Whose idea was this, anyway?

Honeydippers

Warning: this is not a cooking post.

 

We had our friendly, local honeydippers visit this morning.

They’re the guys who open up the septic tank out back, shove a big hose down into the Stygian Abyss, and pump it all out.

Being urbanites, this was new to us. (I have a vague memory of hearing about the Wyoming place having its tank pumped out once).

It all started with the shower downstairs not draining as quickly as normal.

Then there was this glugging noise coming out of the sink.

The toilet downstairs started to drain very slowly.

Then strange stuff started bubbling back up the toilet.

And finally, back into the shower.

Our intrepid cleaning lady (my Avon lady too, btw) came on Thursday and brought her husband along so I asked him if he would have a look.

He sent Scott to buy a plunger.

It didn’t help.

We called our very friendly, very nice plumber Mr. Saturday Night.  

His real name is Mr. Szombathy (pronounced sort of like “somebody” and it’s a Hungarian name that means Saturday).

He has been a huge help in the past, with our water pump, the leaky pipe coming from the washing machine, and he installed our new dishwasher.

All for very reasonable prices.

He took one look at the toilet and the shower and told Scott to get the key to the septic tank.

They had a look inside and he immediately knew the problem was a full septic tank.

It was backing up into the lower bathroom.

Yikes.

He called the sewage pumpers, who were not able to accommodate us until today.

We spent the weekend keeping as much as possible from dumping anything down the drains.

And we fell out of bed very early this morning, expecting them at 7:00 a.m.

We learned a few things.

Our tank is five cubic meters. We have a one-cubic-meter water butt and I remembered how stunned I was that thing filled completely after one good rainstorm.

It’s a relatively small tank, because this place was built to be only a vacation/weekend getaway without permanent residents.

When you first open it up, the tank doesn’t smell much at all.

It’s only after the pump’s been going that the odor gets a little pungent (no breakfast for us this morning).

You can’t predict when you’ll need to empty it again (we don’t know how recent the last emptying took place, except it was before we moved here, 2009).

Our wonderful Mr Saturday Night (My cousin Gene gave him that name) will now have a look about every three months just to monitor.

He talks about putting some bacteria down there once a month or so. Scott looked online and the very reputable Ag Department at Michigan State University says it doesn’t add anything.

We’ve been pretty good about keeping coffee grounds and eggshells out of the tank (I learned that from Dad in Wyoming). And we put a lot of stuff into the compost.

I have a dishwasher and washing machine, three toilets and a shower.

I can’t believe it took five years to fill the thing up!

But aren’t the flowers nice above the tank.

Dear departed Erma Bombeck was right!

 

Alchemy: pork belly to bacon

We were planning for our first BBQ party of the season.

We have friends here (British and Polish) who not only speak English, they appreciate stuff that’s cooked on the Weber. (Yes we can buy Weber grills here and their accouterments).

In anticipation of the afternoon, Scott bought two really nice rib slabs from the local (45 minute drive) restaurant supply megastore, Metro.

What we realized when preparing the ribs for the grill was, there is an entire pork belly dimension to each slab of meat.

Cutting it off longways, the ribs are ready for brining, then BBQing on a  s l o w grill.

What happened to the BBQ party is one story; what happened to the leftover pork belly is the story of this post.

Here we have five pounds of very respectable pork belly.

I have been, historically, the one in the zumBurgess family to prepare tasty pork belly meals.

I follow recipes by Daniel Boulud, by Adam Liaw (Australia’s Master Chef winner season two), and on occasion by my hottie favorite, Anthony Bourdain.

Okay, I was a fan of Bourdain ever since I frequented Les Halles in New York (1995-1998), when my office was just around the corner from his eatery on 29th and Park Ave South.

Les Halles was a bistro in the true French meaning; the menu was pure French: steak frites a staple but also moules marniere, cassoulet, rillettes, snails, choucroute… you get the idea.

I read Kitchen Confidential before it was a hipster doofus thing to read.

And I loved sitting at the bar in Les Halles because I could smoke there.

It’s where I learned how to drink cold red wine in the hot summer.

I actually once espied Bourdain taking a smoke break out on the Park Ave curb with a colleague, while dining there for lunch with a friend; but that was well after Scott and I moved to London.

I am so getting away from the story at hand.

Except it’s important that I convey just how Mr. Bourdain - he was a helluva cook back then - influenced, and perhaps more precisely, gave us permission to embrace the pig as a profoundly great thing to eat.

So, back to my story:

Scott has just put five pounds of fresh pork belly into the freezer.

We both think that I will do something with it over time.

Then up pops this recipe for home-cured, home-smoked bacon on my Flipboard one morning.

I could do another digression about surfing Flipboard and this strange tech thing Scott and I have about sending each other electronic bon mots while we are lying in bed right next to each other, but I won’t.

Suffice it to say, here is this interesting idea to Make Our Own Bacon.

I forward the link to him.

