Ham I Am

The pig is back. In his, shall we say, final form. I ran out to Keizer Meats yesterday to pick him up, in the small car, with the kids in the back. I intended to put the meat in the trunk, but as it turned out, there was a bale of hay in the trunk that I didn't know about. So I had to put the meat in the front seat, all three pretty big boxes of it. Then I had to pick up Rowan from the bus stop, and she had to sit on top of a big pile of frozen pork all the way home. 

The butcher doesn't give me a final weight on the meat I get back, but I know that his hanging weight was 125 pounds, and that usually final weight is about 70% of that. So that would be about 90 pounds of meat. They did give me the figure of 28 pounds of cured pork - ham, bacon, and smoked shank and hock, because they charge extra for the curing. Doing the math, the butcher's fee comes out to $1.90 a pound, including the kill fee. The original cost of the pig was $75, so that adds $0.85 cents a pound. And I didn't keep track of how many bags of feed we bought, but I'm going to do a scientific thing called "guesstimate" and say we spent $50 on feed (he ate a lot of scraps.). That's $0.57 a pound.

$1.90

$0.85

$0.57  +

---------

= $3.33/pound.

Like I thought: just about supermarket prices. But much better than supermarket taste, as I proved last night with my first pork meal in a while: fried ham and lima bean soup. I know you are asking, why didn't you put the ham IN the soup, as every person of good sense knows is how you cook lima bean soup? 

Well, there are certain people in this house, who shall remain unnamed, who do not eat pork. These poor people just don't know what they are missing, in my opinion, but they must be accommodated. So I have to mix my pork and beans in my mouth.