Family, Food, home, Travel, Uncategorized

Getting the Lard Out

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I have become wary of telling Husband what I want, or if I like something, because he takes it on himself to make certain I get  it.  Sometimes  I just make an offhand comment about liking something, with no expectation of getting it, and Husband takes it to heart and feels responsible  for it.   I think it has something to do with his being an older brother of a younger sister and feeling responsible for her happiness. My father was the same way with me.  One can only be considered spoiled under these circumstances if one comes to expect such treatment.  I don’t expect it, so I am not spoiled!

Last week I took the last jar of home-rendered lard out of the freezer as I needed it for pie crusts. I told Husband that we would need to render more lard some time. I didn’t mean that I wanted to do it right away, but that was how Husband interpreted it, and he set to work finding some pork fat for me to render.  I came home for lunch to find a disgruntled man who had been unsuccessful in finding any pork fat from our usual sources. He even phoned butcher shops in Fargo, Brookings, and Canby, MN.   I assured him that it wasn’t a crisis, and that it was fine if we didn’t find any.  There are lots of good pie crust recipes that don’t call for lard. Husband was still  fretful. I just hoped he would forget about it and stop ruminating.

Yesterday while I was in my meetings, Husband chanced on a farmers market on Nicollet Avenue, and found a source for leaf lard and pork fat from a guy who raises hogs in New Richmond, WI.  He and Husband talked lard and, after several phone calls back to the farm to check on supplies, he and Husband arranged for us to pick up 10 pounds of leaf lard and other pork fat from him at the Minneapolis Farmers Market on Saturday morning.   Lard crisis averted.  It remains to be seen what Husband will ruminate about next.

What have you gone to extremes to find or accomplish? What is your favorite pie crust?  What do you ruminate about?

24 thoughts on “Getting the Lard Out”

    1. Yes. I suspect a number of us here would like to be on his list. The cartoonist, Guidon, had a cartoon once with a lumpy guy presenting a bedraggled sunflower to his lady-love and the caption said, “Oh, HIram. A single perfect sunflower.” This got a lot of play in my family because my sister’s husband’s name is “Hiram” so for years that cartoon was posted on her fridge.

      I can see the cartoon redone, as follows: “Oh, Chris. A single, perfect lard jar!”

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  2. right now i am looking for just the right gibson sg guitar for my friend in our card playing group
    he has talked about getting one for a long time and how much he would love it
    i have looked and there are plenty available at between 100 and 5000 dollars
    i sold my beater a couple years ago and haven’t missed it as i have others but he really wants one.
    i am an older vintage fan with a worn finish being a badge of honor and a petina rather than a sign of wear and tear
    i think my friend is more of a brand ass new perfect presentation kind of guy so i’m searching the $500 range for him.
    he is a lawyer with autism that makes him phenomenal at researching detail for his court cases and he takes that same spirit to his guitar research projects. he sits and plays like he is dissecting the composition where i get a groove going and make it my own he strives to do an exact duplication of the version he has playing in his head
    he gets frustrated with me for taking liberties and i have a different idea of how to get through a song than he does. a bit of felix and oscar or bert and ernie when it comes to approach
    red 60’s vintage would be my choice
    i’ll likely find him a 10 year old closet guitar to cherish
    need to find it soon

    julia childs pie crust is flakey and wonderful

    making me want some apple pie right now at 5 in the morning
    no lard thanks

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  3. hey renee there are many great farmers markets in the twin cities , ask pj about her favorites and saturday is souses to be a top 10 weather day so get out and enjoy it.
    the big one is on the north side of downtown under the lyndale ave bridge and it is amazing. my favorite is next to the guthrie along the river and has a great vibe
    enjoy minneapolis on peak colors weekend and bask in the sunshine.
    i’m in chicago hoping the weather follows me over for daughters frisbee tournament saturday and sunday
    maybe a baboon farmers market meetup can be arranged
    easy for me to say as i wake up in illinois today.
    enjoy

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      1. I am also having problems with the Like button on Explorer. But it appears to be working well on Chrome. I’m going to wait until the absolute possible minute to upgrade my poor old laptop.

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  4. Rise and Shine Baboons,

    I can guarantee that I do not ever, ever ruminate about lard. That would just never make the list. That said, my favorite pie crust does use lard, However, said lard comes from the grocery store refrigerator section. When my sister and I do our Pie-a-thons for family events, our hands are soft as a baby’s bottom due to the lard.

