In Praise of Lard

A few weeks ago I bought some lard. In part because it was there, in part because of Rob Cockerham's pioneering work with lard, and in part because of the now famous 10 point austerity plan, which lacked lard in the original version. I was toying with making pemmican, Rutstrum style, to augment our diet of squirrel.

Lard is rendered pig fat, and back in the old days was perhaps nearly as common as flour and salt. I don't know if they had corn oil, or Crisco, but they did have pigs, and pigs have lard. Lard is still regarded as the best fat with which to make flaky pie crusts and fry donuts.



Before I tried making pemmican, I thought I would try Indian Fry Bread, which, thank goodness, is not called Native American Fry Bread. Yet.

First I got the lard melted and hot. Wait, let me back up. First I waited until Joey was out of the house for the evening. She and her Mom went to enrichment meeting. Then I melted the lard and got it hot while I mixed up the flour, water, salt and baking powder.

It was about this time when I congratulated myself on waiting for Joey to leave. For a while on my mission I was in San Antonio, Texas, in America, and we taught a family that lived near a dog food processing plant. The smell was something else. The lard does not smell like that. Have you ever smelled a wet dog? The lard didn't smell like that either. In some towns people bring law suits against pig farms because of the reek of pig manure. No one, to my knowledge, has ever sued lard for stinking. And yet, as I melted that pound of lard on the stove I was reminded of all these smells. They seemed to combine in a particularly hellish way, made more maddening because the odor was simultaneously faint, yet inescapable. It stuck to everything. I had started down the path to my very own episode of Steve, don't eat it!

I had no choice, I had to follow through. Strangely, the frybread looked good, and smelled good, without the wet-dog, rendering-plant, burning-hair, pig-crap smell that the lard had. I put on a little honey, and bit in to it. It tasted good. Really good. Granted, it sat in my stomach like a 16 pound shot, but it was filling.

When Joey got home, she walked in the door and I started counting: one one-thousand, two one-thousand, etc. 16 seconds later she stopped, sniffed loudly, and looked around with a startled look on her face. But this is what is so cool. She didn't say anything. She didn't mock me, or accuse me of boiling a rat, or anything like that. She just moved on, and about a half hour later casually asked me what I had been cooking, but in a totally pleasant way. She is awesome, and so was the frybread, despite the iron stench that clung to the condemned trailer for the next three days.

Our Gaby

I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

Flashzach:



Tinkerzach:





Finally, Zach White:

This week has been weak.

This week has been on the lame side. I have not been looking forward to it as it loomed on the horizon like a funnel cloud for the past few months. But when it arrived it became much more complicated.




I was looking towards a huge criminal trial list on Tuesday the 6th, with only very vague ideas of what my clients wanted me to try to accomplish, and I had a civil trial scheduled for today which perplexed me in that there seemed to be no dispute about the facts, and I was sure I was missing some critical piece of knowledge that would explain why we were rolling the dice on a trial rather than settling.

The new ads in the yellow pages seem to be generating a lot of calls, and that makes things hectic, and I picked up, somewhat by accident, a new federal client who is charged with a very serious crime and who speaks no English or Spanish. This added a half day with an interpreter on Wednesday and then I took a 50 minute trip to Dover to visit a client in jail, then back to Bangor to prep my client for the civil case, then came home to see if Joey needed a ride to Ellsworth for a church meeting since I had her car. (My truck has shed its mortal coil spring and so we are down to one vehicle). Then got to Ellsworth around 6:15 p.m.

I got done at church at about 10:00, back home by 11:00 and up at 4:00 to finish getting ready for the trial.

The trial went smooth. I still don't know why we bothered to do it.

A dear sister in our branch passed away earlier this week, so I have been trying to offer some assistance to the family in planning the funeral. That has taken some juggling, but Joey has been trooper and not complained about being a single mom, and my office has been very understanding about rescheduling things that weren't critical.

All this has been acompanied by -30 wind chill in a month I still think of as a "spring" month.

Tomorrow will be another busy day and night, and the funeral is set for Saturday. Sunday, my two counselors will be out of town and Monday I'm picking a jury in an Aggravated Trafficking Cocaine case, so not too much let up, though I am glad to have the civil trial behind me. Its always much easier being the defendant than the prosecutor or plaintiff too, because its perfectly acceptable to sit there with your client and criticize the other side's lack of planning or execution, seeing as they have the burden of proof and have to do all the heavy lifting.

If you are interested in a sweet 1994 Ford F-150 4WD pick-up truck with under 176,000 miles, please drop me a line. It has a current inspection sticker, and I can help you arrange shipping.

Peace, Out.