Sad Easter Candy, Kittens, and Pig Parts

For the Easter holiday we gathered at my parents house, and while we had all the Easter favorites, like colorfully decorated eggs, ham and potato salad, adorable children in pretty dresses, and even newborn kittens, we were sadly lacking in the chocolate bunny department.  I remember the good old days when Easter came with sugar highs and upset stomach from gorging on jelly beans and sugar coated marshmallows shaped like fowl.  I'm not sure what happened this year, but when I complained to mom that I didn't get a single chocolate covered marshmallow, she brings me a single mini mellow with a single chocolate chip.  Even though it looked mighty sad, to someone who's been living on celery juice it was delicious.  Now, if only I could have about 50 more!

My nieces did a wonderful job decorating the eggs.  Real eggs, from mom's real chickens.  They were beautiful and very sparkly.  Everything is pretty when it sparkles.  Just ask my nieces, they know.

But really, who needs chocolate when you have kittens that are just one week old.  New kittens are cuteness overload and you don't even have to be asked to smile for the camera.   My parents recently adopted a very friendly cat.  I say adopted, but in reality is started living at their house, so I think she adopted my parents.  Turns out she wasn't one of those rare obese strays like we thought. 

My contribution to the festivities was the ham.  Not long ago I contacted a local farmer and ordered an entire pig, butchered, of course.  We split the frozen meat three ways, but we had one large raw ham which I kept with plans to cook for Easter.  I procrastinated and didn't get the ham from the freezer until the morning before we were to eat it and realized it was much larger than I thought - nearly seventeen pounds!  Seventeen pounds, frozen solid, and meant to be eaten the next day.  After consultation with mom and the inter-web, which have basically the same information, I decided to cook it in my pressure canner, which is also a giant cooker.  I've never cooked with a pressure cooker and couldn't find a recipe for a mostly frozen seventeen pound ham.   Probably because you shouldn't cook a seventeen pound frozen ham.  Anyway, I cooked it for an hour and fifteen minutes and checked the internal temperature.  Forty degrees, the perfect temperature to poison your loved ones.  By this time it's nearly midnight.  I cook it for another hour and twenty minutes and the internal temperature is two hundred degrees, which is too high.  So, after finally getting to bed at 2:30 in the morning, I was pleased to present to the family seventeen pounds of overcooked ham which tasted like a dried up pork chop.  Oh well.  Mom's potato salad was great. 

While I was retrieving the frozen ham from the freezer in the garage, I took the opportunity to do some inventory and found that I have two sets of frozen pig ears.  Why?  Well, when you order a whole pig it comes with the ears and so far I've ordered two pigs, and still have the ears left from the first one.  How long do frozen pig ears last in the freezer?  I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with them.  Pig ear stock, maybe?  Dog chews?

And I have some pig feet, but only two.  What happened to the other feet? 

This scrumptious looking stuff is frozen pig fat.  Since I bought the whole pig, and paid by the pound of it's "live weight," meaning that I already payed for it's fat, I asked for it with plans to make lard for cooking and try to make some soap.  I asked to have the leaf lard, which is the fat from around the internal organs separate since it's good for pastries and anything I don't want to taste "piggy".  Of course, it's still in the freezer since I haven't made time to render it.  Hopefully I do a better job with the lard than I did with the Easter ham.