Smoked Jowls

I pulled the smoked jowl from the back of fridge where I'd stored it for four months. It was fine, no mold. It had been salt cured then smoked and would probably last forever. An experiment to see about keeping meat through the winter. Life on a whale ship, bully beef and pork in brine; sea biscuits, which last a very long time if you can keep them dry, Lemon juice in the grog, to keep your teeth from falling out; two years or more without touching port, dried peas and salted pork. Smoked jowls that keep this well, I can have cracklings and beans through the winter. I order beans from Adobe Mills, Dove Creek, Colorado, black beans, pintos, and a red bean they call, to my delight, red beans. While I'm ordering, I get five pounds of grits and five pounds of cornmeal from Logan Turnpike, in northern Georgia. The best grits I've ever eaten. John Thorne is one of the great food writers ever, and I never would have thought of cooking those sausage casings and making a sandwich with them, but with a slice of onion and tomato, it's one of the fine treats ever. Recycled pig intestines, who knew? Foggy morning, so I drove down the creek, then into town on Route 52, spent some time at the library. Then the pub and Cory gave me a free bowl of beef stew so they could clean the pot and start another batch. There are some cheap tenderized steaks at Kroger, so I get a package of those, and some wild-caught cod fillets to make breakfast cakes. A back-up bottle of whiskey, and I have plenty of tobacco and papers, I won't have to go out for days. I saturate the sub-sill at the back door with bug killer, to get rid of the carpenter ants, and consider how I'm going to rebuild a very tight and strong replacement; several ideas come to mind, and I run through them for the most elegant and inexpensive solution. I had this same problem once on a cabin threshold, but I had to replace an entire log underneath, here I just need to get things level when I install a new piece of sub-floor, build up a water-shedding layer of something that doesn't rot, and top it with one of those compressible gaskets that meet the bottom of a door. Piece of cake.