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Damn. I still have a knife scar from the time I tried to split and clean a pig's head with a cleaver, a hacksaw, a prybar and paring knife. If only I'd thought of the bandsaw! Course, that's one problem with those cute little farmer's markts: no bandsaws. Not to mention that my head was damnably more expensive than yours appears to have been. (Damn family farmers!)

However, my pigs were not allowed to run free across the verdant hills, taken to museums and other field trips, read bedtime stories, or permitted to expire peacefully of happiness like yours were. $0.99 per pound, baby!

Pictures please?

Here ya go. Click any thumbnail for bigger image.

Defrosting the trotters:

Initial simmer:

Aromatics:

The Joy of Mise:

Time to Skim:

The Result, Before Picking:

The Result, After Picking (the meat is the tiny pile on the upper right):

Mix in Shallots, Mustard, Herbs:

All That Work For This?

Clever observers will note that a couple of hocks are snuck into the "before picking" picture. This is because Heather paid attention to the recipe sooner than I did, and noted that the "Pork Trotters with Sauce Gribiche" recipe from Bouchon does not in fact call for trotters, but rather five pounds of hocks. At the market, I was thinking much more about heads than feet, so I wound up with the wrong parts. As it turns out, there is precious little meat on a trotter - the toe-pads probably outweigh all the muscles I could find in there. I ultimately wound up with about half what the recipe told me to expect (8 oz meat instead of 16 oz).

Something else to note about this recipe is that it is probably best done in a hot kitchen. The recipe does advise one to pick the meat away from the skin, bones, tendons, etc while hot, lets it congeal into a rubbery mass, but the amount of pork fat everywhere in the subsequent steps meant that my cold kitchen tended to turn the resulting meat mixture into glue. I lost a little bit of precious pork every time I transferred it because of the tenacity with which it congealed to the bowl, my hand, the spoon, etc.

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Pictures please?

Did you tell him your evil plan for the half heads?

I told him, "nope, they're for dinner!"

Pictures will be forthcoming. I'm dealing with trotters tonight, will post action shots later, and if I feel like cracking open the cooler, some frosty hog heads.

Emma and I went to the DC Farmer's Market when it opened and bought two long trotters and three pig heads - total damage $35. They came frozen, so they happily split them for me. Not many seven year old girls would be as into watching a frozen pig head get cut in half with a bandsaw as mine was.

The butcher asked, "Is this for some kind of science project?"

The item at the bottom of this page is what I have. I had a kilo, but I've gone through about 1/2 of it in the last week. We also scored some excellent EVOO.

That's some great Engrish on that page, even if it's technically from the wrong part of the world!

"The organolectic values are a fundamental requisite of the nutritive quality of our products, in great part binded to the selection of the natural ingredients, the handwork and in special way to the drying of our products, thanks to the exclusive microclimate in this part of the Nebrodi (Sicily)."

And anyone who uses autochthon in a sentence gets a thumbs up from me.

Went to the DC Farmer's Market this morning and I was blown away by the size, variety and selection. However, neither bunnies with entrails nor fresh hog jowls were to be found. There were plenty of cleaned bunnies, and smoked jowls, as well as virtually every other part of most domesticated farm animals (at least one marketeer had mountain oysters).

So I think I'm just gonna follow Mrs. B's advice and buy a whole head there on Tuesday- at $0.99 per pound and approx ten pounds each (looks like the skulls are removed, generally), I figure it's worth my while.

For a dinner for four I figure I'd want one cheek per adult, so that's two heads. I guess I can follow Mario's advice and make guanciale with the rest of the jowls, but there will still be a snout, ears and, um, forehead to deal with. Any suggestions?

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Not sure I want to buy 20 pound heads just for 6 oz of cheeks, but that market is my last best hope. When are they open?

Pretty photos of 200 calories of different kinds of food.

(Since I'm new to actually posting here, apologies if this is the wrong place to post this...)

I will call Lancaster Meats later today

They too were not able to help me.

I did get a call back from Wagshal's just now, telling me that they can get me cheeks, but only in 60 lb quantities. I said that was considerably more than I need.

According to the Website of "The Other White Meat", hog jowl is the cheek of a hog.

Actually Batali sez, in the Babbo Cookbook which the Montgomery County Library kindly loaned me,

The cheek is the small muscular portion of the whole jowl, and is quite simple to remove. Do not discard the remainder; make it into guanciale.

So Heather was right, as usual.

Isn't that made with jowls?

Are jowls and cheeks not the same thing. I don't claim to be any more knowledgeable on obscure pig parts than I am on the genus of truffles, so please clue me in.

Scott's going for something more like the pork cheeks I had at Corduroy earlier this year, for a "nose to tail" dinner. (Actually, it will be "nose to trotters.")

Ah. Come on throw in some tail, it is much easier to find.

I don't think I'm allowed to go chasing tail anymore.

Whoa-ho-ho, I slay me. Actually I was considering including that on the menu - any suggestions?

I'm looking for pork cheeks. I tried My Butcher and More, and I tried the Union Meat Company at Eastern Market ("If it's part of the pig - we sell it." - they lie) and I've tried Wagshal's, and nobody has them or can get them. The guy at WF looked at me like I was insane when I asked about them.

I will call Lancaster Meats later today, but does anyone else have any suggestions? Maybe if I were more of a regular at one of these butchers they might entertain the request?

Tonight, The Best Recipe's Supermarket chili, served on rice with sour cream, cheddar, scallions, cilantro and the usual garnishes.

It was good. I ate four scoops and kind of regret it now, though. I need to learn to calibrate on our new soup plates - they are bigger than I thought.

We were supposed to have Onion Soup (the Bouchon recipe) but someone chucked a hunk of play dough into the pot while the onions were cooking down. I had to throw 8 lbs. of onions into the garbage.

If I may disclose our IM conversation from this afternoon:

[16:06] shorter.rm: what was that shouting about?

[16:15] Heather Shorter: there was a chunk of play dough in the dutch oven

[16:15] Heather Shorter: it's all over the onions

[16:15] Heather Shorter: x(

[16:16] shorter.rm: ARGH

[16:17] Heather Shorter: indeed

[16:18] Heather Shorter: there goes 8 onions in the trash

You know, if you're a very, very good girl, you get to have these sausages as your post P-Funk, post walk back from Constitution Hall to Adams Morgan, post being thrown out of the Pharaoh, 5-in-the-morning snack - sauteed with apples, onions and bacon and accompanied by a damned fine '98 Vieux Chateau Certan Pomerol. Waitman, you are officially the best home cook I know.

I don't know if its because I've been a good girl, but those sausages were really damn good. Thanks for the grub, Waitman.

the little tubers

They are fungi, not tubers, right?

the Solaris zinfandel for Scott.

I picked the zin thinking it might stand up to the spicy etouffee, but of course I was mistaken. I would have been better off ordering a rose and treating it like lemonade, or to be more authentically Nawlins, a beer.

Next week on THURSDAY 12/8 is El Chalan.  Who is in?

Me!

Come on folks - I know there must be someplace good to eat in this town!