I am not sure what has happened over the last three to four weeks. But I have become a cooking and freezing machine. Has the great Egyptian Squirrel God, Stor-Em-Hotep, taken residence in our abode? All I know is I have this urge to make quantities of food, put them into smaller containers and pack them in the freezer. One would think that there will be an imminent removal of the entire food distribution system.
Logically the frenzy is motivated by two factors - the availability of items only available seasonally and the favorable weather for smoking.
On the first front, I am freezing fresh corn on the cob from a local producer. I am roasting green chile as it is available from the garden. Tomato production in the garden sucked this year but I still made a bunch of roasted tomato salsa. Not related to seasonality, I also made a batch of Malay curry paste and froze that.
On the smoking front, this is the prime time of the year to run the monster Yoder. When it gets cold the massive piece of metal is too hard to get up to temperature (though I may have an idea for how to finesse that! Bwahahahahaha...Think wrapping a large piece of metal in cheap electric blankets during the night!). Two weeks ago it was 12 pounds of pulled pork shoulder. Last weekend I did a similar amount of chicken breasts and thighs PLUS a whole duck! That translated into many chicken breasts for salad and sandwiches, dark meat for cooking with (got much more off the duck than I expected), cracklings, and a massive amount of stock.
Tomorrow we are experimenting. Instead of the slow cook until the meat falls apart, we are going to use a slightly higher heat (275) and smoke/roast a boneless leg of lamb and two cuts of beef roast (eye of round and sirloin tip). I will cook them to medium rare. I will also smoke potatoes. We did that last week and they were very good. Opens the eyes to other vegetable smoking opportunities.
We will have another 12 pounds of meat from these. This will carry us through until next summer.
3 comments:
From a selfish point of view, I would love for you to perfect your smoked vegetable technique. I love the flavor, but as a vegetarian, I only get it in smoked cheeses and Chipotle peppers.
smoked potatoes and vegetables sound divine!
In theory from what I've read you can smoke just about anything. Though evidently the more fat content something has, the more it absorbs the smoke flavor.
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