So yesterday before the manhunt at our place (I posted about this on my facebook page) I cut up lard from last year’s pig to render it.  It is still in an effort to clear out space in our freezer.  I last rendered lard 3.5 years’ ago, and it has lasted this long.  I have learned to like cooking with lard for pie crust and for frying.  This time I used a recipe from The Prairie Homestead.  My old trusty crusty crockpot worked well for this, better than our Instant Pot.

The recipe did not describe well how to make cracklings so I pulled up the NYT Cooking recipe and used that for the cracklings, putting them in the oven.

The problem was that I did not realize there was a pinprick hole in the rimmed baking pan I was using.  The oil from the cracklings dripped out onto the floor of the oven and then some dripped further down into where we keep our frying pans

So it was a clean up mess.  No fires though.  And the good things were that I had plenty of paper towels, and it was garbage day.  I got it cleaned up and the cracklings looked good so made two more batches without making too much of a mess.  I got 6 quarts of lard.  The lard on the left is cooling and turning white while as the quarts on the right and still warm.

So now I have at least 3.5 years worth of lard again.  I baked Crackling Corn Bread last night but it was nothing amazing.  I still do not have the courage yet to try to eat a crackling straight up but will soon.