100 Mile Diet

My wife and I have always been advocates of good food. We try to eat a lot of local food, we get our veggies mostly from a local CSA farm and we get our beef from a local farm as well. We get to know where our food comes from and what went into it.

Over the past year, I have been getting more and more into the eat local craze. Much of this was the result of Michael Pollan’s books: The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food.I believe these books are a must read and should be added to everyone’s personal education.

I fall off the bandwagon every so often, I admit it – I have an addiction to CheeseIts. My New Year’s resolution (first one I have had in years) will be to eat far more locally. You have to be practical, good luck finding local peppercorns or other spices.  However there is no excuse other than laziness for buying in-season produce and meat from anyone other than a local producer.

To keep me focused on my resolution, I have decided to start a 100 Mile Dinner Club, based on the 100 Mile Diet that had been getting a lot of buzz lately. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes. The basic idea is that:

• a group of friends will rotate hosting duties once a month 
• everything in the dinner, including the wine, must be raised, grown or caught within 100 miles of the host’s home
• there are a few exceptions, most notably salt and pepper

I am excited about this endeavour. I hope I discover many local treasures. We’ll see how it goes.

The Saga of the Ham, Part 1

If you read my earlier post on my love of pork, then you know I am interested in making a ham. Not any ham but something in the neighborhood of Parma perfection.

The first part of any saga like this is research. I’ve found a number of places on line with some helpful advice. If you are interested in making ham, you should check them out.
http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/how/cure_smoke/virginia_ham.pdf
http://www.foodandwine.net/recipes/recip009.htm
http://forum.rivercottage.net/viewtopic.php?t=13379
http://www.culinary-yours.com/ham.html
http://www.channel4.com/life/microsites/C/come_dine/7philham.html
http://www.rootsweb.com/~tnweakle/Hog_Killing.htm

Given this research, I have a good feel for the ingredients and the basic process. Now I need to settle on the cut of meat, the recipe and the specific technique.

I am a beginner here, so I am a little nervous that I will completely screw this up, so a smaller cut of meat is intriguing. On the recipe side, I would like to do a Parma style ham. The basic ingredient here is salt though you can add other ingredients to spice it up a bit.

OK so I had 1 pound of left over tenderloin. I decided I needed a curing agent other than salt. I went to Bass Pro Shop and picked up Lem’s brand cure. Nothing more than Prague #1 or Instacure #1 for those in the know. I think for ham you should really use Prague #2, but I couldn’t get that anywhere quickly. This is an experiment so #1 it is.

 

I mixed 1/2 tsp of the cure with 1 tbsp salt, 1/2 tsp garlic powder, 1 tsp ground pepper and 1 tsp ground corriander. This was double the cure the package called for but I think it is typically used with ground meat…

I rubbed every last bit of the rub over the meat making sure to miss no part of the pork. For the last step I wrapped it up in celophane and placed in the fridge. I’ll check back in 2 weeks.