I want to preface this post with the disclaimer that I don’t eat like this all the time. Currently my favorite snacks are, in no particular order: candy crisp apples, toasted mochi sweetened with honey, roasted beets dressed in vinegar, and kale chips. So it’s not as if I’m having lard biscuits for breakfast, lard pies for dessert, and lard snacks in between. Because I really only do that once or twice a week, and even then, I share. Sharing is key.

But sometimes, lard just begs to be made into a snack. Once all that beautiful, ambrosial liquid fat has been rendered from leaf lard, you’re left with several hefty handfuls of cracklings: little indigestible bits – crunchy, porky and irresistible. Dressed in your choice of seasonings, cracklings are wonderful as snacks or mashed up and spread on toast. In the fall or winter when I’m more likely to have roasted or confited garlic on hand, I mix the cracklings with the garlic for a classic Southwestern French treat. The softened, sweet garlic blends easily with the crispy bits of fat.
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When you’re looking to bake a batch of cookies for friends who are butchers, it is generally advisable that the cookies be a) made from lard and b) fashioned like pigs. It is, in my opinion the gift for the butcher who has everything.

When I first bought this cookie cutter, I tried cutting everything into the shape of a pig: biscuits, blocks of cotton tofu, premade squares of mochi – you name it, I tried to piggify it. Really, though, a cookie cutter shaped like a pig is good for one thing only: cookies. The nooks and crannies in the cutter can only keep their shape if the material is thin and relatively solid, like that of a rolled out cookie dough.
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I didn’t get around to posting last week, but I have an extremely good excuse that I plan to employ again a year from now.

It was my birthday.

I baked this cake.

Or rather, I baked myself this birthday liver pâté.

To celebrate, I took a train out of the city to spend the day with a close friend who lives in Princeton. I greeted her at the train station with a sheepish grin on my face. Our birthdays are usually cause for part-reflection, part-lamentation over the state of our lives. Year after year, we never seem to accomplish as much as we’d like or visit enough of the wondrous places in this wide world. Still, we almost always try our best, and that has to count for something.

The night was dark and snowy. Ample flakes fell relentlessly as the evening progressed. Inside, we cranked up the thermostat to a toasty eighty degrees and lit a few candles to mark the occasion. A good crusty loaf accompanied the birthday pâté, and a glass or two of wine made the evening considerably more celebratory.

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