Home-cured meats

It's been a really busy couple months. We've both been working a lot and the weekends have been pretty busy, too. Being super busy means occasional cooking but, most often, we end up eating out a lot. That's a shame but also just the way it is right now.

It seems like more and more people I know are smoking and curing their own meats. y0shi cold-smoked some Pine St sausages which I had a picture of, but it really just looked like ... sausages.

Here's Mike's pancetta. He gets the pork belly from Gum Creek Farms through Pine Street Market and then cures it by hanging it in his wine cellar. We should all be so lucky to have a wine cellar to hang our meats in!

It looks gorgeous and it tasted great.

I was home alone for dinner so I took half the pancetta (the other half is in the freezer) and made carbonara. While I saw it, I didn't really register how much pepper was on the pancetta and I gave my pasta the heavy hand as I made it. Whew, it was peppery! But delicious.