DON'T BE LAZY -- PREPARE YOUR OWN!
I’m often asked — ‘why do you not eat in restaurant more often?’
The answer I usually use — it’s a health issue. That’s true but it goes way beyond health. It’s anti-aging. If you can limit the poisons you add to your body by breathing and ingestion, you will live longer. When you recognize the benefits of certain foods and combine them to repair your body’s natural immune system, reverse aging occurs.
So, in my household, we bake our own bread, we juice local tropical fruits, we make tea from ginger, lemon grass, and turmeric we grow in the pyramid herb garden, we roast our coffee, we ozonate our drinking water and we make our own sea salt. The sugar we use is either honey or muscavado (raspadura). We make our own coconut oil. And when we ozonate it — it becomes our miracle cure for most everything (from burns to ulcers).
We recently moved to another house in town and now I have my smoker installed and functioning properly. We are currently experimenting with making our own bacon, ham, and Cdn bacon. It’s turned out quite nicely; not only with taste but also the simplicity of production.
Here’s a synopsis of that process.
Homemade bacon and Cdn Bacon or any of our smoked products begins with the salt.
We make our own salt from seawater. The seawater is purified by ozonating a two gallon glass jar of the raw seawater for five (5) min. This kills all the bad organisms and lowers the radiation. Then water is cooked down to salt — basic clean sea salt.
The curing of bacon and Cdn bacon begins with the brine.(dry or wet) We use only our salt and muscavado (Raspadura in Central America) No chemicals allowed. The spice mix we put in the glaze is all natural as well as the coconut milk and pineapple juice. We juice our pineapple to get the juice — we squeeze the coconut milk from the shredded copra (this is also the way we make coconut oil)
The curing process takes 4-5 days. The smoking process takes 4-6 hours. Then like magic, the bacon and the Cdn bacon are finished.
Fish fillets, beef and chicken jerky take less time in the smoker. They are not cured but they are brined; usually for 24 hours. Smoking is usually on racks rather than on hooks and takes less time. All in all, the preservation aspect is good and the flavors are wonderful.
As an aside: we use a vacuum packer and then put our food products in the freezer or refer. Two things happen — if you lose power —no problem it will maintain its freshness for about 2 weeks. If you defrost and then change your mind, you can refreeze without creating any risk of food poisoning. With a vacuum sealed package it adds four times the ‘goodness’ life to ordinary frozen meats.
