pig or sheep intestines). He said no, this was not something he would ever want to do. Processing an animal already takes about 15 hours, and this would add so much (unpleasant) extra work that it just wasn't worth it.

Next, he slipped the casing entirely onto the end of the sausage stuffer, which had been fitted with the proper-sized nozzle (based on the size of sausage he wanted). He twisted the end slightly.

Guiding the sausage into a spiral

He had also filled the container of the sausage stuffer with the ground meat mixture and now started cranking it. Rapidly, sausage started emerging in front of the machine. He guided it into a spiral shape on the table in front.

When he had made all the sausage he wanted, he cut off the casing and twisted the end. He said you can repack the casing with salt and it lasts a long time.

Twirling the links

He then took up the length of sausage, decided how long he wanted his sausages to be, and then twirled the "rope" to get the links.

Removing air pockets from links

Then he pricked each one to release any air pockets. He had a little forked tool for that purpose.

He said that, with fresh sausage, the best storage is freezing in as airtight a container as possible, in amounts you would be likely to use. Just cut them apart before freezing.

The finished product

Doesn't this seem like something we could do ourselves?

All Natural

Today I pollinated my pumpkin patch. It's something I've never had to do before. I don't know why, but this year the birds and the bees have fallen down on the job.

It could be the new variety of pumpkin I'm growing.
It could be the weird extra-foggy weather we've been having.
It could be a bad year for bird and bee whoopy.

In desperation, I searched for and found instructions for pollinating pumpkins.

Girl pumpkin flower: see her shapely figure?

It turns out there are boy pumpkin flowers and girl pumpkin flowers. I've only ever noticed the girls. (Is that such a surprise?) Other years, there have always been a few early "lost opportunities." That is to say, a number of those small baby pre-pumpkins just die and fall off. But, by July, I get pumpkins taking hold and growing.

Boy pumpkin flower: a manly profile

This year, here we are at mid-August, and I still don't have any pumpkins growing! This makes me alarmed, because these are baking pumpkins, and I count on having a home-grown pumpkin for my Thanksgiving pie. The clock is ticking.

To intervene on behalf of future pie, I took the boy pumpkin flower and exposed the stamen by peeling off the flower. Then, I rubbed this on the stigma of the girl flower. I did this for as many of the girls as were available--about four or five today.

So what's natural about this? My answer is: what's not? I'm part of nature, after all.

I have a particular horse in this race, which I will now disclose. I belong to what has, since August 4, 2010, been described as a suspect class. (This is a beneficial distinction, it turns out.) For the longest time, what and who I am, including how I managed to become the mother of my best beloved son, has been considered by some (including many voters in my adopted home state of California) to be unnatural. Even though Judge Walker's wonderfully deep and detailed ruling is currently on hold for what feels like forever to me, his words are still on record.

For instance:
"The evidence did not show any historical purpose for excluding same-sex couples from marriage, as states have never required spouses to have an ability or willingness to procreate in order to marry. Rather, the exclusion exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage. That time has passed."

I remember having a big argument with my father in about 1978 on this same point. My father believed homosexuality is a choice--really, an act of perverse willfulness. That's why, even though he was an ACLU member who defended the civil rights of others, on this issue, he wouldn't bend. He's been gone for more than 20 years now, so his time has passed too.

It's my time now, and I say that doing things differently doesn't make them unnatural. It's all natural, because we are all part of the whole.

Our visit to the Maker Faire

This weekend we went to the Maker Faire. The event is 1 part county fair, 2 parts inventors' workshop. It is sponsored by Make Magazine. A clue to understanding the mission of Make Magazine ("technology on your time") is one of the projects on its current home page: "Hack a hoodie to turn off TVs with the tug of a zipper."

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a big fan and adherent of the DIY approach. I've written about making catnip cigars, holiday wreaths, gift bags, cheese, and rag placemats. But, I cannot hold a candle--or rather--a miniature LED flashlight to the technological wonders that abound at the Maker Faire.

For example, last year Iris and I saw a dress woven from ordinary fibers blended with electronic fibers. The woman working on the design aimed to create a garment that would enable a visually impaired person to detect information about the immediate environment, such as proximity to objects. This year, her comrade in threads was showing a wired shirt that lights up in reaction to the wearer's body temperature and activity. It's made for dancing, in other words.

Our companions for this year's visit were our 12-year-old friends Ben, Hannah, and Jessie. The visit was our birthday present to them...the kind of gift that is at least as much fun for the givers as we hope it was for the receivers.

