Meat

Do you sense a theme here? Milk last week, meat this week. Hmm. What does my life revolve around? It couldn’t be feeding a lot of hungry people, could it?

We’ve processed two cows in the past month. One was an old dairy cow that we boned out and ground up because she was too tough for much else. The other was a 1 1/2-year-old steer that we raised. He was on the small side for eating, but because of his bad habit of jumping fences, we decided that he had better jump into the freezer before he caused any more trouble with neighbors. We have a lot of meat in the freezer! I thought I’d share a few pictures of some of the things we did with all that meat.

First, here is a picture of Simon running it through the mincer. We normally use that table for school in the mornings, but the days that we were working on meat, we set up a table in the living room and used that, instead.

I made a lot of the meat into meatloaf. I packed it into plastic-wrap lined loaf pans, froze it, then popped it out and put two loaves into each ziploc bag in the freezer. We’ve already had a couple of easy meals from that.

Another lot of meat got shaped into hamburger patties and frozen, then put into bags, free-flow. I put plastic wrap between each two layers of patties on the cookie sheet, and stacked them up about four layers high. It wasn’t too hard to pop them apart with a butter knife to transfer to a bag when they were frozen.

I also saved out a lot that day to make into meatballs the next day, which are also in the freezer. I guess we forgot to get a picture of them!

Another lot of meat I cooked up right away and froze that way. It sure is handy to pull out a package of frozen, cooked hamburger and throw it into my soup or whatever! I liked it so well after doing the first cow that I cooked up a lot more from the second one. I was also going to can a lot of it, but I got sick and spent the day in bed, instead, so Esther just divided the meat up and froze it raw.

We saved all the bones, too. We cut them into smaller pieces with a power saw, and divided them into bags according to the amount that will fit into my biggest pot. I fill the pot with water and add some vinegar, then simmer for a day or two. Then, I pressure can it and we have the beginnings of instant soup or gravy!

We got all these bones from the old cow! I didn’t make it through all of them before it was time to do the steer, but had friends who were happy to take some.

One of the evenings we were working on meat, I didn’t have much time to cook but needed a nourishing meal quickly. I opened these jars–beans, stew beef, and broth–and made a quick, delicious stew.

Then end product: I had some black beans in the fridge, and added a package of pasta. We enjoyed it that evening, and there was enough left for men’s lunches the next day or two.