Sweet & Smoky Bacon-Onion Marmalade


I love a good, classic burger. High quality grassfed meat should be able to stand on its own. But sometimes I like to get creative. Sauteeing some maitake mushrooms, adding bacon strips and BBQ sauce, throwing on some grilled chile peppers. You name it, I've probably tried it. My newest creation, however, trumps them all. Sweet & Smoky Bacon-Onion Marmalade. It’s hard to describe how good this stuff is. When one of my friends tried it for the first time last night it was one of the best culinary experiences in my life. He took a heaping spoonful, chewed slowly and swallowed. His face went momentarily blank and then, all of the sudden, he lit up in a huge smile and exclaimed, “That was the best bite of anything I’ve had in my entire life!”. We all started laughing and I knew it was really as good as I thought it was. 

It also helps that the burgers are pretty damn good. I take ⅔ ground beef (100% Highland grassfed) and ⅓ ground pastured pork (Berkshire) and add salt liberally. That’s really all the meat needs. For cheese I prefer a medium-aged cheddar (4-9 months). Last night I used Prairie Breeze, which comes from Milton Creamery out in Iowa. Milton is operated by a Mennonite family (the Mussers) that collects only hand-stripped milk from nearby Amish farm families. It’s the best cheddar I’ve ever had, period.

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When Old Texts Go Bad. The Cow: Dairy Husbandry and Cattle Breeding


The Cow: Dairy Husbandry and Cattle Breeding by M.M. Milburn

I mentioned previously that I've been reading a lot of old farming books. This past weekend I came across an example of "old texts gone bad", as I like to say. These are instances where clearly the author's day and age got the better of his beliefs. I always wonder what madness we believe in today that will be ridiculed in the future, but for now I'll just do my best to avoid the madness of years gone by.

In this particular instance I was reading "The Cow: Dairy Husbandry and Cattle Breeding" by M.M. Milburn. The book was printed in 1852 and is available for free courtesy of Open Library or Google Books online. There's lots of old texts available for free on the internet, you just have to track them down. Usually, they're more helpful than more recently published books. However, Milburn went off on a tangent about 50 pages in that really makes me wonder just how much of his other information I should trust.

It starts when he writes "Some very grave facts have been arranged and classified to show that when a pure-bred animal has once been impregnated by one of another, such impreganted animal is thereby for ever afterwards a cross, and may be expected to produce a cross-bred, and no more pure-bred young."

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