We’d like to think that despite the stories I intend to publish about wrestling pigs: we clean up real nice.

Happy reading.

I was supposed to be attending a Soft Cheese Class at Kookoolan Farms Saturday, something I’ve been trying to do for several months now. If you hadn’t heard Food & Wine Magazine rated Kookoolan Farms in “100 best new food and drink experiences” and Portland Monthly just suggested Kookoolan Farms as a “To Do” for foodies in wine country. So when I realized I double booked with Portland Meat Collective I figured who better to benefit from this mistake, than you?

Are you interested in learning about the process of making soft cheese and are free this Saturday from 1-4pm? Its already paid for, includes all of your supplies and even comes with $10 farm credit. See the class description below for more information. If so, comment below and tell me what your favorite cheese is. One answer will be selected at random, submissions close tomorrow afternoon at 2pm.

Can’t make it this time? Not to worry, Chrissie has the remainder of this year’s class listing on their website and sign up for their email list to receive their monthly newsletter as well as next year’s class schedule.

Class description:

The instructor is Scott Catino, local goatherd, cheesemaker, and educator.  In this class Scott will demonstrate techniques for making a variety of soft fresh cheeses from liquid milk.  You’ll sample at least six different soft cheeses made locally and all over the world, made from cow and goat milk.

Go here for details and to vote for the 2010 Local Heroes.

Do you have local heroes we should know about?

With the holiday season comes the need for food, and in large quantities. For me that means I have the excuse to purchase in bulk and use my garage as a walk-in refrigerator. It also means that I get to show off all of the local resources available to put amazing quality food on the table/buffet.

Fall produce is in full force as well. Some of you were over run with zucchini a few weeks back and found yourself sitting on the counter and using your feet to push the freezer door closed. Now it’s multi-colored and bumpy cousin is taking over in the form of spaghetti squash, acorn squash soup, butternut squash ravioli, etc. Trying to figure out how to take advantage of it all and store it for winter use is a challenge I look forward to each year.

If you want to share resources for local harvest items as well as ways to preserve it all for the coming months and/or serving a Thanksgiving meal with local flair, join us:

November 17th @ 7:30-9:00pm
EXCITING LOCATION CHANGE!

SweetestThing Cupcakes

Join us for CUPCAKES and coffee! Thanks to John and Ann Rhinehart for opening for this after hours event!

Bring with you:
- Techniques for preserving late summer/fall produce (pickled cauliflower, canned tomato sauce, drying onions, storing potatoes, etc.)
- Tried and true methods for dealing with Tom (the turkey, not your weird relative), and selecting a bird for your thanksgiving feast
- The worst homemade gift you ever received (it doesn’t have to be the actual item, sometimes just the memory is enough) so others can prevent making the same mistake

You’ll also have a chance to talk with our food representative from Food Services America to find out what items you can order and have delivered locally, either to stock your pantry or to feed all of those people coming round your table for the holiday feasts.

This means that Bubba and I will actually see each other with regularity and some of the other projects we have on the home front will move forward. For the next few weeks we will be sharing stories and updates regarding all of the fun things we did amidst the craziness of harvest but also what’s coming up.

Things like:

- Pig wrestling
- Harvesting porcupines
- Preparing for the holidays
- Building community through food

So much for the end of hard work and chaos.

I (Sarah) am going to be launching  a new portion to this site and making some upgrades. Its time to remodel a bit and make room for yet another new item on our current menu. I’ll be explaining more with in my first post on the new page: For the Sake of Good Food.

Just in case you thought that Bubba and I would be winding down for the year and settling in for a long winter’s nap- we’re just getting started.

Thanks for taking the time to stop by, its all of you who make it the fun worth having.

Many hands make light work

The most common questions I get from people are how are you raising them (and where)? And, why are you doing this?

