So the truck was doing great. Except for all the things wrong with it. The first to be addressed was that the carburator was leaking gas onto the engine. Which is bad enough for gas mileage, but even worse for catching on fire. Also there were multiple oil leaks, broken hoses, water in the rear end, the radio didn’t work, primer instead of paint, and I cannot recall all the other things that needed to be fixed. With safety related items needing addressing, sorry kids, no more rides till Daddy get’s this thing fixed.
After curing and smoking all the pork bellies from our class it was time to slice bacon. We had some trouble with the meat slicer that I bought. The blade wasn’t sharp which was easily solvable but the blade also wobbled on its bearings which was a problem. Miguel and I took it apart and found that the blade didn’t run on bearings at all, it runs on bushings which were worn. Great, easy to fix… if you have the parts. Oh well, we put it back together and Miguel and I went to work on bacon with a wobbly blade.
Last time I made bacon, I sliced the bacon in a huge pile, then sorted the pile into vacuum bags which ended up, after sealing and freezing, being salty frozen bacon balls. I love bacon, but salty bacon balls just didn’t make anyone happy for breakfast.
It turns out that Miguel, in his past, worked in a deli in Mexico and knew exactly how to slice bacon, or so he claimed. I guess this was before he worked as a talent agent and after his stint as a double naught spy in Her Majesty’s service. I can’t find anything he doesn’t know how to do.
So at Miguel’s direction we get out waxed paper and a frozen rasher of bacon. The blade is still wobbly but I’ve sharpened it. Miguel asks how thin I want the bacon and I say I guess as thin as you can get it, since my salty bacon balls were also chewy thick slices. Miguel runs off the first few packs of bacon and you can see through the bacon it’s so thin. I finally told him he was showing off and to thicken it up a bit. This is less than 1/10th what we ran in a few hours. We put over 100 packs of bacon into the freezer. I ran out of freezer space in our big freezer for bacon. I thought there was always room for bacon?! Perfect slices, perfectly packaged and put into the freezer. This is the best looking bacon we’ve produced. It’s also the best tasting bacon we’ve produced as the smoke was pretty good and the cure was a nice sugar/salt cure. Very simple and good with no chemicals or additives.
In case you think this is one big sales job on why you should buy our bacon, you’re wrong. This is verboten bacon. Illegal, contraband bacon. It’s not USDA inspected and is only for our use as a family. However if you stop by for a tour I may slip you a package to take home. Nobody said I couldn’t give it as a present. I just can’t sell it.
And so it begins. This is going to be another series of posts, documenting the little red 1972 Chevrolet step side truck that we have here on the farm. It’s not the original step side we had when I was a boy, but it’s as close as I could get.
When I first moved to the farm, we had an old service truck my father had brought from work to use as a farm truck. It was tired and worn out when we got it. Three speed on the column, rough running, window locks broken. But to a little boy, it was a neat old truck. I learned to drive a “three on the tree” with that truck despite it’s worn out linkage. Years later, a man who worked on the farm and at my father’s company, James Lee, offered to buy the old truck, which by this time was REALLY worn out. It had been sitting under our barn for another 10 years, covered in dust and hardly used anymore. I’m not sure it would even start at that point. Dad agreed and I think James paid $200 for the truck. He took it home and I didn’t see it again for a few weeks until one day he drove it to work. It was running well, was cleaned and shined up, and looked really good. It looked like a $2000 truck, not a $200 truck. James drove that truck for years after buying it and I always admired it as you only can something that you let get away.
Fast forward 30 years and I’m now running the farm. I have a boy about the age I was when we had that truck and as men at my age tend to do, you get nostalgic. I started looking for an old truck like the one we had when I was a boy. I was relating this story to a friend, talking about how I’d been looking for a truck for some years and couldn’t find one. He asked me some specifics about it that only a picture would answer so I hopped on Craigslist to find a picture of one like we had. In a few minutes I found one and showed him the detail I was referencing. Instead of listening to me, he keeps staring at the Craigslist ad. “What’s wrong with that truck?” I was so busy telling him about the truck, I didn’t read the ad. Turns out the elusive truck I couldn’t find was the ad I was viewing, located in South Carolina and not too far away. So the next week I went to look at the truck and ended up buying it there that day.
This blog continues to evolve and show more and more of our farm life. However it all started so that we could do what you see recommended in this picture.
Its April and winter has finally released its icy grasp. The grass is showing signs of life and we are back to moving our cows onto new grass each day. Calves are beginning to hit the ground and the flavor of this blog will be reflecting our core purpose going forward, documenting our intensive grazing practices and grass conditions. Of course the hog class pics will still be in there and we will be showing pics of the truck restoration as well but expect more grass pics and cow pics for the next 9 months.
>
Getting the anus cut out without making a mess is always a challenge. Here we are just being successful.
The only thing we “wasted” on this pig. We did not clean the intestines and use them for sausage. We did donate the innards to the wildlife on the farm who ate well that night.
This was a tricky bit because we were dumping the innards while trying to save the liver and kidneys and also the heart and lungs for anatomy class. Success! A clean cavity ready to wash out and then split.
For the cleanup of the hog I tried to do as much as possible except for the scraping. Once we got into butchery I tried to let the students do as much as they wanted.
Here we are separating the bladder and urethra from the hog. This is a careful process because you don’t want to get peed on at this point. This part was also pretty funny because I was so focused on safety, pictures, overall impact on students, etc. that when asked if this pig was a male or female I answered female while we were cutting off his male bits. Not my smartest moment. 🙂Separating the anus while trying to not get pooped on. This is the delicate bit. Once this is done, it’s pretty easy work.
So the truck was doing great. Except for all the things wrong with it. The first to be addressed was that the carburator was leaking gas onto the engine. Which is bad enough for gas mileage, but even worse for catching on fire. Also there were multiple oil leaks, broken hoses, water in the rear end, the radio didn’t work, primer instead of paint, and I cannot recall all the other things that needed to be fixed. With safety related items needing addressing, sorry kids, no more rides till Daddy get’s this thing fixed. 
