I’m making it official, just so you can hold me to it: 2013 is the year of PMC 2.0. Over the past few years I’ve been able to establish a good teaching rhythm by offering four to six classes per month. I’ve pooled together an impressive team of talented instructors to teach our classes, and I’ve finally started teaching classes as well. I’ve been lucky enough to have an ever-growing team of volunteers to help package and wrap and set up and clean up for each of our classes as well. This has been a tremendous help! The PMC is finally starting to feel like a mostly well-oiled machine. Which is always a good reason to start rethinking and reinventing the original idea.
With that in mind, I’ve got a couple of new projects on the horizon that I hope to get done this year. First, I’ll be working to expand classes elsewhere in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest, with the goal of developing a training program to help people outside of Portland start their own Meat Collectives. Second, I’ll be conducting my first high-school workshop—a week-long series, in fact, that will teach 10 highschool students how the meat they eat gets to their tables. Third, I’ll be redoing the PMC website so that it is a much more useful and efficient resource for all of us. And lastly, I’ll finally be making those t-shirts and aprons everyone’s been asking me for.
How am I going to get all of this done while working other jobs and trying to maintain my other career as a writer? Well, it’s going to take a lot of dedication and help. In order to not raise prices on our classes, it’s also going to take a little bit more in the way of financial resources, which is why I’ll be launching a Kickstarter Campaign in the coming months to help raise money for PMC 2.0. Please keep an eye out! I’m excited to see where I can take the PMC this year and in the years to come, and I hope that each of you will be able to be a part of that evolution in some way or another.
Meanwhile, here’s the new Jan/Feb/Mar class schedule! Still to be added to the schedule is a long awaited beef class (just finalizing the dates now), another charcuterie series, and our very first Kosher Chicken Slaughter Workshop! We’ll announce those as we finalize them. Sign up fast before they sell out. And that’s not just a marketing attempt. Our classes really do sell out quickly once we send this newsletter and post classes online, so act fast!
Cheers,
-Camas Davis
Class Offered Multiple Dates: Jan 24, Feb 12
Sausage Making
TIME: 5:00-8:00pm
LOCATION: TBA
Grilling season may be over, but sausage-making season is year-round. Come learn the art of preparing French, German, Spanish, and Italian-style links, among many other varieties, with Camas Davis, founder of the PMC. Students will learn how to select the right meat and trimmings from the appropriate muscle groups, and how to grind, flavor and stuff their sausage of choice. Students will go home with more than enough links for their frying pans and freezers, plus recipes.
Want to learn all things duck? Join French-trained Camas Davis for an evening of le canard. With Davis’ guidance, each student will break down their own duck, with several delicious end results in mind: duck confit, duck rillette, duck prosciutto, and more. Once students have worked through their bird, Davis will walk them through the important combination of salt, fat, and duck meat, covering the various ways in which students can cure and preserve their ducks. After tasting examples of those cured and preserved results, students will go home with plenty of recipes and duck meat to explore on their own at home.
In this class, students will learn how to break a lamb into its respective, delicious parts, with instructors Adam Sappington (chef and owner of Country Cat Dinnerhouse) and French-trained Camas Davis, founder of the Portland Meat Collective. Students will find out how to tie a leg of lamb, how it is that lamb can become ham, why lamb makes merguez taste so good, and how to carve a perfect lamb “popsicle.” At the end of the class students will go home with a bag full of meat for their enjoyment. (NOTE: This is also a good class for hunters who want to learn to process their own deer.)
Class offered on multiple dates: Jan 20, Jan 26, Feb 3, March 10, March 31
Basic Pig Butchery
TIME: 1-5pm
LOCATION: TBA
Learn the lost art of home butchery from French-trained Camas Davis, founder and owner of the Portland Meat Collective. For this four-hour class, Camas will teach students how to split sides of pork into primals, and how to cut those primals into cookable cuts like ribs, tenderloins, ham roasts, chops, and coppas. The class will also include tips on how to cook and cure various cuts, and everyone will go home with their share of meat.
