Easy delicious ribs in the oven

Making fall-off the bone ribs is really easy, you just need a lot of patience, and:

1 (or more) racks of ribs

Salt, or a spice rub you like

Lots of aluminiumum foil

Water

To make them:

Ribs recipes almost always tell you to pull off the membrane that may be attached. The things is, if you don’t really care about presentation, you can do this after you cook them and it’s a lot easier. Up to you.

Rub the ribs all over with the rub. (English verbs. How inventive!)

Put the ribs fat-side up in the oven on broil for just a few minutes, until the top starts sizzling. This is optional but nice.

Now preheat the oven to 250F.

Put the ribs on several layers of foil. They don’t need to be tightly wrapped but they do need to be enclosed in the foil and you’ll want several layers of foil because the ribs can poke through if you’re not careful.

Just before you close up your foil package of ribs, pour in about a third of a cup of water. You could use broth if you prefer.

Put the ribs on a rack with a tray underneath to catch any drips.

Leave the ribs in the oven for…3 hours? 4? 5? Carefully check at 3 hours, but they will probably not be done. They are done when they are almost ready to fall apart.

100 years of medical science and a modern diet

According to U.S. CDC Data in 1998 the leading cause of death in the United States was heart disease, at 31 percent of all cause mortality. (The next leading cause was cancerous tumors.)

In 1900, 7.9 percent of all cause mortality was heart disease.

The leading cause of death in 1900 was pneumonia and influenza. (It’s difficult to tell these two apart as a cause of death. In fact, many respiratory ailments present with similar symptoms, such that without a lot of work it’s difficult to isolate cause of death to one specific respiratory disease. Of course, if you have a test that will ensure you diagnose one particular ailment and you receive extra funding for treating patients with that particular ailment, you may find that almost all your respiratory patients serendipitously happen to become diagnosed with that particular ailment.) That percentage of all cause mortality was 11.7 percent. Curiously, after 98 years of medical science pursuing relief from this age-old harbinger of finality, pneumonia and influenza are still in the top 10 causes of death in the U.S., at 3.9 percent. (Suicide is in the top 10 in 1998. Suicide joins the top 10 causes of mortality in 1975. It wasn’t in the top 10 all through the Great Depression. Isn’t all the ease and convenience of modern life supposed to be making people…happier?)

I don’t know the specifics of how the bigjobs of medical science ran their profession in 1900. I assume there were various unsavory practices such as vivisection, along with administering experimental pharmaceutical therapies to populations without adequately informing them of the risks — something that is, thankfully, now illegal and thus never happens. (If it did happen, of course, those responsible would be swiftly brought to justice.) Quite possibly there were a number of shady businessmen back then selling ineffective quack cures just to make a dirty dollar. Today, of course, we are assured that the modern medical pharmaceutical industry is impeccably regulated and basically exists only to serve the greater good.

Still, looking at those numbers objectively, it appears that 98 years of pharmaceutical and medical industriousness managed to decrease deaths (as a portion of total) from pneumonia-influenza by two thirds, while at the same time almost quadrupling deaths from heart disease. I am not a doctor, but I think that is not a track record to be proud of. Succumbing to a respiratory ailment is always going to involve some amount of bad luck, but if the causes of heart disease are, as medical science suggest, internal, it should be easy to regulate. That’s probably why ads for the American Heart Association don’t tout the increase in percent of deaths from heart disease in every year their Association has been associating. It appears that if you simply ate and exercised like Americans did in 1900 and ignored medical advice about diet and pharmacology — including all that stuff about the health benefits of smoking tobacco or how you could supposedly take a synthetic opioid and really, totally, absolutely, cross-your-heart never get addicted — you might be healthier than otherwise. Presumably, of course, if anyone were to buy medical journals and pay doctors to completely accidentally and totally not on purpose fail to tell the truth about something like that, then those responsible would be swiftly brought to justice.

To give the bonesaws their just praise, however, deaths from non-motor vehicle accidents have also decreased more than 2/3. So if you happen to get your shirtsleeve caught in the tablesaw you really, really want to be going to a modern hospital. Though of course the real heroes are the sanitation engineers. Almost nobody dies from diarrhea these days and it was a huge cause of death in 1900.

