Where is the PigWizard on this blog?!

Notice: there are some really good lines in here, but for the most part, it's pretty crammed together in ways that may not immediately make sense.  Apologies....but this one is kinda for me.  If I took the time to explain how everything in here is related in my head, I would never finish it.  I promise to be a little more succinct in future posts.

If you've been following this blog at all, you will have noticed a distinct absence of anything from yours truly, the PigWizard.  Part of this, is because we only brought one computer with us, and most of my time on it has been researching the next phase of our journey, contacting farms and couch surfing hosts, finding the best flights, trains, and buses to get us around to unfamiliar places. Before we even started the trip, Nicole and I had a discussion or twenty, about the nature of the blog, what it's purpose was, and how we we´re going to share it. For the most part, I just wanted to write when I felt like writing, to be artsy about it, and she felt it was more accessible to readers as a chronological journal.  I've never been a good journal keeper (I have written and rewritten this post at least eight twelve times already) and so as yet she has been the only source of posts.  To paraphrase Thoreau, if I write the life I'm living, I wouldn't have time to live it.

But the main reason I haven't written is that I didn't know what to write about, and how to organize it.

For me, the food oriented aspect of this trip is about ideas and inspiration.  As a high school drop out, and a largely self taught cook and butcher, I've never had anything but my own ideas about what I should learn, and there has never been a focus or a specialty (despite what you may think of me if you only have known me as the PigWizard), I have just always wanted to keep learning, and not just about food.  While I will never stop learning, at some point you have to put what you've learned into action, stop fucking around, and make a living.  Having said that, it's kind of a sickening idea to me, owing a business.

It's a great idea in a lot of ways, but looking at the reality of scares the shit out of me.  Borrowing a few hundred thousand dollars, being responsible for hiring and maintaining employees, dealing with the myriad of regulatory institutions, writing schedules (ugh), surviving the winter months in Monterey as a food business, fixing machinery; where is the time for making cool new stuff and still learning?  Why can't I just keep doing what I've been doing for the last 19 years, hopping around wherever my curiosity takes me, making just enough to live on, and continue to follow my passion?

Ego, that's why.

I think I'm pretty awesome (no sense beating around the bush since I'm being brutally honest here), and  I think it's time to share as much of that awesomeness as possible.  This makes me a little crazy, 'cause I want as many outlets as possible to get that awesomeness out.  Being mostly self taught, with no scholastic culinary training, my resume looks like I put a list of jobs and hobbies painted on the side of a barn, and threw darts at it while blindfolded and drunk; and I'm not just talking food jobs (metal sculptor, warehouse worker, wrought iron, cabinet and furniture maker).  It seems random, but it's not. The idea of career is usually relatively linear in our society. I think that sucks.  I want my story to have some quantifiable success in order to inspire others that want to kick the American educational system in the teeth and go there own way, rather than through the excessively bureaucratic, neurotic, comatose public school system inspired by the Prussian model that incidentally lead to Hitler and the rise of Nazism.   That is to me the freedom that we fight for, the freedom to follow our curiosity to the limits of our imagination.

Let's be even more honest. While I think that cooking is largely a craft and almost never art, I, personally, am still an artist in temperament and desire.  I want to cook food that I like and want to eat, inspired by my view of the world and the food I have tasted and loved and share it to make a decent living. 

What's stopping me?!?! And how does shutting down PigWizard and traveling off to Europe for a year square with that??

Well, me of course.  And I haven´t figured out on how to put it all together.

A restaurant seems like the natural choice, but I hate working every night and missing the sunset.  I talk a lot about a butchershop also, but that doesn't allow me to put food on a plate for you very often. It's not like I watch every single sunset or want to, but I hate the idea of not having the choice.  I'm loathe to commit to one thing because I like doing so many different things, which is something I've dealt with my whole life (I might have gone to college for particle physics if I had learned about it before I left high school.) A lot of people have tried to tell me that I have ADHD or some other attention problem, but that diagnosis is a load of malarkey shat by the same Prussian model I mentioned earlier.  I am a creator, not an automaton. 

But that is not really a good enough reason, it's just an example of the kind of thinking that I'm trying to work out on this trip.  And that's why I haven't written much, because I've been in the deep dark recesses of my brain, hauling out some some moldy ideas, and trying to square them up with our future.

Artists, at their core, are philosophers by nature if not by words.  They must look at the world from multiple perspectives, and either frequently or occasionally, vomit up some sort of mish-mash from the experience of life. I say vomit, because it is involuntary most of the time, and my aversion to vomit keeps me from being only occasionally ill, as in writing this lengthy and largely unnecessary explanation of why I haven't written more.  There is also some deeply rooted bitterness that I am working through, but I´m not hauling that out in public, just acknowledging that it´s there.

So there. On to more interesting things.

One of the reasons we went to Extremadura, considered by most everyone in Barcelona to be the grundle or taint of Spain, is because of the pigs.  Loads of them, eating acorns, getting salted and becoming the most sublime of cured hams, Jamon Iberico Bellota.  In the states, a leg of average quality bellota will set you back a minimum of $900, because there is only one producer in all of Spain that is allowed by the USDA to export to the States. In Spain, even trying your hardest, at the most touristy stall of la Boqueria, buying the most grand reserve of reserves is about $480.  I'm sure that the USDA requires them to be shipped refrigerated, because the fact that the salted and cured legs have been shipped around the Mediterranean without refrigeration for thousands of years  is irrelevant.  The American observance of excessive cleanliness is part of what is making us fat and unhealthy, in my well read and educated opinion, but I'll save that for another post.

