I may not get through a full eight quarts today, because I wasn’t hungry when I woke up, so I got a later start. That’s okay; it’s not like two gallons is a magic number.  That’s just what I figured a guy my size should shoot for.  The idea is to overfeed yourself, so it’s better to drink too much than too little.  I may end up averaging more like closer to 7 quarts a day; I’ll just have to see.

A little on how it’s done:  You don’t drink it in three big batches, like meals.  You sip at it gradually throughout the day.  That way your body always has a ready source of energy, and you don’t feel like you’re sloshing when you move.  So I keep a glass of milk on my desk and try to take a sip pretty often.  The other key is to drink it warm, as close to room temperature as possible.  I figured lukewarm milk would be nasty, but it’s actually pretty good.  (Of course, this is raw, pastured Jersey milk with plenty of cream; maybe store-bought stuff would be nasty warm.) Drinking a big slug of cold milk can cause some stomach cramping or discomfort, but warm it goes down easy.  I pour a quart at a time, so by the time I finish it, it’s getting fairly warm.

Off to refill my glass….

Two gallons of raw milk

Yes, that’s two gallons of raw milk.  I’m starting the milk diet, which is exactly what it sounds like.  No other food, just as much raw milk as you can drink.  I expect to stay on it for 3-4 weeks, so I’ll write more about the whys and hows as I go.  This is just an introductory post to kick it off and establish some baselines.

The main purpose of the milk diet is to rev up the metabolism.  All restrictive diets, whether you restrict calories, carbs, or fat, tend to slow the metabolism down over the long-term.  This is reflected, among other ways, in a low body temperature.  My temp this morning on waking was 96.4, and that’s pretty typical lately.  I think my slow metabolism goes back to long before low-carbing, to when I first started feeling tired all the time and was diagnosed with adrenal exhaustion.  Low-carb helped with the tiredness for a while, but it came back.  More on that later.

Two gallons of milk have nearly 5000 calories, so this definitely isn’t a diet in the restrictive sense.  It’s actually an overfeeding regimen, where you give the body as much energy and nutrition as possible so it can heal.  Raw milk is a particularly good food for that purpose, because it also includes the necessary enzymes for breaking it down, so the body can use it quickly.  (It’s designed for fast-growing baby calves, after all.)  I doubt I could force down 5000 calories of meat or potatoes every day, but two gallons of milk goes down pretty easily.

I actually did a trial run a couple months ago, for just three days.  It went surprisingly well:  I didn’t crave anything, and it didn’t spike my blood sugar (blood glucose, or BG).  That last part was critical, because a cup of rice containing 40-50 grams of carbohydrate can send my BG high enough to be harmful.  Two gallons of milk contains about 350g carb, so I figured that much might kill me on the spot; but my BG never went over 110, which is completely acceptable.  Right now, after my first three quarts of today (132g carb) my BG is 94, well within the normal range.  I think that’s partly because the milk is spread out over the day instead of concentrated into 3 meals, but I also suspect the lactose (milk sugar) just isn’t processed the same as glucose or fructose.

I forgot to weigh myself this morning to get a baseline for that, so I’ll try to remember that tomorrow.  I wouldn’t be surprised if I gain a few pounds, but it’ll be worth it if my metabolism improves, because the weight should come back off much more easily then.  Some people even lose weight on it, though, so who knows.

By the way, this isn’t some new fad diet.  It was a well-known treatment for metabolic issues before pasteurization and the demonization of raw milk.  You can’t do it with the dead stuff from the store, because it doesn’t have the enzymes and nutrients that make real milk a complete food.  It has to be raw, which isn’t easy for everyone to get.  We’re going to have to run to the farm every 2-3 days to stay supplied.

I’ve got a lot more to write about it, but I’d better save some for the weeks ahead.  I’ll continue to report on my body temperature and BG readings, as well as any changes or problems I encounter.  I suspect the biggest problem will be boredom, especially since we have a lot of good stuff coming out of the garden right now.  We’ll just have to preserve what we can and sell or give away the rest.  There will still be plenty of stuff getting ripe a month from now when this is over.

1.  Start with good meat.

I can’t stress this enough.  When people ask me how we make it so good, I tell them, “It’s all in the hog.”  That’s pretty much true.  All we do is rub it down with salt and pepper and cook it until it’s done.  Most of the flavor and texture comes from the hog: the breed, how it lived, what it ate, and so on.  There’s a good article that talks about “food provenance.”  He points out that wine snobs understand that everything that goes into a bottle of wine affects the taste, starting with the soil fertility and variety of grapes, through the amount of sun and rain they get, right down to the type of cork that’s used.  People typically only think that way about wine, but other foods are bound to reflect the same influences.