I'm going to give you a small tour of the Faire, so if you are looking at this post via the email feed and you don't get the images, you may want to follow the link to the web version to see what you're missing.

This is the "Raygun Gothic Rocket" on the Midway, visible from either entrance when you first arrive at the fair. Quite a climbing structure, don't you think?

This is a floor shot in the "Maker Shed," a warehouse filled with kits, books, demos, and, well, inspiration. Oh, and also, crowds.




Introducing Shovel Man, a DIY musician. He is appearing on the Human-Powered Stage, where the power for the amps is provided by members of the crowd pedaling bicycles. Ben took a turn.

A captivating metal and fire sculpture in the Fire Arts area. The kids were able to use a controller to cause "synapses" to fire.

One of my favorites: The Egg-Writer and the computer program running it. It's multi-purpose: it also writes on ping pong balls, light bulbs, why, think of all the things it might be good for!

What Faire would be without Robot Wars? At this point in the action, the crowd roared, "Death to the Barbie Car!"

The kids made soap, drove virtual cars, played a version of electronic pong, ate both good and bad food, and got tired enough that they hit the sack several hours earlier than the night before. In short, it was a Faire to remember.

Remnants

Making something new from the leftovers of old projects has real appeal to me. I can see materials I've carefully chosen for one purpose combined in new ways, and, in the case of fabric, this yields interesting color, pattern, and even texture juxtapositions. Because I often sew gifts, the combinations also bring together thoughts about the people for whom the fabric was originally purchased. So, there is a many-layered weave going on.

In the case of my current project, a set of rag placemats, I actually needed to start by making the loom. And, for this too, I began with "remnants," in that I used lumber, screw and nails we had on hand.

The dimensions of this simple box loom are 19 X 15 3/4 inches, and it is made from ordinary interior grade 2 X 4. The nails are 2 1/2 inch finish nails, though you could use nails that are somewhat shorter or longer. I pre-drilled the holes so as to avoid splitting the wood, and I did not nail in a straight line for the same reason.

The next step is to string the warp, and here again, I used string I had on hand. It doesn't have to be fancy string, but you want to use something about as strong as a good kite string. You start from the upper left corner with a slip knot and wind the string up and down around the nails. The warp layout map shown below is from an old rug-making book I got from my mother, who was a rug braider.

Once you have the warp ready, all you need is your fabric and a yard stick or wide tooth comb for battening the rows. About the fabric: this is the perfect project for the remnants from pant making. The reason is that you need to work with strips that are about 1 1/2 inch wide.

The author of my little book, Kathryn Andrews Marinoff, assumes I'm working with wool, but I don't have wool remnants, because I really don't sew with wool. And this project is all about using what I have on hand. So, I'm thinking of this is as a kind of experiment in weaving with cotton "rags." I like how it looks and feels so far, but it may all come apart the first time I wash the place mats!

Before closing, I want to put in a plug for a couple of great resources for those of you who do not have a lot of "remnants" of various kinds laying around your house or garage waiting to be remade. The East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse and Urban Ore are both treasure troves. The Depot has more of the interior kinds of things (paper, fabric, paints, and on and on and on). Urban Ore has massive amounts of construction materials, furniture, hardware, and on and on and on.

I've left out some details here, so if you want more information, please do post a question. I'd also love to hear about your projects along these lines.

Doing it Yourself Changes You

This week I've been off work and have had more time to experiment with something I've wanted to try ever since I got a book for my birthday, Back to Basics. This is a "complete guide to traditional skills" and covers everything from buying ranch land, and building windmills, to canning, braiding rugs, and canoeing. The project that seemed most immediately within my grasp was cheese making. If you've been following my tweets this week, you've see the blow-by-blow. If not, you can check out the photos.

Anyway, messing around with the curds and whey has been a great experience. I like this kind of thing a lot. I find myself in the middle of something just beyond what I know, and yet I realize that only a generation or so ago, many women and men knew how to do this very thing. It was second nature, like operating a word-processing or spreadsheet program is to me, perhaps. And, almost always, something about an ordinary food or other part of my life, makes a new kind of sense. Now, for instance, I know that cheddaring is a process, and I know how much milk it takes to make a certain amount of cheese.

