Bought a pig

Having the freedom and resources to travel have been the great advantage of retirement and I suppose to a lesser extent most of our lives. I think you learn so much from escaping your own circumstances and exploring other places and people. I started documenting our experiences in a travel blog beginning in 2016, but I was including posts since I began writing online on these experiences in other blogs. Lately, there just haven’t been the opportunities to write on travel because of the pandemic and related health vulnerabilities. It was our 50th anniversary a week or so ago and we had planned to celebrate with one of those European river tours and also visit a friend at her home. All of this has been shut down for the time being. At our age, it feels like we are losing opportunities.

We bought a pig. Cindy read the Facebook story of a Minnesota hog farmer who was not able to send his pigs to market because of the closing of processing plants. He was going to have to euthanize his animals and just bury the carcasses. He decided to use his Facebook account to sell his animals for $150 and help those purchasing find somewhere to process the animal. After thinking about the situation for a while and seeing if our kids and their families would take some of the meat, we added our name to those wanting to make a purchase. The delay put us well down the list and the farmer had to scour the area for small operations able to butcher his animals and prepare the meat. We finally were able to pick up the 150 pounds of pork yesterday.

I realized that the 130 mile drive to Cadott, WI, was the longest trip we had taken in months and I decided this might be the best opportunity for a Grabe Travels post for some time to come. It had all of the elements of an adventure - unfamiliar territory, uncertainty of circumstances, unique learning opportunities, and pictures of food. 

We spend quite a bit of time in Wisconsin and are familiar with local meat and cheese shops. Cadott was in a different area and the countryside of Wisconsin is beautiful. Nearly wiped out a white tail deer who decided to dart across the road. My finely tuned reflexes and keen ability to spot wildlife saved both the deer and our car. Some of the trip took us through Amish country and we would normally have stopped to have something to eat in another time. Interesting people.

The meat shop was impressive even given our experience with such establishments. One-hundred fifty pounds of pork is a lot. We would not have had the storage capacity and offloading some of the haul to the freezers of our kids. When you purchase an entire animal, you acquire delicacies you tend not purchase in the grocery store. We passed on the heart and the tongue so I am not certain what happened to these sources of protein. Perhaps they were ground into the sausage or brats or were sold to customers interested in these delicacies. Here is a recipe for ham hocks just in case you wonder how you might consume pig knuckles. The ham hock and collard greens slow cooker dish sounds great and I think I may have eaten something like this before. It sounds like the type of thing I now enjoy.

We used three coolers of this size and a couple of smaller coolers to get everything home.

I did promise a food picture. We had bacon and eggs for breakfast.