And he acts on it.

The first hurdle is finding the ingredients one needs.

The recipe Scott follows says that pork belly is actually kind of hard to find.

Here in Slovakia, it is one of the easiest things to find here in our local grocery.

It’s the nitrate, or pink salt, or Prague Powder #1 or Morton’s Tender Quick….a fundamental ingredient needed to cure pork belly into bacon… that we have a hard time finding.

We had no idea that nitrate was perhaps the most important ingredient.

Here, there’s one brand.

It’s just a paper packet that says rychlosol on it (Tesco store brand).

Silly us: if only we knew our adopted country’s language better, we might have known that ‘rychlosol’ (literally translated as ‘fast salt’) is easy to find. Lots of people home-smoke meat here.

After you have these two fundamentally important ingredients - meat and nitrate salt - and a lot of regular salt, the rest is pretty much up to you so that you get your own personal kind of flavor for your bacon: maple syrup, pepper, brown sugar.

Also bourbon.

We use Tennessee sour mash whiskey ourselves (you might know it as Jack Daniels).

 

These ingredients are combined and massaged into the pork belly, which is then inserted into a hefty ziploc bag, and put in the fridge for a week or so.

Every day Scott goes downstairs and pulls the belly out to massage it and flip it in its bag, and puts it back in the fridge.

After seven (or eight) days, it goes into the smoker.

Our smoker is our Weber.

For this part of the process, one needs - in addition to charcoal - a good smoking wood.

Apple is particularly nice.

We have, in the past, found both apple and cherry wood chips where we get our Weber parts.

But it’s a little early yet for the general population to start grilling regularly outdoors so no decent smoking chips are currently available.

We have new neighbors - who have recently been visiting the vacant lot between us and our friends and neighbors the Laukos.

These new neighbors are from Bratislava and, in spite of our offer to buy their vacant lot, they have decided to restore it.

According to them, it was an old orchard.

They are clearing out all the old underbrush and cutting some of the dead wood down, opening it up to the sun. They’re even planting new trees.

They seem like very nice people and we are hoping they don’t decide to actually build a chata there; not for the pain of having someone living there, but for having all the noise that construction naturally entails.

Anyway, Scott asked if it was okay to take some of the old, dead apple wood to use in the smoking step of his bacon.

They are pleased to let Scott avail himself of the old dead wood.

And he is in business!

Scott preps the grill by lighting a half-full chimney of charcoal briquettes and bank them onto one side of the grill - along with an aluminum packet of apple wood chips Scott ‘harvested’ next door.

The other half of the grill is where the meat goes.

The lid goes on and the vents are closed.

The smoking process takes about three or four hours on a very  l o w  temperature (you don’t want the meat to cook after all). Scott turns the meat on occasion while it smokes:

What comes out on the other end is this:

 

Best bacon we ever ate.

Ever.

An exercise for living in the moment

It’s one of the things I’ve always loved about Cesar, the Dog Whisperer. He teaches us that dogs don’t anticipate or remember past ‘wrongs’ (like leaving them alone for too long).

They live in the moment and are always so happy to see us again as if all were forgiven.

Because all is.

The side blog I’ve been concentrating on lately has had me looking a lot into my past and looking through copious old photographs and old home movies.

I have a dear friend who gently reminded me not to spend too much time in the past, but keep most of my attention in the present with just a little backward and forward.

My cousin Nancy has just introduced me to the meditative exercise of coloring a mandala.

I’d never heard of that before but gosh it’s right down my alley so I’ve just bought myself a couple of coloring books and a set colored pencils.

 

A year or so ago, Nancy’s sister Karen referred me to a book called Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives by Wayne Muller (Harvard Divinity School).

We are not religious people, Scott and I, but this book has been very interesting in its exercises to help us keep our centers, individually and together.

The book is full of thoughtful exercises, neither long nor difficult, and Muller applies them to different religious or spiritual contexts. Muller, in fact, goes to some pains to be inclusive of most religions. (We like that, especially in a world where it seems there’s too much of the opposite.) We've actually learned a lot about some of them from this book.

Muller explains how many religions observe the Sabbath, but he also teaches us that the Sabbath, as it is translated correctly, is when god exhaled, at the end of all that inhaling (when he was creating). He says you need that exhale if you're going to inhale again.

We have enthusiastically adopted our own mini Sabbath, a moment in each day where we stop to think and be glad with what we have. We take this moment when we walk Sisi up the hill behind our house.

At the top, we stop, look and listen to the sights and sounds of nature.

The birds, (cuckoos are back!), the buzzing of the insects, the rustling of the wind through the leaves, the rushing stream below.

We concentrate on this moment, calming and peaceful. We remind ourselves how happy we are. It helps us appreciate our lives and each other.

Yes and it even helps us appreciate Sisi, our dear P.I.T.A (pain in the ass) for insisting that we take her up the hill.

It really does work.

Here’s a little movie I made of a recent Sabbath moment: