Been too busy with work and meat this week to post much but it's been fun (the meat part). Good sales this week... I bought 3 briskets, a pork loin, a picnic ham, 4 turkey thighs, some salmon / tuna, and took some pork jowls out of the freezer to make some Guanciale. I also made my first sausage, but since I never keep it simple, I made bratwurst, bockwurst and breakfast sausage. My conclusion: pusherman (CRG) got me. Can't wait to make more bockwurst. But that's another thread.
So... I took the pork loin, ground about 1/4 of it to make 2lb of ground lean for dumplings, cut about 2 lb for some nice pork chops now in the freezer, and the other 4 lbs are currently curing in my fridge as Canadian bacon. I'm not a fan of the sweeter bacons, so I decided to use Ruhlman / Polcyn's savory belly bacon recipe but added some fresh thyme. Essentially this is MTQ + garlic (mine was smoked) + peppercorns + bay leaves + the thyme.
Guanciale (from the Italian word for cheek, guancia) -- this is from Ruhlman / Polcyn page 47. Seems like an excessive amount of salt / cure (like 3x what i'd expect) but we'll see how it comes out. This is basically a pancetta recipe (unsmoked bacon).
Pork jowl on the left. 1/2 pork loin on the right.

A little flavor. The garlic was cold smoked.

The pork jowl. I wanted to eat this raw. I felt bad salting this, thinking there may have been a more savory way to cook this, but I'm looking on the bright side: I split this hog w/ my friend and she's got the other jowl!

Ok, so here's where we are now... curing in in the fridge. Canadian bacon on the left and guanciale on the right.

more to come, but not for a week or so.