Lest you think that it’s just all the carbs Americans eat these days that are causing heart disease, consumption of carbohydrates went down during the 20th century and fat consumption increased. Saturated fat consumption stayed about the same; what increased was consumption of things like linoleic acid, which, prior to the temporary discovery by the medical industry that these were healthy, had previously been useful in manufacturing items such as paint. Indeed, over the past 100 years or so Americans shifted from eating a lot of farm-raised pork and milk fat along with a moderate amount of beef fat from lean, grass-fed beef, to eating less pork fat, less milk fat, fattier grain-fed beef, and much more hydrogenated vegetable oils. Crude fiber intake also decreased by about a third. It would be very interesting to see nutrition profiles of common foods grown using 1900s soil and farming practices compared with present-day, but that’s likely impossible. It seems a reasonable hypothesis to assume that if the only thing you add to soil is a modern industrial N-P-K fertilizer, various trace nutrients which might have once been present in food grown therein, which are added through natural fertilizers such as animal manure, are not going to be present in anything like their original scale. Again, over the same period of dietary progress, deaths from heart disease quadrupled as a portion of all cause mortality. (Actual heart-attacks have increased more than that, of course, but modern science is relatively good at keeping a patient alive and on drugs until some future, second heart attack causes death.)

The typical middle-class American family in 1900 had a small garden. They bought fresh, natural food from local farmers or grocers, canned or preserved it themselves, and cooked at home. The lack of modern labor-saving devices like dishwashers and washing machines meant that the family of 1900 did not have the copious free time every working middle class couple with children presumably enjoys today. Instead of the soul-affirming technological achievement of the family separately watching separate entertainments on separate screens, a family might have been forced to spend a day off together, picking cucumbers from the garden and pickling them while taking turns reading a storybook out loud. The reader will likely have some understanding of what the typical middle class family of today eats and how they spend their time.

Then again, the food that Americans ate in 1900 was really expensive. Households spent 43 percent of income on food. Housing was 23 percent and clothing was the next most expensive item of a household budget. These days American households spend closer to 10 percent of the budget on food. Cheaper materials and labor-saving technologies (along with low-cost, some would say criminally exploited, immigrant construction labor) have, however, somehow coincided with a 40 percent increase in housing costs. The other big ticket item Americans spend money on today is transportation. In 1900 one would typically work at home or close to home, shop locally, supplement with a home garden, and cook and eat at home. A shopping trip would be an all-day affair perhaps involving a visit to friends and family along the way. In these more progressive modern times most Americans have the luxury of driving an automobile to work, driving an automobile to a takeout chain for lunch, driving an automobile to a store, and purchasing food grown by strangers a thousand miles away or more.

Food was different, as well. In 1900, a chicken dinner would be a cockerel which had been foraging in the field on a varied diet, stewed to improve tenderness in a homemade stock made from its bones. Today, a large number of Americans don’t have a clue how to roast a chicken, but if they do it’s a genetic hybrid specially bred to grow in a third of the time of the 1900 chicken while sitting in a small cage and eating a diet engineered to pack on as much meat as possible in that short time at the lowest possible cost, plus a vitamin powder reasonably sufficient to prevent the chicken from dying prematurely.

At least most people don’t die from measles these days. In 1900 without a measles vaccine, 7,575 patients died from measles, 0.009 percent of the population. Today, due to the assistance of the $1.3 trillion U.S. biopharmaceutical industry, we can be assured that something less than 0.009 percent of Americans die from the measles. Lest someone scoff at such a tiny number, this really is a big deal: measles mostly affects young children, and that pre-vaccine measles death number is more than three times all the deaths in the 5-9 age group in 2019. Is that reduction the result of the vaccine or, say, better sanitation? We may never know.

