So where were we? Ahh yes. We had just smoked the ham.
In the end, we left all the meat in the smoker to use up every last puff of smoke from the fire and took the meat out on Sunday morning. It was truly beautiful.
It tasted every bit as delicious as it looks too.
Some of the meat was pretty thick, so in the spirit of "safe, not sorry" we cut some of them in half and boiled them so that the middles were cooked. Nobody likes food poisoning. Basically, we boiled the water, then let the meat sit in it until it was cool - so not terribly long, but enough to kill stuff without killing the taste.
Just as V was finishing that, our stovetop pooped out on us, so we're now waiting for an electrician to come fix it for us! It's been fun to think of meals that don't require stovetop cooking.
During the day, we had a photography appointment (family photos!) to do for someone, so we drove to Kinsale, and went grocery shopping afterward... which accounts for the lack of light in the next photos.
Once we were home, we borrowed a transformer from our neighbors (the ones who got the other quarter of the pig) so that we could use my Foodsaver that I brought from the states. See... I brought a few appliances from the states, at hubby's request (I had planned on leaving every electrical appliance behind) because we had planned on getting our very own transformer...
15 months later...
*ahem*
but anyway - we began the packing process for storage.
For the past two weeks since we started the curing process, we have been deliberately going through our freezer and eating as much as possible from it so we have enough room to store 20 packages that look like this!
V was proactive and even made little labels for all the meats. Hooray for organization!
In case you are not one who can read Polish, it says "Shannon & Witold's Homemade Meats" then has the package contents in both Polish and English (on all but the ones that say "ham and bacon" for some reason).
Once everything was packaged and labeled, we stuffed as much as we could into our freezer, and stuffed the rest into our fridge until we figure out how to clear up more space.
I can think of one way... yum, yum!!
