It gladdens the heart and makes the stomach happy to have a delicious, hearty breakfast made from local ingredients. One breakfast we had this week was comprised of our own chicken eggs, Bluegrass Beef breakfast sausage, Daily Bread asiago cheese and garlic bread, and Happy Jack Pumpkin and Produce potatoes fried in lard we rendered from local pork fat. Sublime!
We also picked up some delicious plums at the farmer’s market and made a plum crisp with them. The Asian pears we bought from the same vendor, Ayres Family Orchard, made a tasty, very fizzy water kefir, too; it has a slightly different flavor profile than water kefir made with Bartlett pears – sweet, delicate, almost floral.
We take our lard seriously, and had previously been purchasing organic lard online and paying a pretty penny for it. It’s easy to render your own lard and it’s much more economical, so we were delighted to discover that our farmer’s market pork vendor, Goldfinch Farm, (who sells awesome jowl bacon) had pork fat to sell. We bought everything they’d brought because, to our surprise, we found it difficult to acquire locally. In fact, a few months ago, we made an hour-long drive out to a local processor that also has a farm store and asked about lard. We figured that since they process pork in quantity, they must have some on hand. To our dismay, it turned out they had just sold it all to a local college. We just hope that local college was whipping up tasty meals with it.
Are you thinking to yourself that we’re skating along the razor’s edge, eating saturated fat (we consume coconut oil daily, along with eating whole eggs, butter, lard, nuts) with reckless abandon, when the prevailing medical wisdom maintains that it will cause heart disease? First, we’re logical, science-oriented people. We read and research voraciously, and we question the status quo. Second, we’re healthy, and we feel great; ergo, our diet has been good for us.
Still feeling unsure about eating healthy fats? Here’s an allopathic physician’s opinion, as food for thought about which substances are really the culprits: https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/08/23/an-unconventional-cardiologist-promotes-a-high-fat-diet/.