This sounds like a small thing, and I guess in one way it is. But I look at it also in this way: by following a practice from a time before everything came pre-packaged, I open myself up to all of this:

• understanding the steps built into the finished products I do buy;
• appreciating the labor of the people who perform those steps;
• joy in being able to perform new skills;
• delight in producing high quality, fresh products (when I'm lucky!); and
  
• gaining new information about the stuff of everyday life. 

In short, it changes me a little, which is cool.

It's a wrap: gift bags

This is an idea I got from my sister Ann: using cloth remnants to make gift bags. I sew as a hobby, so I do have remnants, but you could also have fun perusing the remnants table at your favorite fabric store. (My fave is Stone Mountain & Daughter.)

You'll also need ribbon or cord for the draw strings. I tend to save up the ribbons from other packages and even floral displays throughout the year. (They may need ironing to restore their utility.) Here's a box I packed this week for shipping.

Gift bags have all kinds of advantages over paper wrapping:

• Ease of wrapping. Kids love wrapping packages with gift bags!
• When the holiday or birthday is over, you have almost no clean-up.
• This is pre-cycling: You are re-using ribbon and fabric and adding zero paper to landfill.
• And, lastly, the look of cloth-wrapped packages is charming.

 The steps are simple. (Read them through before you start.)

1. If the item you want to wrap needs to be boxed, box it. 
2. Consider its size and then cut a piece of fabric double that size, allowing a 1/2 inch seam allowance on 3 sides. At this time also, cut two pieces of ribbon or cord about 5 inches long for the ties. (Select something that goes with the color of your fabric.)
   
3. Finish the side you want to be the top with pinking shears. If you don't have pinking shears, then you should allow a 1/2 seam allowance on that side too.*
4. Fold the fabric in half with the patterned ("good") sides facing inside. You now have one side with a fold and two sides that require a seam. The top should be finished with a zigzag (from the pinking shears).
5. Pin one of the sides. On the other side about 1 inch down from the top, secure the ribbon on the inside between the two pieces of the fabric. Pin the second side of the fabric, anchoring the area where the ribbon is well.
6. Sew together the two sides, back stitching where the ribbon is located. 
7. Clip the bottom two corners at a diagonal to reduce bulk. Turn the bag inside out.

*If you do not have pinking shears, before Step 4, turn down the edges of the two ends and finish the tops with a simple edge.

Wreath Wraiths

At our house, we have something of a tradition for the weekend after Thanksgiving. We often go up into the Berkeley hills and look around for greens and fallen stuff. By stuff, I mean just about anything that strikes our fancy--eucalyptus buds, pine cones, dried pods, anything that has survived the first rains and looks interesting.

Back at the house, we take this material and work the greens onto a wreath frame. This year, we got the frames at an art supply store, and we also had one we'd saved from a previous year's purchased wreath.

You can see in this photograph that we attach the twigs with short lengths of wire to the frame.

It takes a fair amount of material to make it around a 12-inch wreath frame. With my once-a-year level of practice, it takes me about 45 minutes to an hour to do this task.

Once you have the greens completed, the fun begins, and you get to do the real decorating. We have two different techniques for attaching the decorations: wire and (most often) glue gun. Wire is hard to work with for the decorations, but if the wreath is intended for kitchen use, it is preferred, because it is non-toxic. One of the wreaths I made this year is composed of California Bay (the greens), cinnamon sticks and red peppers. I kept the use of the glue gun to the absolute minimum.

To glue on the decorations, you put a dot of glue onto a stem of the underlying greens and then hold the decoration in place until the glue dries.

In this way, you work your way around the entire wreath until you have the whole thing anchored.

Below is one of the wreaths we made this year.

Catnip Cigars

I had a bumper crop of catnip this year. The plants were watered more than in previous years, because I had moved them up onto a new raised bed we had put into the back yard. Take a look at those big, lush leaves!

These are the cuttings from two plants one week. After another three weeks, I would get another harvest like that.


I have to grow the catnip in a cage to protect the plants from neighborhood cats who are drawn to its delights. The first year I tried growing it in pots set out on the ground, I'd come out to find them mauled out of all recognition.

I grow catnip so that I can make catnip cigars from my sister Ann's 3 cats for Christmas.  Ann makes homemade dog biscuits for our little doggie, so all the family animals are well gifted on Christmas morning.

This year's stogies are jam-packed with "product." As I was sitting down with a big pile of the dried leafy stuff in front of me, portioning it into three smaller piles, I couldn't help but think back a few decades to another time... I swear: you just never know which skills will turn out to be transferable!