A food show

My piece is up and running at Project Gallery in Wichita, and I'm quite satisfied with it. Here's a quick, down-and-dirty edit of some installation shots.



The opening was Friday night. Saturday, the gallery organized a potluck dinner. Everybody brought something to share. My wife and I brought some homemade, locally sourced food: home cured bacon, home cured pastrami, a salad of purple hull peas we grew in the community garden, some home canned okra pickles, and some home canned pickled watermelon rind.

I fried the bacon for about the first half hour of the event, feeling a little bit like Rirkrit Tiravanija, but sillier and more bacon-y.

It was a lovely weekend.

Pastrami update

The brisket sat in the pickling brine for three days. (A few hours short of the whole 72, actually, but who's counting?) And this evening I dusted it with toasted, freshly ground black pepper and coriander and moved it into the smoker pit.


Because it's supposed to smoke very slowly (Ruhlman and Polcyn write that usually, pastrami is cold smoked before it's finished in a hot smoke environment), I set a pan of ice in the pit with the meat. You can see that even after the 10 minutes or so it took me to get the photo, the ice has begun to discolor from the smoke.

As I write this, the ice is gone and the meat is getting warmer. Currently it's cooking at about 275 F.

I'll have pastrami before bed time.

Pastrami

My family will gather at my house Sunday. I'm making pastrami for them, using the recipe in Brian Polcyn and Michael Ruhlman's book Charcuterie. Currently, I have a beef brisket in a pickling brine in the refrigerator. It's been there for about a day. Two more to go. After three days of brining, it'll get patted dry and rubbed with black pepper and coriander. Then comes the smoke.

Tonight it looks like this:


The brisket started out at five pounds, but the salt and sugar in the brine will draw some moisture (and therefore weight) out during the meat's time in its bath. I imagine I'll end up with about four pounds of pastrami.

iHam

A friend sent me this link. Be sure to read the manual.

Proof I'm weird

I visited And/Or Gallery in Dallas this afternoon to take notes for a review I'm working on. It's a show of Net-based art plus some hacker stuff that exhibits just the the right amount of edge without giving in to snarkiness. One of the artists in the show, Olia Lialina, has a Web site here with her partner Dragan Espenschied. Since the mid 1990s, she's been making Web-based artworks that have something of the awareness of material semiotics you find in the works of really good sculptors. Only here, the awareness is applied to the niceties of HTML code and low-grade digital graphics, not plastic, stone, rubber, etc.

My plans to work on a second review were crushed, however, when I found the gallery closed. In fact, all the business owners in the neighborhood met with the mayor this afternoon. So lots of places were closed. Foiled by community development.

Back home, I sliced a passel of homemade bacon, fried it up, and schlepped it to the Spot down on the square to share with Friday happy hour friends. That I took a mess of bacon to a bar this evening is proof that I'm weird. Nobody hauls bacon to a bar.

My friends liked the bacon, and I'll visit the gallery tomorrow. I hear the mayor has the day off.

Bacon

The review is at the magazine. I've begun research for the next one, and I've hacked away at another disgusting part of my studio.

But my point here is that the bacon is done:


Raw above. Cooked below.



BLT's for dinner, of course.

Studio

I spent the day slogging through some of the mess in my embarrassingly too big studio. Vacuum cleaners and machetes and stomping bigass spiders behind me, I have at least one room in a non-toxic state tonight. The work was pretty much physical, which was a gift, actually, since I needed the break from writing.

The writing proceeds apace. I have a draft of a review for one mag and a glimmering about what to do for the next one. The next one comes tomorrow -- a day late by my schedule, but that's what happens when you spend the afternoon hacking arachnids with almost illegal blades instead of writing. Wonder what my deadline is?

Meanwhile I also have three chunks of cured pork belly in the smoker pit right now. The belly chunks have been in a cure for a week as of tonight. It's time I had a good look at them.

Bacon beckons. More later.

Prosciutto

We bought half a hog last fall. In January, I packed a piece of the ham (the local meat processors cut the ham into two parts, alas -- I didn't know they were going to do it, so I didn't know to tell them not to) in salt and weighted it down to cure in the refrigerator. After the salt cure, I wrapped it in cheese cloth and hung it in a wine storage unit for a little more than five months. Today is my birthday and so I unwrapped it. That's me trying to slice it above.


I'm pretty happy about how it turned out. Never tried to cure a ham before. The only hard part was the waiting.

Bacon again

It's our wedding anniversary. I'm making bacon:


Three batches of bacon, each weighing more than three pounds.



We bought over ten pounds of pork belly at Rudolph's meat market in Deep Ellum today. Back home, I cut it into three chunks and applied the basic salt cure described in Ruhlman and Polcyn's Charcuterie. In a week, I'll smoke it.

Cured, aged, sometimes smoked

The hunk of meat above is homemade pancetta. Let me explain why it's hanging in my pantry.

Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn published a cookbook some time back called Charcuterie. I got a copy for my birthday last year and have been sampling cured meat tricks and processes from time to time since then. Experiments so far have included smoked salmon, chicken and garlic sausage links (made them on the afore mentioned birthday, as a matter of fact), cured duck breast (like the stuff I ate in Southwestern France a couple of Christmases ago), and some really fine pastrami. Lately I've turned to pig meat.

This fall we got half a hog from a local farmer. Pastured; raised without antibiotics; allowed to eat bugs, acorns, pecans, snakes, and just about anything a happy pig could desire to eat. It is very good pork, slightly gamy, but delicious. The bacon I made from part of the belly is some of the best I've ever tasted. That's it above in the iron skillet.

The pancetta up top is the most recent addition to my stock of cured pork. Since that photo was taken, the pancetta has finished its two-week stint of air drying and is now in the fridge.