Looking again at all cause mortality, now sorted by age, almost all deaths from heart disease occur after the age of 65. It might be interesting to know how soon after the age of 65 these numbers pick up, but the CDC, which is staffed by pharmaceutical industry insiders who presumably went into government service because they care deeply about the health and well-being of each individual citizen, tracks data in discrete cohorts right up to retirement age and then lumps those of retirement age who are no longer paying payroll taxes into one big catch-all category. Furthermore, as with most respiratory ailments, deadly influenza or pneumonia almost exclusively affects those well over 65 years in age. So perhaps the choice is between falling asleep due to pneumonia-induced low blood oxygen and passing away peacefully in old age at home after a final tearful but meaningful visit from your children and grandchildren, or having an extremely painful myocardial infarction, being rushed to the hospital where you are stripped naked, tubes are shoved into you and your chest cavity is cracked open before time of death is determined and your surviving family members are presented with the bill. Either way, for those who make it to 65 the average life expectancy is around 85 total years these days, which is around 5 years more of being in and out of hospitals and eventually confined to an assisted facility than it was 80 years ago, where you might have to spend your final years spoiling your grandchildren.

This all applies only to the United States. If you live, today, in say, sub-Saharan Africa, perhaps most of your most arable land is now devoted to producing cash crops for the global market on behalf of global corporations which are totally, absolutely, one hundred percent not imperialistic looting operations (just look at the “Commitment to Diversity” statement in their Annual Report to Shareholders), and you might have the opportunity to roll the dice by having your children injected with a vaccine known to correlate with a higher rate of mortality than it prevents. Of course, drug dealers would like us all to know (sorry, I mean public interest-oriented pharmaceutical companies and billionaire philanthropists whose selfless philanthropy has somehow preserved and increased their billions) they ship such therapies overseas in mass quantities because of their philanthropic focus, and not because of a potential $5 billion market or the prospect of reducing labor costs by shifting production overseas at the “local prevailing wage”.

But hey, I mean, “safe and effective”, right?

Pasture-raised meat chicken enterprise budget

Update: This post was getting some additional traffic (thank you) so I’ve updated some of the numbers to reflect late 2022 pricing.

Raising chickens for fun and…profit?

I went over this for someone elsewhere, and decided I may as well write it out and put it up here. The purpose of this post is to help people who are thinking of starting a pasture-raised chicken enterprise. I also have no qualms about present or future customers finding out how much we (don’t) make from selling chickens, though I think it is vitally necessary to point out that:

(i) a sustainable farm business does not consist of a single enterprise, so that it would be unwise to extrapolate a single enterprise like chickens to the entire farm, and

(ii) we don’t raise chickens this way anymore since we switched to a free-range model. If anything, our costs are now much higher than this. Anyways, here goes.

(Edit: Note: If you don’t understand concepts like “feed conversion ratio”, “opportunity cost”, “depreciation”, “cost of goods sold”, or “gross margin”, then pause your plans to start a chicken business and go study some basic business concepts. Most small farmers lose money — and the farm — because they don’t understand what it actually costs them to produce food.)

Capital Investment (not included in cost)

I will assume producing 100 Cornish Cross chickens in four Suscovich-style coops. I think Salatin-style coops are cheaper to build, but they are also uni-taskers which seems like a poor investment to me. I am glad they work for Joel Salatin but I don’t think building them is a good business decision. Even if you never raise chickens again, the Suscovich-style coops are extremely versatile and useful to have around.

That said, I’m going to estimate $250 to build a Suscovitch-style coop. That will depend on lumber prices but I think it’s wise to err on the high side, and in fact $250 a coop is possibly low depending on how many modifications you need to make to John’s design to fit your local environment. So that’s $1000 which, depreciated over 5 years, is $200 per year. Since these coops have other potential uses I’m not going to require the chicken enterprise to pay for them, but keep that $200 in mind as we continue. You’re also likely going to need to spend on maintenance, such as new roof tarps every few years. That said, a single batch of 100 or 200 chickens shouldn’t be the goal, and the more chickens you raise in a year the more use you get out of your investment in the coops. It is, however, a startup cost to consider.

Chicks

100 Cornish Cross chickens from our local hatchery will cost about $275. Everyone should start out raising the standard Cornish Cross chicken. If you can keep these alive you can keep other hardier breeds alive, and the CX will likely net you the most return of any meat breed, so you’ll know what you’re giving up by switching to a more chicken-like breed of chicken, if you choose to do so in the future. Pasture-raised Cornish Cross are sufficiently different from grocery-store chicken that I think you’ll be very pleased with the results, although I think flavor is improved with slower-growing breeds.

