Meat CSA

Dear me, poor neglected food blog. It's not alone--work and Life in general got pretty hectic, so LJ and Facebook reading and even some email lists got pushed aside, and I may never catch up on the more active RSS feeds. LJ at least got some reflected posts as I tweeted through a Walt Disney World Food & Wine Festival visit in October, a family trip to Italy over Christmas, and back to WDW in January with friends, but somehow the food posts I constructed in my head never made it here. I'm going to try to do better.

In January I joined a CSA of sorts: a carnivorous CSA, specifically. It's an experiment by Pine Street Market in Avondale Estates, an butcher shop that specializes in artisan meats. They're known for their applewood smoked bacon, and a number of sausages and cured meats. They don't promise that all their meat is locally sourced, but they do work with a local farm that raises pigs drug-free on pasture for some amount of their meat.

The CSA boxes have been heavy on pork with some lamb and beef. This is a shift from my usual non-poultry meat purchases, which tend to be mostly beef, some pork, and almost no lamb. I'm a little at risk of being overwhelmed by meat, but then January and February had a good bit of travel and thus less home cooking. Travel has been abruptly stopped with the budget sequestration, so I'm going to make an effort to use the current box plus the leftovers from January and February this month.

The March pickup was today, and here's what was in my box:
1 lb. applewood smoked bacon
8 oz. applewood bacon ends
Pork Sausages:
Irish bangers (4, ~14 oz.)
Spiced pear sausage (4, 1 lb)
Mettwurst sausage (4, 1 lb)
4 oz. tasso ham
1 lb 6 oz pork belly ribs
1 lb country (pork) sausage
1 lb applewood bacon burger (ground pork)
1 lb parmesan lamb meatball mix (lamb and pork)
3 cider brined pork chops (oddly cut, 2 boneless and one bone-in, bone-in one is large and very irregularly cut)
2 "Creole crepinettes"--pork and beef sausage patties wrapped in caul

For dinner I think I'll cook the two crepinettes, plus make burgers from the applewood bacon burger and pan-fry them all. Or maybe grill them--the challah is a little behind schedule, so I might not want to be juggling baking bread and grilling burgers.