So we were surrounded by pigs, and pig farms, and of course there were hams everywhere.  Every bar, liquor store, convenience store, and grocery store had jamones from various regions and of various qualities. At Carrefour, the Spanish equivalent of a SuperWalmart, they are treated like babies waiting for adoption by Angelina Jolie, with nursemaids hovering over them, keeping them properly separated, wiping their butts, and changing their little cone diapers when they fill with too much dripping-olive-oil-like-fat.

Then there are the xarcuteria/charcuteria stores, lined floor to ceiling with swaths of swine, veritable temples of worship to products of porcine persuasion.  The most important hire for a wedding is not the bartender or the band, it is the jamon carver, and that's all he/she does.  Trims and slices leg after leg after leg of jamon.  Big weddings will have more than one jamon carver, since in most of Europe you don't go to a wedding unless you can fork out enough cash in an envelope to cover the cost of your meal plus a little extra.  Spain without jamon would be like Japan without rice.

But why is jamon so important?

During the later centuries of Islamic occupation and rule over  most of the Iberian peninsula, eating pork became synonymous with being Spanish, and partly a sort of political and religious rebellion against the Muslim law prohibiting the eating of pork.  Spanish hams were popular long before that though, praised even by the Romans, so giving up pork, and all of it's wonderful parts, was like forced conversion (something the zealots took to heart during the Inquisition), and love of jamon became a poster child of defiance and proof of where your loyalties lie.  That's a couple thousand or more years of acorny pork fat flowing through the hearts and minds of Iberians. 

Freshly Stripped Cork Oak

It is also about the relationship between animal and environment. Since slaughter was traditionally a winter time activity before the advent of refrigeration, piglets are born in the early spring,  and acorns fall of the tree in the fall, it is natural that the pigs are healthiest and most plump at the beginning of winter.  The acorns themselves are critical also. The acorns of the two predominant varieties of oak, Holm and Cork, have been eaten by people of the region during times of famine, and are high in oleic acids, similar to olive oil, which is linked to the positive effects of the Mediterranean diet.  This leads to a higher proportion of monounsaturated fats, which is less prone to rancidity by oxidation than polyunsaturated fats (which helps when you are going to hang a ham for 2-4 years), and supposedly better for you, although I personally (as well as a lot of doctors that don't get a lot of headlines) don't buy into the cholesterol theory of heart disease.

(Ok, I have to take a tangent here.  The hardening of the arteries leading to heart attacks is often attributed to by the depositing of saturated fats on the artery walls.  The question that most people don´t bother to ask, is why do these fats start collecting on the artery wall in the first place, considering that our liver produces a large percentage of said fats and that they are essential to health in the right proportion?  Cholesterol on the artery walls is a symptom, and the heart attack is a reaction to that symptom, but cholesterol is not the root cause. The reason you don't know the whole story is because there is a lot of money to be made on your ignorance.  Big Pharma, hospitals, clinics, magazines, insurance, stock holders and pension funds make a LOT of money by convincing Americans to feel good about taking medicine rather than feel bad about not changing unhealthy lifestyles.  ¨Eat all the McDonald's you want, just take these 50 different pills and have octople bypass surgery and you'll be right as rain!¨  Also, web searches are based on advertising, not fact, so much of the data that people see most often is heavily biased.  Use Google Scholar instead.)

So, despite the fact that we are here in Spain in the summer, and no pigs are slaughtered or salted on the farm in the summer, I did get a better understanding about the origin and importance of jamon.  One thing I learned for sure is that there is no way for me to bring it home, either in my suitcase or by making it myself.  The production does not translate across the ocean, because the conditions here are a large part of what makes it great. 

Cooking and eating are very emotionally driven activities, the best return a cook can ask for is joy and gratitude.  I am grateful for the small amount of praise and attention my own work has gotten, but I think I need to appreciate that and many other things more often, and enjoy what I've got with a little more regularity rather than looking for more. Maybe that will clear my head to help me figure out what the next step is. So, I'm going to tip my hat to Mary Schley, and produce a little list, which is in no particular order.  Do not in any way feel like you have to read it all.

Some of the things I am grateful for: my hands and the pleasure I get using them to create things; the chance to travel, the deliciousness and versatility of pork; the internet for keeping in touch and nerding out on research papers; my health; great coffee; my mom, brother, and grandmother; bacon; learning to type in fifth grade; the writing of Frank Herbert and Henry David Thoreau; being born in the US; the work of Isaac Newton; dinners with friends; beach parties; my friendship with Dustin and Karen; the lyrics of Tom Waits; sunsets; beer; gas stoves; big bathrooms where your butt doesn't stick out of the shower when you have to bend over to pick up the soap; toilet paper; BSF&W; mushroom foraging; spearfishing; braised cheeks; PBS cooking shows; hugs; rye whiskey; pickled sardines; Jamaican rooibos tea at Acme; lots of passionate friends that inspire me; pencils and paper; my martial arts training; my many, many mentors, including but not limitied to: Kurt Schmitz, James Campbell, Todd Fisher, Craig von Foerster, Dory Ford, JackieThurman, Ian James; good balance and flexibility; my guitars, even though I can't play them yet; foie gras; Nicolas, for giving me the nickname PigWizard; sodium nitrate and nitrite; ribeye steaks; tools made to last a lifetime; knowing how to use a chainsaw without losing and arm; hot tubs; Dansko clogs; that my brother didn't die when I put him alone, in a canoe, on the swollen-by-snowmelt Colorado River; the Bill of Rights; and cheese, glorious cheese.

The first will go last: My beautiful wife, Baby Bird (Brain) Nicole, for marrying me, and for telling me how much she loves me a thousand times a day, along her gracious and loving family, for treating me like one of their own from the very beginning.