If you put your brooder, where you keep the unfeathered baby chicks, in an enclosed and sheltered area then I think you can build it out of something like the cardboard box that a refrigerator or freezer is shipped in. Make friends with the warehouse workers at your local big box store. Cardboard would be a single use but it saves on initial materials cost. You could also build a similar-sized brooder out of plywood, OSB, and scraps. That would add extra cost. If you need to build a brooder outdoors you’ll need better materials and a better-engineered design. However, you’re probably going to need a better-engineered brooder because you have more orders for chicken, and perhaps you need to start chicks earlier in the season with a brooder which will keep them sufficiently warm. Brooder cost can therefore be a bit more in line with sales than is the cost of the coops. You’ll need a couple heat lamps and a way to get electricity to them but those aren’t all that expensive and can be reused many times. The only cost I’m going include for the brooder is the input of wood shavings as bedding, 2 bags for $18. If you use enough shavings they should still be quite high in carbon content but they will have some nitrogen from the chicken manure. They could make a halfway decent mulch for a garden or you could try adding them to a compost pile, so you can get some use out of them after the chicks do; still, I’ll call it an expense.

Feed

On pasture we should estimate that the CX’s feed conversion ration will be 4:1. It’s supposed to be lower, and certainly is in the CAFO settings these chickens were designed for, but you’re going to have feed waste on pasture regardless of what you do. Other breeds all eat significantly more than this, and free-ranging, while healthier for the chickens, increases feed use still further, as they spend more calories foraging than they get. Regardless of forage availability, these are not layer hens. You can potentially reduce feed waste by wetting the feed, which prevents smaller particles from being lost. A lot of people say you should ferment your chicken feed, and this makes sense theoretically but it is extra work, you have the potential risk of your wetted feed not fermenting but going moldy and being wasted, and I have not seen any study showing what the FCR benefit is from fermentation. Fermentation proselytizers get mad when you say, “I believe you that it helps, but show me the evidence that it helps enough to be worthwhile,” but there it is. Wetting the feed right before you give it to the chickens is easier to do, doesn’t introduce the risk of mold, and is at the very least probably not going to hurt anything, so long as your feeders are designed to hold the consequently larger volume of the daily food ration.

The cheapest feed is around 40 cents a pound. This may be lower if you live in corn and soy country and you are feeding corn and soy feed. Non-GMO, non-corn, non-soy feed may cost more. Given the rampant fraud (allegedly) in the organic feeds business, I think paying for organic chicken feed is stupid. Perhaps if you know the mill owner and they know the farmers and so on you will actually get a truly organic feed mix, and if you can find people who will pay the resulting chicken prices, well done. If you pay extra for a bag that says “organic” on it made by people whom you don’t know, who likely buy their ingredients on the open market from people they don’t know, then you’re just paying extra for a label. Most “organic” food isn’t tested in the field where chemicals would best be detected: nobody has the capability to do much more than “selectively audit” a few crops here and there. For anything which gets shipped from overseas, what is sold as “organic” is really just an “organic equivalent”, which in some cases means basically something like whatever “organic” legally means in the U.S. and in other cases is spelled b-r-i-b-e-r-y. Also there’s apparently no concern that having regulators paid by the farms they regulate might introduce a conflict of interest, which is…interesting. Mixing your own feed when you start out is a very bad idea, you will likely kill your chickens. Again, these are not layer hens that can survive on kitchen scraps. As you get more experienced you might look into mixing your own feed, but that’s not a good risk to take when you’re first starting out.

If we assume your average carcass weight will be 5 pounds, which is an achievable if particularly good result, then for 100 birds at 5 pounds and 4:1 FCR you need 2,000 pounds of feed which is $800.

Labor

It takes 56 days to raise a Cornish Cross chicken to processing size. You need move the coops and feed and water the birds every day that they are in the field, plus get and store feed, plus set up and clean out the brooder (if not using a disposable box). The work is less physical for the 2 or 3 weeks the chicks are in the brooder, unless you have brooder problems in which case you will be working a lot more to try to fix your setup and save the remaining birds. However, because of the many things that can go wrong in the brooder, you will need to check the chicks multiple times each day and night and adjust your heat sources and ventilation accordingly, so all these little visits are going to add up. I would estimate an hour a day working with the birds, and you will probably spend a lot more than that by the time you factor in building and maintaining coops, getting and storing feed, solving predator issues, catching and transporting chickens to the processor, and so on.

