Pork!

Pork IS The Meat! Pork chops, bacon, gammon, Pork Roti, sausages of nearly endless variety. Pork is the King of Meats! We wanderred off to A&R's Sunday afternoon to drink 5 bottles of cheap bubbly wine (at least what I brought was!) and assist in the preparation and cooking of a quantity of pork belly meat. I know of this thru study of wild hogs and the butcherie of pork. Yes! A sharp thin bladed knife 6" - 8", slip it under the tough pork skin on the back, proceed to pull thru the meat pressing down as you go under the skin, the shoe leather comes off leaving the precious white pork fat. Remove it entirely, do NOT throw this away! You can render this for the fat in a skillet over a medium fire and use the resultant for bisquits, fring or sauteing of meats, fish. Great stuff pork fat. The we cut the belly across the grain of meat to make steaks 1" thick and 8" long. Small bones remained which was fine. Salt, pepper and lemon juice then wrapped in aluminum foil and placed over the BBQ fire at about 350 degrees. The packages each contained about 3 such steaks and took about 1.5 hrs to pre-cook. Remove from the fire, unwrap and now drench with the following sweet/sour BBQ sauce.
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Sweet and Sour BBQ Sauce

Catsup, Tomato Sauce, Tomato Puree 2 cups
4 cloves of garlic minced
White Wine vinegar 1/2 cup
1/2 cup sugar, marmalade, brown sugar or molasses, jam (you can be very creative here!)
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 Tablespoon salt
1 Teaspoon black pepper
1 - 4 hot peppers finely chopped, watch it!

Combine all and mix thouroughly.

Dredge your pork steaks in the sauce, both sides and place on the medium BBQ fire. Cook, turning every few minutes til browned and the sauce carmellized. DO NOT BURN!

Remove the meat from the grill and allow to rest 10 minutes before serving.

This recipe s also good with chicken breasts, lamb chops, pork chops.

Brocantes = Rusty Tools

How can there be so many rusted old tools? Where the hell do people find them? They MUST think they have value BUT in reality they take not a little bit of "brushing up" before any of them could be utilized for anything useful. I mean garden rakes that the handles are so eaten by beetles that the thing weighs nothing! Hammers that were used before WW2 by a 300 lb ANIMAL beaten to a mushroom and then the broken handle repaired by black tape from a WW2 GI. How? No part of these things can be used. I LOVED watching three men trying to get an ancient lawnmower's engine to run, no !@#@#@! chance, the last time this thing actually ran to mow grass/weeds was just after Citroen created the Duex Chaveau! We went to two such junk ales this morning, ringing about the rows of knick-knacks, rusted tools, baby clothes and such without spending a dime. We have become jaded, perhaps we bought ALL the GOOD STUFF over the years and this is the REST. May it all rot in a landfill somewhere. We ran into our friends A & R and shared a cuppa coffee and a stick of bread with ham and butter (what passes for breakfast hereabouts ) and examine their FINDS. Not a bad take, the REST of the GOOD STUFF! Never fails, timing is everything! They were there first. We are headed to their place and lick our wounds with a pig BBQ and wine later this afternoon. We departed #1 brocante to travel across the township of St. Amand to the Medieval section for another try at scoring some great thing. No luck, it wasn't there either! We did pick up some duck shaped aluminum candy molds for the hell of it. What for? I dunno, but they are cute and CUTE counts sometimes. In France there's a LOT of cute stuff, not useful...but cute. On the way home we stopped y the little house (our first abode in France) and I removed my oil painting supplies from the grenier (attic) and picked up a few empty flower pots for my growing collection of plants-that-will-soon-be-dead. The home to relaxfor a while amaid the squalor of the ruin, peice together the tile wall covering into the dining room and write thi blog entry. Now off to our friends to fill out the rest of the day with laughter and good food.