If you buy conventional pork from the store, it comes from a hog that was bred over the generations to be as lean as possible, lived inside on concrete slats,  and ate nothing but a grain mixture all its life.  It’s no surprise that it tastes different from a hog that was bred to be a little fatter so it could handle the outdoors in winter and summer, lived on dirt and dug for roots, and drank from a creek.  The meat from those two hogs will be as different as a fine bottle of wine is from a box of wine, for many of the same reasons.

2.  Rub with salt and pepper.

You could add other spices, but the meat tastes so good I think it’s unnecessary.  I can’t say how much to use, because I just grab some.  We grind the pepper up fresh, but I don’t suppose that makes much difference.  If you use pre-ground pepper, you’ll probably just need to use more.  It’s hard to use too much on these big chunks of meat, since most of the meat isn’t on the surface.

3.  Cook it slowly.

We pack as much as we can into each roaster and cook it at 250, so it wound up taking about 18-20 hours.  Kabrick’s cut it into about 10-pound sections, so 2-3 of them fit into each roaster.  They also separated the ribs from the other parts, because the ribs cook faster.  That was nice, because we were able to start shredding the rib parts while the others were finishing.

You’ll need a good meat thermometer, so you can cook it to 205 degrees internal temperature.  That seems high, since pork chops should only be cooked to about 145; but 205 is the point at which the collagen that holds the fibers together breaks down.  At 205, the meat just falls off the bone and you can pull it apart with ease.  Even at 195 you have to work a lot harder to shred it, so the temperature is critical.  Go much past 205, and it’ll probably start drying out.

4.  Get some Bear Paws.

Bear Paws are awesome.  We had them last time, but we hadn’t really gotten the hang of them yet.  I think we were trying to use them like forks: stick one fork into a chunk of meat, and use the other fork to pull off shreds.  That’s not right.  You have to put one up against the meat, and then reach through it with the other one and pull as much through as you can grab.  It’s easier to do than to describe.  (Next time I’ll take some pictures or video to demonstrate.)  Once we got the hang of it, we shredded the whole thing in about three hours, and our hands didn’t hurt from pulling at it with forks.

5.  Save some juice.

When you pull the meat out of a roaster to shred it, pour the juices into a large stockpot or something to cool.  Most of the fat will rise to the top.  When you’re ready to put the meat back into the roaster to keep it warm, skim the fat off the juices until you get down to the dark pork broth.  (Chickens love the fat.)  Dip about a quart of this broth back into the roaster.  That’s to help keep it moist, so if you’re planning on a long day, you might use more.  It’s got a ton of flavor, so it adds some of that too.  If you’re going to add barbecue sauce (sacrilege!), you may want to pour some of the juices off first, so it isn’t too soupy.

That’s about it.  Do all that, and you should have pulled pork everyone will be talking about.  If you’re stuck on step #1 without a source for good quality hogs, contact us.  We have some going to market every few weeks, and we can set you up with one (or a half), custom butchered to your specs.

That’s a mistake, because some things are a lot easier to show than to tell.  A one-minute video of someone showing how to fillet a fish is probably more informative than a whole book trying to explain it in words.  Plus, all the internet marketing gurus say video is growing in importance, and a lot of people out there are just the opposite of me — they’ll look for a video first before searching other ways — and the search engines are trying to respond to that by featuring videos.  So for a while now, I’ve been wanting to make some screencast videos.  I think they’ve got a lot of potential for tutorials and demos, and I want to do some as teaching aids for my Latin lessons.

I thought I’d get some practice by doing one with my garden pictures.  It took a while to get all the technical details figured out, but I think once I know what I’m doing, this could be a lot faster than annotating a bunch of pictures and typing up descriptions of them all.  I hope you enjoy it.  If you have trouble viewing or hearing it, or have suggestions, please let me know.  More technical details below.

I captured the video and audio with Gtk-RecordMyDesktop.  My microphone is the crummy free one that came with a sound card or something, so if I speak very loudly at all, it pops.  So once I had the video file, I stripped the audio out into a separate WAV file, and used Audacity to boost the volume, and also to suppress some of the popping.  (If I decide to keep doing these, I think I’ll have to get a decent microphone.)  Then I muxed the audio back into the video, and cropped it to a standard size and recompressed it, all with mencoder.

The spinning red circle I used for pointing things out is from the Show Mouse plugin for Compiz, my window manager.  To display and zoom the images, I used GQview.  I’m hosting the video on blip.tv, which is like YouTube except that it’s more restricted to actual shows and documentaries, and not wide open to everything under the sun.

They’ve got a really nice website too: Laurel Valley Creamery.

From Grass to Cheese: The Nolan Family Farm from Milk Products on Vimeo.

(Incidentally, I wonder why so many older videos look so bad.  I realize they didn’t have digital recording back then, so these have been converted from VCR tapes.  But still, they look like they were rerecorded from tape to tape about 20 times, and then the tapes were left in the sun for a few years.  Or they were recorded by pointing a camcorder at the TV, possibly through several layers of wrinkly cellophane.)