If you were to make $40,000 a year as a chicken farmer, and you worked 8 hours a day 5 days a week for 50 weeks of the year, your hourly wage would be $20. Of course this is a laughably absurd hypothetical situation, but people who don’t think you should make a below-average income, with zero benefits, in exchange for growing good food for them don’t deserve to be your customers (nor to eat, in my opinion), so value your time with the chickens at least at $20 an hour. That’s $20 times 1 hour a day for 56 days or $1,120.

You also have the rental equivalent of the land, but since pasture-raising chickens improves the soil fertility, as opposed to, say, leasing it out to a tenant farmer, I’m not going to include a cost for this. If you are raising chickens on someone else’s land, you shouldn’t pay them anything other than perhaps a few free chickens, and in fact if they don’t offer to pay you for providing fertilizer and pest control I would look for another business arrangement for your next season.

Losses

You should assume a 10 percent mortality rate. No matter what you do, some of your chickens are likely to die. Other breeds can be hardier than the Cornish Cross, it’s true. Probably your mortality will either be much higher (predation, brooder problems, heat wave) or somewhat lower (everything goes well) than this. Also, if all goes well most of your mortality loss will happen in the brooder due to chicks which just fail to thrive for genetic or other reasons. Still, to be safe you should assume you’ll lose 10 out of 100 birds when full grown. (In the Cornish Cross, the most dominant birds which gorge on the most feed and are the largest chickens in the flock tend to give themselves heart attacks just before your processing date.)

Processing

Processing is $4.00 $5.00 or $6.00 a bird, for whole bagged chickens. Again, the facilities to properly and safely process 100 birds in a day are not in your price range, starting out. If you have a day job, or other farm work to do, I don’t think processing on the farm is a good investment. This is something, perhaps, to look into at a larger scale, but again you have to think about the opportunity cost of time and facilities. By all means process 10 or 20 birds at home for personal use, but that’s different from processing 100 or more of birds you’re planning to sell. Assuming a 10 percent mortality loss, you’ll have 90 chickens to process at $6.00 a chicken for $540.

Adding up the cost of raising chickens on pasture

Thus, we have:

100 chicks at $2.75 each for $275.

2 bags of pine shavings brooder bedding for $18 total.

2,000 pounds of starter/grower feed at $0.40 a pound for $800.

56 hours of work (hah!) at $20 an hour (no benefits) for $1,120.

90 birds processed at $6.00 a bird for $540.

In total, that’s a cost of $2,753.

Over 90 surviving chickens, that’s $30.58 per chicken.

At 5 pounds each, on average, that’s $6.11 per pound. This is your break-even price on a batch of 100 meat chickens.

This doesn’t include the $200 depreciation on your coops, or your brooder once you build a permanent brooder. It doesn’t include any cushion for the inevitable times you have a heat wave at the wrong time and lose 20 percent of your flock despite staying out in the heat to spray them with cool water occasionally to try to save them, this doesn’t include losing your entire flock to a bad predator attack, or, if you can’t pick up from a local hatchery and have to mail order your chicks, having the postal service delayed by a day and losing half your chicks in delivery (most hatcheries will make this up to you, if they can, even though it’s not their fault.) This doesn’t include freezer storage for the chickens, if your customers aren’t picking up on processing day. This doesn’t include getting up in the middle of the night because it’s excessively windy or rainy and you need to go check your coops, and Heaven help you if the wind flips one of them despite your efforts in staking it down.

All other things equal, $6.11 a pound is not a break-even price for pasture-raised meat chicken. At this price you do not have a sustainable business enterprise. You won’t be making enough to maintain and invest in the business enterprise over time, which is a significant part of being “sustainable”. The only reason to do it is because of the added value you get in improving your soil fertility, which is why if you’re doing this on someone else’s land they should be paying you for your service.

