In the beginning, with pancetta

Good morning and a Happy New Year. Personally, I've never understood the reason to write blogs, but then I've never been a writer. Maybe I've had a Saul on the way to Damascus moment; maybe I just want to get famous and rich, maybe it's the camera I got for Christmas. Anyway, I start at the beginning of a new year as the writer of a blog and we will see how far this goes.
I live in the upper Midwest, just north of the Twin Cities. Me, my wife, my daughter, four dogs, four cats and my sourdough starter Oscar (he's messy). I have always had a fascination with preserved foods: the crisp bite of a pickle, the creamy/spicy taste of a well made sausage, the earthy sense of place in different cheeses. Along the way, I've become a consumer of regional and homemade beers and a sourdough fanatic.
I don't envision this blog as a recipe book. The first couple times with a new food, I tend to follow recipes precisely, to see how it's supposed to taste, before I start to play with it. Since I'm not sure how copy write laws work, I won't give the recipe I'm following , only the process and the source. If the source is a cookbook, I will also provide a link to Amazon (see above about getting rich). For example, the picture at the top of this blog is a pancetta (Italian bacon) that I just made following a recipe for Michael Rulman's book “Charcuterie”. I started with a 6 pound piece of pork belly that I got from a Chinese market. If you have access to a Chinese market it's a wonderful thing. The meat counter is what I remember the old fashioned butcher shops to be, with pork bellies, whole ox tails, soup bones, fresh ducks and pigs feet. I then cured it in the refrigerator for a week with a dry cure of spices, herbs, kosher salt and pink salt (a nitrate which both flavors and preserves the meat). I then rolled and tied the meat. I have a workout room in my garage that in the winter I keep at 50° and the constant cool temperature seems to work well for air drying meats. So for a month next to my heavy bag hung the pancetta; luckily, I never confused the two. The pancetta turned out remarkably well and I am looking forward to trying other recipes in the book as well. The pancetta was made pre-camera so in subsequent blogs, I will take pictures of the processes.