Moussaka

Justina made this amazing Moussaka from some ground mutton from one of our retired ewes and eggplant we got in our CSA share from local Milky Fork Farm.

I actually have some relatives with Greek ancestry but I’ve never had a moussaka this good. Fresh and local ingredients make the dish, sometimes. Of note; we often have mutton instead of lamb, because when we are forced to retire an elderly ewe, I don’t feel justified in selling the meat at the same price for which we sell our grass fed lamb. It’s usually more economical to keep the mutton for ourselves. However, based on what I have researched, people from a couple hundred years ago who ate more lamb and mutton than Americans do today would think that people who eat lamb (a sheep less than one year old) are getting ripped off. After all, the flavor develops more as the animal ages, plus the roasts and chops get bigger. I’ve seen records of people from the 1800s asking for mutton from a 5-year-old sheep, which they considered the best. (Sheep can live for much longer than 5 years, but after that they start getting actually old and losing condition…kind of like I am.) They thought lamb didn’t have enough flavor and was something you ate because you couldn’t afford to feed your animals through the winter. I don’t know when we’ll next have mutton available to buy, but I can say that the coyotes really are mutton connoisseurs.

I don’t have a recipe for this moussaka because all I did was assemble it and put it in the oven, but this ain’t rocket science, it’s a cooking with love thing.

You need a cooking pot and some kind of high-sided skillet like a cast iron skillet, and preferably a whisk or at least a large spoon and an arm that is not tired yet.

You also need several eggplants, some ground meat (preferably mutton), crushed tomatoes, onion, garlic — look, just whatever you want for making a thick and tasty tomato/meat sauce.

Step 1: Slice the eggplant lengthwise (about 1/4 inch slices), salt it, and let it sit 30 minutes or so. Pat off any moisture that comes out (this also pats off some of the salt, which is fine.) Roast it in the oven — not so much that it’s mushy, but enough that it’s soft.

Step 2: Make a tomato meat sauce. You want it thick, so don’t add too much liquid and you’ll want to simmer it for a while to cook off the liquid you do add. If you don’t know how to make a tomato meat sauce, that’s totally fine, you’re already using the Internet so you should have no problem finding several thousand recipes. For this dish, since some people can find eggplant a little bitter, making a sauce on the sweeter side might help. Consider adding some cinnamon and a little brown sugar to your ground mutton tomato meat sauce.

Step 3: Make a bechamel sauce and add in parmesan and some nutmeg.

IF YOU DON”T KNOW HOW TO MAKE A BECHAMEL do not worry, it’s easy. Unlike tomato meat sauces for which there are thousands of recipes and I am not going to tell you your Nonna’s is not the best, anyone can make a standard bechamel.

Just put, like, 4 tablespoons of butter in a saucepan or something that has room for whisking several cups of liquid. Melt the butter over medium heat. When it’s melted sprinkle flour over it. Usually you’re supposed to use 1:1 butter to flour, but really, you can just sprinkle enough flour that you don’t have liquid butter anymore. You want all the butter soaked up by the flour. Now stir this for a few minutes while it cooks. But don’t burn it.

While whisking, add in about 2 1/2 cups of real, whole, preferably raw and unpasteurized milk (if you used 4 tablespoons of butter. If you used more or less butter and flour, just do the math.)

You should use raw milk if possible because it’s cleaner and healthier. After all, pasteurized milk has feces in it. You knew that, right? That’s what they’re pasteurizing. I mean, it’s pasteurized, so they’re “safe” feces. You won’t get sick or anything. On the other hand, small raw-milk dairy farmers have to be extremely careful to make sure there are absolutely no feces in your milk. So you can use poop milk if you want, but I prefer raw milk.

After adding the milk to the butter/ flour mix, whisk it a bunch and cook until it thickens. You’re looking for turkey gravy thickness.

Now remove your bechamel sauce from the heat, and whisk in any seasonings like salt, pepper, nutmeg. Add in grated parmesan and put the sauce back over low heat if you need to melt the grated parmesan.

You can find recipes that tell you how much grated parmesan to melt into the bechamel sauce, but whatever they said, it’s not enough.

Step 4: Assemble

Put slices of roasted eggplant to line the bottom of a reasonably-sized dish. A cast-iron skillet works great.

Now ladle in the meat/tomato sauce.

Top with more roasted eggplant. (It looks kind of like a meat pie with an eggplant crust.)

Pour the bechamel sauce over everything.

Top with panko (or homemade) breadcrumbs.

Bake in the oven at 350 F for 35-40 minutes (don’t let the breadcrumbs burn.) You should always cook using a Fahrenheit temperature scale, which is the best temperature measurement for things humans actually do regularly. Centigrade is objectively worse unless you need a thermometer to tell you if water is frozen or boiling.

Let the dish cool and set for 10-15 minutes before serving.

