It's early yet, we've only been here for 5 weeks, so right now I'm making personal challenges out of things I can't find. I tried to recreate Trader Joe's coconut chips... not so good. Need to do some serious fine tuning. They aren't getting crunchy and they are shockingly bland. I did make homemade granola bars, though, which are magnificent and filled with peanut butter, honey, and coconut oil. For tiny three year olds, they are serious nutrient dense snacks. For grownups, they are delicious time bombs. I'm hiding them from myself. (Sigh. And my Ibu made golden fried doughnuts today. Suck it Ithaca-apple-cider-doughnut facebook taunters.) I'm working on a new sourdough bread starter and have been baking bread almost daily. Yogurt is next on my list in a low tech manner... problem is that there's a little eww factor when working with milk. I also made some enchilada sauce that compared favorably to some favorite Houston Tex-Mex restaurants. This was followed by my own refried beans.... easy enough, but the connoisseur of the house wasn't completely satisfied. Soon after I found canned refried beans and jalapenos and other Mexican delicacies in the commissary. Nora is pleased.
So the make it yourself attitude is not uncommon here in camp, and it can become a great excuse for both indulging a craving and having a party. Necessities both. We were invited to a grand sausage making last weekend, and it was both incredibly fun and incredibly productive. We came away with a jolly outlook and 6 pounds of sausage in the freezer.
The pig was ordered on Thursday morning, butchered on Thursday night, more or less, and picked up and brought to Rumbai on Friday morning. The fun began on Saturday. I'll tell you that skinning a pig on Saturday morning before you've really embraced the day can be daunting, but an enthusiastic crowd was ready, waiting and sharpening their knives. The pig was skinned, cut up and in the grinder before noon. Octoberfest sausages took precedence and were set aside for another great party to be held in the future, and two other varieties, a Cajun and an Italian sausage were made. They are all incredible. Do you people know how much fat goes in to the sausages? Mmmmm, sausage!
As we were butchering hog meat, I was remembering reading the Little House on the Prairie books when I was a kid, and all the fun they had at the hog butchering. (They blew up the pig's bladder and played with it like a balloon!) I recall stories from those books emphasizing the importance of community: the whole neighborhood would turn out for a work party, and while the work got done, it was just that, a party. You get to know and like someone pretty quickly when you are elbow deep in pork fat. Mmmmm, pork fat.
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