wiredfool

Last weekend, before the hog arrived, we pulled out a bunch of beef short ribs from the freezer to make a little room. I knew that I wanted to try a braise again, but the last time that we did it, the flavor was a little vinegary. (That was the recipe from Tom Calliuchio’s Think Like a Chef, with sherry vinegar and cherry peppers in it.)

So, taking inspiration from a few recipies in various meat cook books, I wound up with something that could hardly go wrong.

– 7 lbs of short ribs. (It’s what I had, and was more than I needed, but not by that much)
– 1 qt + 1 cup chicken stock — Quantities here were also what I had on hand from making stock a few weeks back. We froze it in quart jars, and there was a cup left over from something a night earlier, and a quart from the freezer.
– 1/2 bottle cheap red wine.
– 2 smallish heads of garlic, with the cloves split out.
– Couple of Carrots, Celery Stalks, and an onion, in big chunks.

Browned the ribs for a cew minutes on each side, then assembled the stock, wine, and veggies and heated that to a boil. Added the ribs back in, and at this point, I needed to have a 12″ fry pan and a 6 qt stockpot to hold everything. Added a little water to nearly cover the ribs, then put in a 350 oven till everything was at a bare simmer. Turned it down to 325 and let it go for a few hours. After a couple, I turned the ribs, after a couple more, I took everything out, separated the ribs from the veggies, strained the liquid, and reduced it by about half. Reheat the ribs in the liquid, and serve.

The liquid was a thick beef stock, with intense beef flavor and only a hint of wine, and no vinegaryiness. The meat was fall apart tender, and very flavorful.

I want to try this Cider Braised Ham Roast, or something similar. I was a little unhappy that we got 4 extra fresh (frozen) ham roasts (not cured) with the half hog, instead of putting it in sausage. We _know_ we eat sausage. But then again, we also know that we really like pulled pork. So, hearing that the fresh ham roasts can be used like butt, and knowing that braises are goooood, I think this is going to be a winner.

Only 2 short years ago, we were vegetarians. Now there’s 40 lbs of pork in the outside fridge curing into bacon and ham.

We’ve got one ham going, roughly 20 lbs on the bone, which was half of the back leg of the half pig that we got. It’s big. It’s a huge chunk of meat. And it’s curing in the Cider Cure from Hugh Fernley Whittingsworth’s Meat book. It’s likely go go something like 30-40 days in the cider and brine, then it will be hung to dry for a while.

We’re doing 2 different styles of bacon, one is the basic dry cure from Hugh’s book, with mostly salt, a little sugar, and some spice. It needs to be re-rubbed every day or so, so it’s a bit more work. The other one is a wetter, maple, sugar and salt cure Basic fresh Bacon from the Charcouterie book. These will go a week to 10 days — the dry cure one is already looking firmer, the wet one is going a little slower.

The cats were terribly interested in what was going on in the kitchen while this was in progress. Thankfully, no bacon was lost to cats, nor was any bacon taped to them.

Time Machine is great when it works. I had the chance to do a restore from an existing backup today, and had the original drive not been working, I would have been somewhat out of luck.

First, when importing using the migration assistant, the backup was not found. It just wasn’t there even when the network share that contained the sparse image was mounted.

Second, and likely related was that when I attempted to mount the image in the finder, I got an error that there we’re no valid filesystems on the image. This was a highly distressing thing to google, since most of the advice was to make a new backup. (and the pages without that advice are mainly q/a spam. Really bad search results. Thankfully there’s a new chrome extension for that.). I was pretty hopeful, since the original machine could access and continue to update the time machine backup. It turns out that the image opened properly once I copied it to the local drive and mounted it from there. I’m thankful for gigabit networking.

Finally, and most disturbing, there are missing files. These are files that should have been backed up, as they are the original images imported into iphoto. The databases that reference them were backed up properly, as were the thumbnails. Getting them to backup was a matter of touching the directories from a terminal window, then running a new incremental backup.

This does not fill me with confidence that Time Machine will be there when I need it.