In the last week or so, I’ve made pork paté de campagne, vanilla bean ice cream, wild cranberry sauce, 4 quarts of duck stock, 2 ducks worth of duck confit, cured then confit’d 11 wild ducks in domestic duck fat, made roughly 3 lbs of moose hickory smoked jerky, 3 lbs of elk hickory smoked jerky, cured a leg roast of wild boar, roasted a chicken, made chicken stock, made a batch of ‘sauce bigarade’ that I hated and threw out, blanched the zest of 3 citrus fruit, baked 4 pizzas made from scratch, made 1 batch of pizza sauce from scratch, a garden onion compotée, baked 2 baguettes [which will be 4 by tomorrow morning], made a batch of wild cranberry ice cream, crème anglaise, and baked chocolate lava cakes – on top of the usual day-to-day cooking. I dug a few hundred pounds of red potatoes, about 10 lbs of russian fingerling potatoes, 2 rutabagas, some huge carrots, half a 5 gallon bucket of beets, 1 wild mushroom, 2 huge butternut squash [my first!], and 5 ears of corn.
Oh yeah, and I dropped the slalom course in crappy weather, and pulled the boat and lift out of the lake. The previous week I’d been up a few times before 5am to go goose hunting, and helped butcher and pack about 11 ducks and 107 geese, and made about 22lbs of goose sausage.
And work’s been really busy. So basically, I have been getting up, working, from 6am to 10pm, and then sleeping. I’m tired.