The Nasty Bits »  Recipes and stories for everything but the
oink.    [Photographs: Chichi Wang]  Two months ago I began an
apprenticeship at Fleisher's Meat Shop in Kingston, New York,
that started with a single premise: Could Joshua Applestone and
his team of butchers teach me, your humble nasty bits columnist,
to break down a pig in one week or less? It took me a week to
learn how to butcher a pig, but what I couldn't have anticipated
are the months I needed to recover from my time upstate.  What
started as a simple goal became a turning point in my meat-
obsessed life. I loved everything about butchery: the sound of
cracking bones and cartilage, the thrill of digging my fingers
into inches of pristine fatback and feeling all that creamy fat
lodging deep within my nails. I loved the aroma of raw meat:
fresh, feral, and bloody all at once. And when giant hunks of
aged steak were pulled out of the freezer, I loved to lean in
and inhale the smells of meat mastery at its finest.  I loved it
so much, in fact, th