What I’m saying is that you can’t charge that price, you have to charge more per pound or your farm business is going to fail. If you charge $7.50 a pound you’re making a bit less than a 25 percent gross margin (not profit), which is still stupidly low but might be enough to maintain equipment, invest in some improvements, and save up for when you have a bad season. In this case you would have a gross profit of about $125, although we haven’t factored in the cost of gas to go pick up a ton of feed and bring it back to the farm, and take the chickens to the processor and back, which is likely to be around $80 to $100 depending on how far you have to go and what gas prices are like.

Volume can help improve the picture somewhat. It won’t take all that much more physical work to raise 200 chickens than it will to raise 100, so you can allocate your labor more efficiently. However, you’ll then need to make extra capital investments; not just a larger brooder and more coops, but probably a trailer to transport that many chickens to the processor, and of course a way to get them home safely without spoiling the meat, and freezer space to store them. You’ll also need to make sure you get on your poultry processor’s calendar early, because 200 birds is going to fill up a significant portion of their day and they will need to schedule that well in advance, especially if you’re doing that multiple times in a season.

If you process on farm, you’ll save a dollar and change a pound. If the time and facilities and equipment you need to process on farm is worth less than that to you, great. Of course, if you invest in, say, what you need to process 200 birds at a time, and then you don’t sell that many, tough luck. You may have to process yourself if a suitable poultry processor isn’t available to you, but if you have a local processor then I think you really need to ask yourself what business enterprise you are engaging in. The same goes for hatching your own chicks. I’m not saying not to do it, but be very clear about the opportunity costs of significant investments in these other activities as opposed to, say, being more productive on your farm. If people want you to process your chickens on the farm, tell them to bring their own equipment and you’ll sell them a live chicken and watch them do it.

A message to people who think real pasture-raised chicken is “expensive”

Now, if you’re a consumer of chicken who has read this far, thank you. Please ask yourself: when you shop at the famous “organic” grocery store, where all the out-of-season apples are pristinely unblemished despite, supposedly, not having been sprayed with any potentially dangerous pesticides or antifungals, and you see a “free range” whole chicken being sold for, say, $5.00 pound, which includes an advertising budget, and commercial truck transport, and grocery stocking fees, and “fresh” availability year-round even when the grass the chickens are supposed to be “free ranging” on is covered in ice, and the “organic” grocery store’s markup — do you think, just maybe, that the agribusiness corporation pretending to be a small, sustainable farm business, could be, kind of…lying? Do you really think that corporate-branded chicken you see in the store was raised on decent, healthy feed in a clean, grassy field by well-treated workers, all for a cost at which that multi-facility agribusiness corporation calling itself a “family farm” can sell the bird in a high-end grocery store for $5.00 a pound and make a profit?

I am not saying the people raising these chickens are bad farmers. I can see how economies of scale could reduce the cost of raising chickens by half or more. And at the scale of tens of thousands or so chickens each year, you can of course afford to pay people to find even more efficiencies in the process. I think that these corporations are probably doing a better job than the companies (though often they’re the same) making a standard cheap CAFO chicken with its beak cut off in a cage. But they’re certainly not “sustainable” in any sense that normally implies. The idea that these are “family farms” is kind of like saying the Pritzker’s run a “family business”.

I have another blog post (click here) about how much you are being ripped off when you buy the “cheap” CAFO chickens.

I have another blog post about why eating chicken is kind of weird and, in terms of sustainability, chicken is really more of a luxury item than the way it’s treated in modern American cuisine. Not that you shouldn’t eat it…I mean…we do.

Did you know that, despite the supposed benefits of modern medicine, in correlation with everyone eating this factory-produced, factory-farmed food such as cheaply-raised Confined Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) chickens, deaths from heart disease have increased substantially over the past 100+years? Could this be a consequence of all the unhealthily-raised food that is sold to people these days? I’ll have another blog post about that, next week.

December 13, 2021 Farm Newsletter

Link.

See the difference! Chickens help grow pasture

Pickled Eggs

This are a really yummy and healthy snack or addition to salads, sandwiches, a topper for ramen or rice…pretty much anything. We keep them in the refrigerator but some people in cooler climates keep them in a cold outdoor area or porch. Do Not Get Botulism.