Here’s one of the beds with the floating row covers in place.  Floating row covers are pretty cool.  They’re so light that they just “float” on top of everything, and rise along with the growing plants.  Definitely $10 well spent.  I’m glad I left them full-sized and didn’t cut them down to fit the beds originally, because now the one on the west bed is just big enough to cover it well.  We’ll have to remove that one soon, because the peas are just starting to bloom, and if they’re covered the bees won’t be able to pollinate them.

These are all the radishes from the first square, except that one I pulled last time.  As you can see, they didn’t make much of a root.  The tops are huge, and they were starting to bolt and go to seed, so they weren’t going to get any better.  I think that means there’s too much nitrogen in the soil compared to the levels of potassium and/or potash.  We’ll see how the turnips, carrots, and later radishes do.  The chickens got to enjoy this batch.

The radishes are gone from this area, and everything else is getting bigger.  Their square will probably get a basil plant.  There’s a new paprika pepper transplanted into the front square where leaf lettuce didn’t come up.  The Swiss chard is big enough to pick a small batch soon.

This isn’t as much of a jungle as it looks like in the picture.  The garlic and onions are kind of sprawling, mostly because of that one time Pepper thought the floating row cover was a bed for her to sleep on.  But the peas are growing well and starting to bloom, and they don’t like too much sun anyway.  We’ll be trying the mesculine lettuce in a salad very soon.

This is the north side of that bed.  There are tomatoes in all the north squares except the one with the thyme plant.  They were growing pretty slowly in the cool weather, but they’re starting to take off now.

This section looks a lot better than last time.  All the shallots are alive and growing.  The head lettuce is bouncing back from being transplanted.  The peas still look very rough from bird damage, but they’re growing.  The other two paprika peppers are now in this area too.

The pole beans and replanted bush beans came up when we finally got some sun, and they’re growing fast now.  They may need a little thinning, and the pole beans will need a trellis in a few weeks.

I hadn’t been watering these plants very often, because where they were sitting near the edge of the porch, they were catching enough moisture to keep them going in cool weather.  But the first hot day really gave them a beating.  I watered them after I took this picture, and they looked fine an hour later.

It's not one of these; maybe a descendant

It’s been a busy week, as we’re  getting ready to sell pulled-pork sandwiches at Trade Days at Stone’s Prairie Market in Plainville again this year.  The hog is being processed right now—can’t get much fresher than that!—and we’ll be slow-cooking it tomorrow.  We got a lot of compliments on the pork last year; and if I may so so myself, you won’t get better pulled pork anywhere.  We’ll have it in salt and pepper (my favorite) and BBQ flavors, and we’ll have chips and soda as well.

We’ll be starting at 9am and going until 3 or so, or until we run out.  There will also be music by the Ragtag Irish Band and others; demonstrations of flint knapping, rope making, and other historical crafts; a farmers’ market; and more.  It even looks like the weather is going to be nice. So come on out to Plainville on Saturday, May 22, and have a sandwich and say hi!

First Radish of 2010

This one probably would have grown more, but I couldn’t resist picking it.  The first radish of the year is usually the first thing ready to pick, and always tastes so good.

West End of West Bed, May 15

Things are still growing great here.  Everything’s thinned to the proper amount, so now we’re just waiting to harvest.  We could start picking a few Swiss chard leaves soon.  The square behind the marigolds is celery root, but it’s still so tiny you can’t see it.  I hope if we get some warm sunny days, it’ll take off.

East End of West Bed, May 15

The sage and oregano were both getting overgrown, so we picked about half of them and dried them.  The peas are looking a lot healthier, but I wonder if they’ll produce much, after the abuse they took from birds.  We need to start using the lettuce this week.

North Side of West Bed, May 15

Here’s the north side of that bed.  We’ve transplanted tomatoes into all the squares in the north side except the one with the thyme.  There are morning glories in the corner of half of those squares, so they’ll climb with the tomatoes and add some color.  The head lettuce is mostly hidden behind the onions.  I thinned it and transplanted a bunch of it to the east bed.

West End of East Bed, May 15

There are 12 head lettuce plants here that I transplanted from the other bed.  The peas in the top row of squares are recovering from the bird damage now that they’ve been covered.  We planted shallots a couple days ago, and they’re just starting to come alive.

East End of East Bed, May 15

Nothing really new year.  Some of the beans look kind of burnt.  That might be from me covering them with the floating row cover while they were wet.  You have to be careful about brushing against beans if they’re wet.  Another possibility I thought of is that the chicken pen surrounded this bed over the winter, so they added a lot of nitrogen.  Maybe it’s more than the beans can handle.  We’ll see.

Plant Starts, May 15

These are all the plant starts we have left.  Aside from the tomatoes that went into the east bed, another eight went to our plot in the community garden.  I’ll get pictures of that soon.  The cabbages came out of the square one of the tomatoes went into.  When they get some size, they’ll go to the community garden plot.  The peppers and basil should be transplanted soon too.