    Several of our neighbors have let me know that they think the time I spend in the garden is a bit extreme, although I think that is comparative. (One of these neighbors had an estate sale last summer. Their house was full, FULL, of pink, porcelain dolls which I thought was extreme). Our next door neighbor really considers my affinity for the compost pile to be kind of weird, although I view this as absolutely necessary to producing an organic garden. They sure like the flowers that the garden produces, which I think is completely normal, not extreme. At. All.

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  5. I remember having lard in a can in the fridge. Never thought about what it was or where it came from, it was just there.
    I do remember using my fingers to scoop out a bit to grease a pan for the home-made (Was it Jenos pizza box?) pizza. No toppings, just thin crust and the powdered cheese and spices that came in the box.

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  6. My niece had a lamp at a rented condo down in Charleston that I thought was really cool. The whole apartment had a 60’s vintage feel too it.
    The lamp was sort of blue-ish teal color with gold trim of a knight on a horse. It had an oval shade, not just round, but oval and fit against the wall perfectly.
    I couldn’t get that lamp out of my mind and I’d search online for it over the years. And then I found the knight base at an antique shop in Florida. I purchased, they shipped it too me, and it’s STILL waiting for me to assemble and make it a lamp. Part of the issue is that it’s ceramic and It must need some type of base for the rod to go though; I can’t just clamp it to the thin top… and that’s where I got stuck. It just keeps falling to the bottom of my ‘to do’ list. And oval lamp shades are hard to find too.
    Such is life! ha-
    I don’t think about pie crusts. Except when my mom made pie crust, she always had the extra pieces left over she’d cover with sugar and cinnamon and bake. Those were yummy.

    I ruminate about lighting or crops or the next show… too often about the weather, too little about other things I’m sure.

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      1. Mine too. Pies were about the only thing that Nonny really baked when I was young (except for the Extravaganza of Christmas cookies every year.) And so there were always little pinwheels of cinnamon sugar pie crust crusts afterwards

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  7. I ruminated on Wednesday about finding a storage unit on Hawthorne Ave to meet up with my friend to help her move a dresser to her apartment in Howard Lake. We were successful, but it was stressful. I need to remember that many people actually drive in the Twin Cities and successfully get to their destinations.

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  8. I will go to “great lengths” when I really want a specific something – book, household or kitchen item, piece of clothing. You know I’ve exhausted all other possibilities when I resort to Amazon.

    I have a container of high quality lard in the fridge that I got at the Farmers Market here, and it may last forever because I never make pies!

    I ruminate about lots of things – lately about what I can take “off my plate”, in order to get our friend W. moved to an apartment that’s opened up in Asst. Living.

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  9. Mine too. Pies were about the only thing that Nonny really baked when I was young (except for the Extravaganza of Christmas cookies every year.) And so there were always little pinwheels of cinnamon sugar pie crust crusts afterwards

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  10. I never ruminate about lard. At our house we are strictly butter or Crisco pie gals. I do often go to Great Lengths for things because in this day and age I can. I can search on the internet, I can call around, I can drive around places if I want to. I love getting to the end of a big search and having all of my searching come to fruition

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  11. My mother made great pies and she generally favored lard—the kind that comes in one pound green and white boxes and that you usually find perched above a freezer case. I was interested enough in the process that by the time I went off to college I could make a passable pie and made a few, usually when some suitable filling became serendipitously available. I remember there was a large mulberry tree in an empty lot just across Cedar Avenue from our apartment and I harvested them. The pie, as I recall, was not memorable. Mulberries don’t measure up to raspberries or boysenberries. I’ve seldom used lard for my crust. I used to use Crisco before hydrogenated fats were bad. Back in the ’70s, Robin worked at a child development center. The cook there had an unusual pie crust recipe that made a good crust and was easier to work than a conventional crust. We still have the recipe and use it sometimes. It has an egg and some vinegar in it.

    One or the other of us is always searching for some hard-to-find item, a tool or a material. I have books that I searched for for over five years before I found a copy. Some of them would have been available if price had been no object. For those, I just had to keep looking until the right copy came along. Some of the books were unavailable, for a time, at any price. Eventually, though, they show up if you’re patient.

    We have been willing to go to extremes. Our trip to Wales was centered around a workshop that Robin wanted to take. Everything else was just stuff we did as long as we were there. Once we drove from New York State clear across Massachusetts to Watertown near Boston to visit Mount Auburn Cemetery, where Edwin Booth and his first wife, Mary Devlin, Henry Longfellow. Julia Ward Howe and Samuel Gridley Howe, Fanny Fern, Charlotte Cushman, and many other notables are buried. There’s a cenotaph for Margaret Fuller there as well.

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