Whole duck on the Pit Barrel Cooker

I have struggled to cook a whole duck successfully. First I tried a modified version of Julia Child’s recipe: modified in that I cooked the duck the way she described, but I didn’t do all the other fiddly stuff on the side like taking the membrane off orange slices. In my opinion, having tried several other Julia Child recipes in the past, either Julia Child never actually cooked anything, or whoever wrote her cookbooks got the recipes wrong. Julia’s duck was a disaster, and in hindsight her instructions had us cooking the duck for a stupidly long time and at insane temperatures.

This time I tried cooking/smoking the duck on/in our pit barrel cooker. We have used a Pit Barrel Cooker* for years; it’s not perfect but I like it. This is not a recommendation, because I don’t know what you like, but I’m happy with it.

I rubbed the duck in oil and a spice rub, fired up the charcoal, and hung the duck from the rebar. It was supposed to take 3 hours. After 2 hours the breast meat was registering 190 degrees (it’s supposed to be 140) and the skin was very nicely browned. However, I found that there was still a pretty thick layer of fat under the skin. This is supposed to render out at the initially high cooking temperature, which clearly didn’t happen. I put the duck under the broiler for 5 minutes or so which successfully rendered the fat and crisped up the skin.

Despite being technically overcooked, this duck turned out really well. The meat was certainly not tough and chewy but was instead relatively tender and flavorful, the skin was (reasonably) crispy, and overall it was a very good experience. In the future I will probably try starting the duck under the broiler first, to get the fat bubbling, and then hanging it in the pit barrel cooker to finish — and watching the temperature more closely.

* A pit barrel cooker (whether sold by the company of that name or from some other source) is basically a steel barrel with air holes in it and a lid. You light a charcoal fire in the bottom and hang meat on hooks from a piece of rebar across the top. The idea is that as the fat from your meat drips on the charcoal, it makes smoke: not wood smoke like in an actual smoker, but enough so you get at least some smoky flavor. Meanwhile the meat cooks through convection as heat rises from the charcoal.

You Can Make Your Own Sausage (Swedish Potato Sausage)

I don’t have any pictures of how the sausage is made. Sorry.

You are probably going to get more consistently good flavor and texture if you pay a professional butcher to make sausage for you. However, making your own sausage at home is really easy, you can control exactly what goes into it, and there are way more varieties of sausage you can try than you could possibly find at a butcher shop.

For this past Christmas (I know, it’s May) we made Swedish Potato Sausage. We normally try to make something from our families’ heritage for Christmastime, so a year or so ago it was Sauerbraten (which was…weird. Okay, but weird. Sorry Deutschlanders.) This past year it was Swedish Potato Sausage.

The recipe for Swedish Potato Sausage is basically equal parts by weight of pork and potato, a few onions, salt, pepper, allspice, and some milk to help stick it together. Then stuff it in pig intestine.

Unfortunately it appears to be impossible for small scale meat processors that serve small, local farms to reserve the hog intestines, so unless you slaughter your own animal and are able to save and clean the intestines, you will probably have to buy natural casings. You can find them occasionally in gourmet stores or order them online. They come in a vacuum-packed bag with a whole lot of salt. They'll keep for several months in the refrigerator, usually. When you open the bag, it smells like, well, pig intestines. You need to rinse them A LOT in cold water including running cold water through them, and then they shouldn’t smell. This also removes most of that salt.

If you don’t want to use natural hog casings there are other varieties available, including collagen casings. You need to make sure you read what size casing you are buying: they go by diameter. Don’t mistakenly order the thin-diameter casings for breakfast links if you want to make brats. The casings don’t really stretch; if you fill them up too much, they burst, and then you have to start over.

The Mahabharata of homemade sausage making is probably “Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing”, by Rytek Kutas, founder of The Sausage Maker in Buffalo, NY. You can buy it directly from them, and you should, because guys who write a book about how to make sausage are cool. It’s mostly technique though, and kind of short on recipes compared to how stuffed the Internet is with every imaginable kind of sausage recipe.

A meat grinder attachment for a stand mixer is pretty useful. You can often find this kind of thing used, or “refurbished”, and let’s face it, a 10 year old mixer or mixer attachment is possibly better made and going to last longer than one made currently. However, you clearly don’t need all this, since people have been stuffing sausage with just a funnel for, well, forever. The benefit of a meat grinder / sausage stuffer is that grinding your ingredients together mixes them for you, so you get better consistency and not, say, a chunk of one thing followed by a chunk of something else. You could, however, grind in a food processor, or just chop everything with a sharp knife or two.

Anyways, making your own sausage at home is one of those things that is so easy, it’s weirdly sinister that more people don’t do it. If you want to make smoked/cured sausage you still need a way to smoke it, you still need to add nitrite, and you need to know what you’re doing there so you don’t get botulism. If making normal, uncooked sausage, you should plan to make 10 or 20 pounds at a time and then freeze it; there’s not much point in making only enough for a single meal. You are likely going to make a bit of a mess in the kitchen, probably, and prepping and stuffing 20 pounds of sausage takes a few hours. However, there are sausage recipes for everything in your freezer that you don’t know what to do with. Will your kids eat beef cheeks? Maybe. How about kidneys? How about beef cheeks, kidneys, and crusty stale old bread you’ve been storing in the freezer, mixed with sage, nutmeg, and a few other seasonings, and stuffed into a sausage? There you go.

