Ham Sandwich Indicted!

Ramp season is rapidly fading, so last weekend I stocked up on a bunch while I had the chance.  Since I still had some pickled from last year, I decided to try something a little different.  Inspired by the almighty internet, I tried my hand at making a ramp confit. To confit something is to cook an ingredient in fat, then store it in that same fat. Most typically, meats are confited--duck or goose confit is fairly common, and while it sounds fancy, it's essentially duck pieces slowly cooked in rendered duck fat then submerged and stored in the cooking fat.  It is an ancient means of preservation, as the fat keeps out air and bacteria, and was used (back in the day) to store food without refrigeration.  Vegetables can also be preserved via confit, and there are recipes out there using mushrooms, onions and garlic.  With ramps being part of the same family as onions and garlic, it made sense to give it a go and try to hang on to ramp season a little whil...

For this past weekend's adventure, I headed east to Newark, OH with my equally adventuresome brother to partake in some honey extracting.  Out in God's Country, in a garage heated up to 90 or so degrees by a wood-burning stove, I met the incredibly informative and entertaining Aaron Kirkingburg and his assorted  family members.  Aside from an extensive knowledge of hunting, fishing, and trapping, Aaron's been keeping bees since he was a kid, and was happy to show this wanna-be homesteader what goes into a honey harvest.  For the record, it's a lot of work, and the amount of honey collected is entirely dependent on the weather, other natural elements (predators, parasites), and the temperament of the bees themselves. The whole art of beekeeping is another story entirely, so I'm just going to focus on the process used to extract the honey from the honeycombs.  When my brother and I arrived at the Kirkingburg farm, Aaron had already star...