Hacking It Up

Warning: Do not read this post if you are ill, squeamish, currently suffering from morning sickness or sea sickness, easily grossed out, generally unstable, or just plain annoyed by crazy nutcases. Because that's what we are. Crazy nutcases. No one here but us chickens.

You have been warned.





Now, wanna see what we did today?


(You should say "no".)



You sure?


You asked for it.






(You were afraid I was going to post pictures of puke, weren't you?)

What you are looking at (or trying not to) is a hind quarter of a cow.

Not a nice meaty, grain-finished steer, but rather a dairy cow. A retired dairy cow. An old, retired dairy cow. An old, retired dairy cow who is now residing in my freezer.

And yes, like the crazy nutcases we are, we bought the quarter and processed it ourselves. Because we're crazy, do-it-ourselfer, back-to-the-land, cheapskate nutcases.

Thankfully, Nathan did not sling it on the table and tell me to "have at it." He did the hacking and sawing and bulk trimming, and I did the chunking and trimming and grinding and packaging and freezing and canning.

(That bright yellow fat, by the way, is the result of the fact that this is a dairy cow of a yellow-fat sort of breed (one of the reasons people like Angus so much: white fat. Cow racists.) that lived on grass most of her life.)




I'm so glad for this power grinder that we borrowed for the job. I can't imagine double-grinding those 25 pounds of burger with one of those little hand grinders or even a grinder that fits on a mixer. I shudder to think of it.

As it is, we spent several hours cutting and grinding.

He cut...



...and I ground.





I'm tired.

And now, I'm working on canning up some of it with my finicky pressure canner, and I have more meat in the fridge that needs canning and freezing for stew meat, after Nathan gets back with some more freezer paper. (Talk about foresight: Yeah, we're going to process some beef, and I somehow didn't think to get more freezer paper and bags... I ran out of paper after the first few roasts, and only barely managed to scrounge up enough bags for the most of ground meat.)

It is a gorgeous beautiful day outside --56 degrees!-- and I'm inside canning. I'd go out for a walk, but I'd be afraid my canner would blow up my kitchen... But hey. My freezer is bursting with meat, and that's saying something. We don't usually get to be so fortunate as to actually have much meat to eat. Even if it is an old cow.