Length: < 1 min And so it starts. The Year of the Pig. And we are planning the final launch for 8th September. Watch this space…

Length: < 1 min Spam has been talked about here before, served as posh fritters. Yet, taken on its own, seared & crispy, it’s also remarkably close in taste and enjoyment, to its ‘brother from a different mother’, smoked belly bacon. And to give… Read More »Uncanned heat’s rather neat

Length: < 1 min “When you buy whole animals, you can’t help but think of every part of them as being equal. If I pay $4.75 a pound for a pig, it is $4.75 for fat, $4.75 for shoulder, and $4.75 for loin. I… Read More »Pricing the whole hog

Length: < 1 min Today’s Seven Dials in London (on what looks like a suspiciously quiet day)… …contrasts rather vividly with this etching of the same area, dating from the Victorian era. As villages grew into towns and those towns merged together — almost… Read More »The stinking London streets…

Length: 2 mins @hlovins Hunter Lovins explains how we should start grazing to save the planet… …no, not us. Not humans. That’d be silly. No, she’s truly excellent on why it’s cattle we should be grazing more of, in her piece entitled “why George Monbiot… Read More »It’s the soil, stupid.

Length: 2 mins Harvesting pigs brains. Not a huge best seller nowadays, I’m led to believe… Ask a friendly butcher to save you some next time they’ve got some heads in stock. And ignore all thoughts of zombie movies. As well as any… Read More »Fried brain sandwiches

Length: < 1 min And fancy a killer piece of pork belly? Courtesy @tuomenyc. The end result: Separating the skin from the meat And a couple more close ups of the result of this mixture of techniques (think Peking Duck, spare ribs and pulled… Read More »Do you have 3 days to spare?

Length: < 1 min Lester caught it perfectly, when writing about Richard Hell: “We’re all stuck on this often miserable Earth where life is essentially tragic, but there are glints of beauty and bedrock joy that come shining through from time to precious time… Read More »Make the most of it; there’s no repeat.

Length: 3 mins There’s a lot to say about our recent trip Japan and there will be a huge number of posts to follow covering a (small) portion of the mélange of varied delights that we encountered. This first one covers my (initial) disappointment… Read More »Missed out on the real pork?

Length: < 1 min No idea of the breed but such a lovely, charming tone to this old postcard. HT @val_littlewood

Length: 5 mins For this post, I’ve moved across the Channel to look at the Noir de Bigorre pig which almost disappeared forever some 30 years ago. Had it not been for the work of one man, then this lovely looking animal may… Read More »Le Noir de Bigorre; too fat and too slow to grow.

Length: 7 mins Nu hit ys on swines dome, cwæð se ceorl sæt on eoferes hricge. “It’s up to the pig now, said the man sat on the boar’s back.” Olof Arngart, ‘The Durham Proverbs’, Speculum 56:2 (1981), 288-300 as seen at the… Read More »This post has been swilling around in my head for a few weeks…

Length: < 1 min And an attempt to introduce pata negra pigs (the raw ‘material’ for the transcendent jamón ibérico de bellota) into the US. Did it succeed? tl;dr: The answer is “yes”, (of course) albeit with caveats, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this… Read More »Spanish pigs‬ in south Georgia?

Length: < 1 min HT to Michael Twitty @koshersoul for this new addition to the kitchen work-top (it replaces boring old, plain, pepper) & to @hels for her great MSG tip, a jar of which also now sits at my left-hand, when cooking. The first suggestion… Read More »The Cooking Gene & MSG

Length: < 1 min Luckily, it’s in Tokyo. Did I mention that we’re going to Japan n̶e̶x̶t̶ this year? Did I? So, this one ranks high on the (ever growing) list of places at which to eat…  

Length: < 1 min HT to @ErnestPig for this picture of a pig playing bagpipes to her piglets at Ripon Cathedral. Who can’t get behind a bagpipe-playing pig? Octopus may be smarter but they’ve also got more limbs, so I think the pig wins in the… Read More »Bag-pipe playing pigs. Not an everyday sight…

Length: < 1 min By the very marvellous Little Feat If any proof were needed of their incandescent genius, then this show would stomp all over your doubts…      

Length: < 1 min HT @val_littlewood for introducing me to this piece, “The Nieuwmarkt in Amsterdam“, by Bartholomeus van der Helst It’s now my current favourite after we saw it in its full glory at The Hermitage Museum in Amsterdam recently.

Length: < 1 min Eurostar-ed to Amsterdam with @val_littlewood to meet up with Thomas Gravemaker at LetterPress Amsterdam; to spend 5 working days turning the lino-cuts — that Val had painstakingly designed, cut and checked (oh, and my words of course) — into ink on paper.… Read More »Cold streets, hot metal in Amsterdam