The ingredients for pizza, when sourced from the farm, take a long time to put together. If I start at the beginning I have to grow the tomatoes, milk the cow, and grow the hog and butcher it. If I start from the mid-point it is still alot of work. The cheese has to made, tomatoes canned as sauce, and canadian bacon cured and smoked. Pizza day the wheat has to be ground into flour and the dough mixed and kneaded.
Any way you look at it, there are a lot of steps in pizza. This morning I grated some cheese and chopped some canadian bacon for the freezer, which will make the next pizzas a little less time consuming. But food is time consuming.
In reality I spend the majority of my days, as do some of my helpers, consumed with food preparation. From planting and weeding the garden to feeding animals, we work on food in come capacity. Mornings we make cheese, sprout wheat, dehydrate chicken stock, or preserve food. We spend hours every day preparing meals from scratch.
Just this morning, I worked on the following food projects and I made breakfast.
- Processed ham, bacon, pancetta, and canadian bacon that was smoked yesterday. Some were cut up and froze, some soaked in water, and some hung to age.
- Made butter and canned it for the summer when the cows are dry.
- Grated cheese and froze.
- Took minced green onions from the dehydrator and stored away.
- Dehydrated sprouted wheat.
- Stocked the snack trays with dehydrated kale chips. Stored the rest for winter.
- Pulverized the dried celery to celery powder. The celery is growing in the hoop house and we are harvesting the tops for drying and then making celery powder. The celery powder will be used to cure meat in place of pink salt in the future.
So why do we do it - well I have written about that before.
