The head cheese is all gone.  We served it at our bar, on our homemade charcuterie menu, as is, just a few slices in a board with some of our homemade bread.

We also cut it into bigger chunks, breaded and deep fried it, serving it with some of last summer’s raspberry jam, pickled green tomatoes and a butter basted egg.

Now that it is gone we have moved on to rillettes.  A traditional french preparation of cooking meat, usually pork, very slowly in fat until the meat is so tender that it shreds apart. Its then chilled enough for the fat to congeal and form a paste.  Typically it’s served at room temperature with grilled or toasted bread.

We are serving the rillettes of Hoosier with pickled green beans, which we pickled last fall, first of the season chives from our rooftop garden, prunes we soaked in lots of booze with some sugar and grilled bread.

We are scraping the bottom of Hoosier’s barrel; all that remains is some smoked skin and bones, which we will soon use.