great! I’ve got one in the basement, for about six months now (it stays about the same temperature year round), but it hasn’t lost much weight and is still on the squishy side.

my plan is to leave it alone until it has lost 1/3 to 1/2 of its weight. i am really curious, how you will tell if it is done, if there is some objective criteria you are using, ie, not just “ask fred”? it is okay if you want to answer in your column.

SO!

It has been over a year since this post. How did that prosciutto turn out?

I had a simliar experience with grape jelly a few years ago. In my case, what I thought was going to be 16 jars turned out to be 12, but what jars they were!

Did you find you had some extra jars afterwards?

Oh no! I have been making g&ts with way too much lime. I do like a gimlet though, so maybe that’s why I didn’t mind. Question: now that I am all out of limes, is it okay to substitute lemon? Or should I just make a different drink?

I always have a problem with pea weevils with all peas, and with shelling peas it is the worst. After reading this I am thinking maybe I plant them too late and leave them on the vine too long. But I still want to wait a few years before trying again. Any tips for dealing with these little fellers?

Interestingly, my browser calls out Zester Daily as malware - is Zester poisoning my computer, or has it just been labeled that way as part of this food culture battle?

I think it is always healthy to pick apart Michael Pollan - at least it shows you are reading carefully.

I demand my food be labeled accurately, but abhor them being applied to myself.

I’ve heard that peppers are notorious for cross-pollinating easily and creating unexpected hybrids. How do they go about creating the new varieties?

Our neighbor’s tree starts dropping apples on our garage in early August, but we had no idea what variety they were. To save cleaning up the mess later, we went and picked pounds and pounds of them this year, and they are just as you describe - sweet, tart, and aromatic. The tree is at least 60 years old and produces an amazing crop about every other year. Thanks for the wisdom!

The Urban Farm Store in Portland also has a custom organic layer mash. Our birds love it but make a mess of it - which must be part of why the Payback is more efficient.

I’ll definitely check out what Naomi’s has to offer.

oh, i hope those calves will not be fed exclusively on grass. perhaps some of mother’s milk will be allowed as well.

Richard, I’d love to see a demonstration of the proper cooking techniques for liver. I did just what you described, except apparantly I didn’t know when to stop. We have another package, but with so much cow and so little time, it will be a while before we get to it. Thanks for emboldening us.

Your fourth point makes no sense; everyone agreed the tongue was delicious. It was the transformation of the animal into meat (the part of the process that consumers generally ingore) that was overwhelming.

we finally made this today and it tastes pretty great. the only thing i had trouble with this recipe was ‘4 canned tomatoes’ - i am guessing it means around 8 oz. it was the very last day of the season and we used a big pile of fresh plum tomatoes and a few romas

After two years, I finally made myself try this recipe with plums from a neighbor. I tried to pick the ripest ones, but found a problem: “sprinkling sugar to taste between layers”?

I thought this meant about a tablespoon per layer, but it is not nearly sweet enough. It is great on ice cream, but not so nice on it’s own.

How much sugar do you like?

Excellent, thank you. I won’t let you know how any of this turns out.

I would love to see an in-depth tempura article.

uh-oh - i was hoping for a few tips on technique here. such as:

when i am frying, how do i know the oil is hot enough? i am supposed to follow a recipe and rely on a thermometer? that’s a tip, i think, but what if i don’t trust my thermometer? is there a certain way i’m expecting the oil to act when i put the breaded pre-fried food in it? no smoke and lots of bubbles is good?

what’s your take on the fry screen?

and what about frying really big things like chicken pieces vs. little things like shrimp tempura? how do you keep the big things from getting too dark? is there generally a difference between temperatures, types of batter and length of frying?

how do i make a flaky batter for onion rings like that place across from my mom’s house?

do i want to avoid watery things to fry? salt them/sweat them first?

is there anything i need to do differently for tempura frying vs. french-american frying, if such a thing exists?

i enjoyed a snitzelwich today, btw, it was fried and delicious.

The idea here is to give the pancakes a complex flavor by adding different flowers and a few savory spices. Substitute your favorite flowers for spelt

ummm those grilled spring onions look REALLY good

I don’t get this - the press release on the Willamette Valley Vineyards site says that the wine industry is relying less and less on natural cork, and that this is bad news for cork plantations. Since cork is good for the environment, it is bad news for us.

Wouldn’t it be better not to recycle corks in this case, so that recycled cork doesn’t compete with the natural cork from the plantations?

The release also makes an out-of-left-field comparison of the environmental benefits of cork to the hazards of “aluminum ore mining and processing”. Is someone proposing to raze cork plantations in order to mine aluminum? Are screw caps made of aluminum? Who knows?

I think someone is getting high on their own supply.

One of the amazing thing about animals, including humans, is that we convert nutrients in plants into simplified, concentrated forms. This is at least true of protein and of vitamin A.

Chickens are protein-extracting machines. They take the 16% protein in their whole wheat feed and convert it into eggs - roughly one each day - that has a yolk which is 50% protein.

If we gave them steak instead of Monsanto Meal, they would not produce more protein. Higher protein feeds might help them gain wait and bulk up for the broiler, but it isn’t going to make our eggs any better.

Does organic feed matter? Yes. Does a varied diet matter? Yes. Do we get any practical benefits if we stop giving them livestock feed as their primary diet? No.

Most of all, freshness matters. Our eggs are delicious.