What a week! I have had such an incredible response to A Plot in Common. The support and enthusiasm has been much more than I anticipated. I was just saying to Ben, how much I love to meet people who are truly passionate about something. This week I have been fortunate to meet a bunch of those people. I think it would be nice to bring everyone together and share their stories, interests and passions. Maybe Spring?

photo taken by Tara Pearce @outertowners

We had quite a bit of pork in the freezer from last years pigs. We dreamed of salami, prosciutto, bacon, anything cured really, but it seemed a little out of our league. Funny how you put things in the 'too hard basket'. Its just taking that first initial step isn't it? Bacon was our first step. We thought that if we were going to make our own bacon we definitely needed to smoke it! We knew nothing about either. We followed a cookbook on how to cure the bacon and while we were waiting for the salt to do its magic, we started building our smoker. We gathered what materials we could from around the farm and with Ben's creative head and hands, built a smoker (we keep on having a little giggle at our little outhouse with a chimney). We rinsed the bacon and hung it in the barn for 10 days to dry. On Saturday we excitedly fired up the smoker. after regulating the smoke we hung the bacon in the smoker for 7 hours.

Dinner Saturday night was going to be bacon and eggs. Nope. The bacon was too salty to eat. It had a beautiful smokey flavour but was completely overpowered by the salt. I'm not sure where I went wrong. Maybe I cured it for too long. Maybe too much salt. Maybe my rinsing technique. I'll do some more research. Any advice is welcome.

It's a bummer when things don't quite go as planned but I love a challenge and this salty bacon won't beat me!

Tash xxxx