The easy one to answer is the how. I wanted to get a heritage type breed, not just a run of the mill Yorkshire or Hampshire which is the standard breed you would find on your grocery store meat aisle. I did come across a guy who had a certain kind called a Whooly Pig but he wanted me to buy 30 pigs because I hand 300 square feet and a pig only needs 10 square feet to live, but that goes against all that I wanted to do, we will come back to that part. I went on the hunt again for some locally bred heritage pigs.

I spent a few months looking not only for pigs to raise, but also the best possible place to raise them. I had set up getting food from The Allison, a new resort close to my house. After a lot of looking I finally found the folks at Heritage Farms Northwest in Dallas Oregon, about 30 miles from my home who would sell me a couple of Red Wattle piglets. The good news was I was happy with what I found, the bad news was still no home.

I put the word out to everybody I knew in Newberg that I was looking for somebody who would be willing to host some pig on their property. A week later The Amazing Judy Hatcher, my mother-in-law’s co-worker said she had the perfect place and the best part, there was almost no work to put into this place because she had already kept pigs there a few years back. And like that I was in business.

Come the first part of March I will fed, raised and butchered my own pork for the family table. I may never want to kill a pig again, but I can say that I did it. If you happen to be up early in the morning and driving about Newberg, you might see me hauling yesterday’s scrap from the kitchen to my next meal in the pasture.

Thanks to the staff at The Jory Restaurant for making this possible!

Breakfast is coming! Wait, maybe I'm breakfast?!

Bubba the Pig Farmer

Chow Time!

Last week Bubba got his sweet reward: Nearly 4.5 gallons of honey were extracted from our two supers this year, enough to give us a few cavities and share with Mike and Katherine (our bee buddies). We also had to leave enough honey behind in the hives for the bees to eat through winter and the first part of spring when things start to bloom again. So how does one, “harvest” honey? Well, we went a little old school. Below are some photos of the extraction process, done using a hand crank extractor where the frames filled with honey are placed in a drum and the honey is spun out of the honeycomb using centrifugal force. The honey then settles to the bottom of the drum where it is poured out into jars and can be stored in the pantry for many months to come (or at least as long as we can keep our fingers out of it).

We are very excited about this highly successful project. We weren’t expecting to get any honey for our own consumption in year one, we thought we would only get enough to keep the bees fed through winter. We were so glad they decided to share. Thanks to Mike and Katherine for being awesome bee buddies- we’re excited to do it all over again next year!

*Keeping bees isn’t for the novice. Honey bees live in swarms of approximately 10,000 and while they sting (just ask Bubba) they are vulnerable to predators and need protection but also get sick. For some current information about the honey bee crisis go here. If you want to bee cool like us and keep bees too, talk to Katherine and Bubba, they’ll get you in touch with the right people who can help get you started.

Honey Extractor

Liquid Gold!

Thanks bees!

Bubba’s experiences with driving on the “wrong” side of the road:
- Bubba swore several times, often trying to imitate an Irish accent
- We hit the left shoulder more than once, luckily the rental car that we received is completely scuffed up on the left hand side so some other dumb American’s before us already took care of the job,
- White knuckles are still present
- Do as your mother taught you and look BOTH ways before entering traffic and trying to cross the street (on foot or by car)
- The yellow ones don’t stop.
- Round-a-bouts in foreign countries make a lot of sense to everyone who isn’t American. We once again tried to take a concept that works just find in other countries an apply it ourselves with different rules because we think WE ARE BETTER THAN THAT.
- A victory beer is well earned after driving on 6 national motorways, toll roads and regional highways.

Maps- they really are a wonderful thing. Despite the fact that I still get my left and rights mixed up (all the time) my internal compass really does quite well especially in foreign countries. While Bubba was busy keeping his eyes glued to the road I usually find myself in the passenger seat, revising our route, investigating alternatives and consulting our guidebooks so our routes intersect into something fun to see or do. We often have more fun picking out alternative routes and pulling over to take photos or stop in for a nip to the loo because we have no set destination or time requirements.