I was reflecting recently, as I made a complete butchery of removing the skin from a shoulder cut that I will turning into pulled pork today, that butchery isn’t a fair word when you mean “a friggin’ mess.” Maybe I’m just a little sensitive since Four Corners did their exposé on Indonesian abbatoirs, but I have long felt (and I’m not alone) that since I derive my own sustenance and life from an animal, I should treat its gift to me with as much respect as possible. And good butchers do just that. They have the tools and training to prepare cuts in ways that I never could.
So, as I spent a good thirty minutes wrestling the skin off that “easy-carve” joint (not facilitated by the cat demanding her cut), I decided that I wasn’t just going to waste the excess that the recipe told me to dispose of. I made my first attempt at crackling. It wasn’t awesome, but it was good enough. And I hope that using more and more of the animal, instead of just the bits I was focused on can make up for the fact that I wasn’t a very skillful butcher.