Liver Dumpling Soup

“Liver dumplings?” you say. “Really?”

Unless you’re saying, “Leberknoedel! Sehr gut!”

But yes, really. These dumplings are three-year-old approved.

With a food processor this recipe is quite simple to make, and is a great way to make a meal with our healthy, pasture-raised pork liver. This is for when you want a mild, “hm, yes, I can taste the liver in this” and not the strong, “Wow! That’s a lot of liver flavor!” that you would get from something like a “paatay”. (Our website software apparently doesn’t know how to print an e with an accent.)

You will need

A large cooking pot, a couple large bowls, a knife, and a food processor.

Liver (Get GOOD liver. Possibly from an Anchor Ranch Farm pasture-raised pig! You could use calves liver or beef liver as well.)

Bacon (Possibly from an Anchor Ranch Farm pasture-raised pig!)

A couple eggs (Ditto, except from a chicken. Pigs don’t lay eggs. That would make breakfast too easy.)

Plain wheat bread (could be white, whole wheat, or sourdough)

Milk or cream

Bread crumbs or just some old extra bread

Fresh parsley or possibly some other fresh herb you like

Marjoram (dried or fresh)

Onion

Salt and pepper

Seasoned beef broth. (You could of course use pork broth, but in fact using beef broth provides a nice flavor contrast, and while the liver flavor really isn’t that strong, chicken broth probably isn’t going to be enough to stand up to it.)

Here’s what to do

Take about as much bread as you have liver (by size, not weight) and cut or tear it up into pieces. Soak these in milk or cream. Use your hands and squish the bread and milk to ensure the bread is soaked. Use enough milk or cream that the bread gets very full of milk, but not so much that the bread can’t soak it all up. Do this first so you can set it aside and let the milk soak into the bread while you prepare everything else.

If you get liver from us it ought to be pretty well cleaned already. Cut it up into pieces about 2 inches in size. You may find some tough parts, cut those out and give those to the dog.

Cut the bacon into about 2-inch pieces. Use enough bacon that you’ll be able to taste it, but you don’t need a 1:1 ratio. These are liver dumplings with some bacon added for the flavor, not bacon-and-liver dumplings. This would be a great way to use those “bacon ends and pieces” you got a good deal on.

Put the liver pieces and bacon pieces in your food processor and make pink paste.

Finely dice an onion and chop some parsley. Again, you want enough onion and parsley that you can taste them, but you don’t want so much that these turn into onion dumplings.

Like this!

In a large bowl, using your hands, mix the milk-soaked bread, liver-and-bacon paste, onion, parsley, marjoram (a pinch or a couple teaspoons, depending on whether your liver is measured in ounces or pounds), salt and pepper, and two eggs. The mixture will be very wet. Add bread crumbs or crumbled old bread until the mixture sticks together. You should be able to pick up a spoonful and turn the spoon over without it falling off.

None of this takes very long, but you could do this part in advance and just store the mixture in the fridge until you’re ready to cook.

Cooking takes about 30 minutes

In a large pot bring the broth to a boil. After you begin adding the dumplings, turn down the heat. The dumplings should be simmered, not boiled. (The cold dumplings will cool down the broth. That’s why you want to bring the broth up to a boil first and then turn down the heat to cook. If you add the dumplings first and then try to heat it up, it will take you until forget-it-we’ll-just-have-pizza time to get the whole thing up to temperature.)

Here’s what they look like while cooking

Using a soup spoon or other large table-spoon-ish-sized instrument, make “quenelles” of the dumpling mixture. (“Quenelle” is apparently a fancy French word for “a spoonful”. We don’t know. All the French people we know talk like normal people.) Slide them off the spoon into the simmering broth. You might need to use another spoon (or your finger) to help get the sticky dumpling mixture off the spoon. You can fill the pot with dumplings, just make sure that the dumplings are in the broth and not piled on top of it. After they cook for a bit they will float to the top; that’s fine.

Let the dumplings simmer in the broth for 25 minutes. As long as it is simmering and not boiling, you can cook them longer if you’re not ready to eat yet. We kept them on for 50 minutes and second helpings tasted as good as the first. If you are going to cook them longer, put a lid on the pot so your broth doesn’t evaporate away.

Serve the dumplings in the broth and with some more rough-chopped parsley. This isn’t a low-carb meal given all the bread and bread crumbs in it, so some nice crusty bread is a nice addition to help soak up the broth.

If the soup smells strongly of liver, do not despair! (We’re not saying it smells “bad”, just strong.) In fact it will likely taste relatively mild. It seems something about the liver flavor compounds aerosolizes quite well, but the smell isn’t an indication of the taste.

Seriously this is really good. Bitte!