The pickling process we followed is from these guys so if you want more information in video form definitely check out their video and do the things that will help their channel grow.

To peel the eggs, bring a pot of water to a boil and then add in the eggs with a spider or slotted cooking spoon or pasta scoop. Cook them for 12 minutes or more depending on how hard you like your hard-boiled eggs. Then remove them to an ice bath and/or running cold water: you want to cool them down as quickly as possible. This will (perhaps, if you’re fortunate) make them easier to peel.

The basic pickling solution for these eggs is half vinegar (5 percent) and half unchlorinated water. Add whatever amount of salt and sugar you like and bring to a boil. Layer your peeled eggs and aromatics in clean, sterile glass canning jars. Some ideas: sliced beets, whole cloves, other “sweet” spices, black peppercorns, maybe some extra sugar in the brine. Soy sauce, sliced carrots, crushed garlic, scallions or lemongrass, red pepper flakes or sichuan pepper, rice wine vinegar. Crushed garlic, sliced red onion, black peppercorns, dill. Crushed garlic, sliced onion, sliced spicy peppers, black peppercorns.

Once you have your eggs and other ingredients in the jars, (don’t pack too tightly, leave room at the top,) use a funnel to pour in the hot pickling liquid until it covers the top of the eggs. Then put the lids on the jars. It’s possible that hot-packing with the hot pickling liquid will “seal” the jars, but these are not canned shelf-stable. (Don’t bother trying to run them through an actual canning process, that’s a bad idea with eggs.)

In the jars kept in a cool, refrigerated place these eggs will keep a very long time, if you can keep from eating them that is.

Japanese Curry Chicken and Settling for "Good Enough"

Over there to the right is a picture of the box this curry sauce came out of. It doesn’t have any particularly nasty chemicals in it; some people have problems with MSG, but it is naturally occurring. That doesn’t mean it’s good for you, but personally I would be less concerned about what is basically a kind of salt and much more

concerned about, for example, the effect of seaweed-extract polysaccharides like carrageenan which are added to foods as a cheap way to bulk and thicken them. (You can make a gelatin-like food from the same seaweed that contains carrageenan, but that’s different from hiding it in your ice cream to save on dairy cost. People who screw over dairy farmers and mess up ice cream just to make a few more cents a carton deserve their own circle of Hell.) Still, the point is not what is in the box, nor is this a recommendation of the S&B Golden Curry product. (Though it was fine.)

The point is that this curry chicken meal took an hour to make and contained:

A Free Range Red Ranger Chicken, chopped in 1-to-2 inch pieces with a cleaver

A large home-grown onion chopped in chunks

4 extra large CSA carrots chopped in 1-to-2 inch pieces

5 CSA potatoes chopped in 1-to-2 inch pieces

The above box of curry sauce mix, a couple tablespoons of homemade cooking lard, and water.

Follow the directions on the box and serve over rice.

Would it be better, and healthier, to make a Japanese curry sauce from scratch? I think so. (Japanese curry is kind of a mix of a curry and a browned roux). That would also have taken several hours to make, possibly after a special trip to the store to get ingredients we don’t typically have on hand. With two young children and a farm to run, we don’t often have that kind of time.

That’s the curry on the right. It was good.

If your options are (1) cheap and unhealthy takeout food, (2) not eating the food you enjoy, or (3) cooking what you like by using as many good quality local ingredients as you can and settling for a sauce or other components from package, then cook the food you want with the off-the-shelf time-saver. It’s good enough.

Americans spend far less on home-cooked meals than we did 75 years ago, and we are also generally much less healthy. Part of the problem is that, coincidental to the popularization of radio and television, prior generations failed in their duty to pass on basic life skills to their progeny. However, it’s also true that most families today have dual income earners by necessity, which means we have less time to cook, and at the same time unhealthy processed food is widely available and artificially inexpensive because the workers who make it are egregiously underpaid. We need to recognize that a home-cooked meal is always going to be better than this garbage, even if that home-cooked meal isn’t “from scratch”. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Cooking a meal with some pre-packaged ingredients is just fine. In fact, even if everything in your home-cooked meal comes from a can or a box, at least you know what you put in it.