Just Deal With It

"Son-of-a-bitch! Those little fuckers chewed off my nipples!"

Normally, I could get away with bellowing this at the top of my lungs, but my mechanic had just showed up to borrow my stock trailer so he could take a beef to to be butchered and he was doubled over with laughter trying to catch his breath.

In the mean time, I had my bottle babies' breakfast streaming out gaping holes where latex had been only hours earlier. Given that powdered kid replacer has gone up to $63 for twenty-five pounds (not to mention the cost of the nipples themselves), I'm not one for wasting the stuff so a few four-letter epithets were in order when it began splattering all over my legs and boots.

And so my day began.....

This is not a nine-to-five or a Monday through Friday kind of job. As a matter of fact, during this time of year, there's no predictability to it whatsoever.

Thanks to my one very rotund hold-out doe and three bottle babies, instead of spending the evening sipping champagne and listening to Christoph Eschenbach conduct Beethoven's Triple Concerto at the Kennedy Center which would have been my first choice for this evening, I had to opt for an Old Fashioned, Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris's All the Road Running and tending to my charcuterie project for Charcutepalooza--the veal pancetta.Once it was all rolled and tied, up into the attic it went along with the drying ham hocks and the salo & lardo. There was a little hang-nail of lardo protruding from one of the pieces and I just had to nip it off and sample it. Oh! The utter opulence of silky pork fat melting on my tongue with a hint of salt, rosemary and pepper. I can only imagine what it will be like shaved over fresh, tender asparagus when the time comes.....

In the mean time, my consolation prize out of the pasture (and the garden) was grass-fed meatballs with baked sweet potato chips. Not too shabby considering how the day started. Eschenbach will conduct Beethoven again in March. The does will all have kidded and the bottle babies weaned. It will be early enough in the season to slip away and recharge my batteries with those things that the solitude of the farm cannot provide.