Activities at Home

This is the project I just finished up this morning, after working on it for nearly a week.  My husband works in a small factory where they do everything from slaughter the animals to making sausage, ham, bacon, etc.  By “small” I mean that they do 100-150 sheep and 8-10 cattle per day, and 125 or so pigs once a week.  Last week on Friday he was working in the boning room, where they break down the carcasses, and brought me home a big bag of “dog tucker”–meaty brisket bones!  We don’t mind eating that sort of dog food.  I have  a stock pot that holds about 25 quarts/liters, but it still took two rounds to get all those bones cooked.  I filled the pot as full as possible with bones, then added water nearly to the brim.  When the meat was cooked, I pulled the bones out and picked off the meat, then put the bones back in, with a bit of vinegar to draw out the minerals, and cooked it again for several hours.  Then, I strained out the bones and bits of other things, and set the pot of broth outside overnight to chill.  In the morning, the tallow had solidified and was easy to get off, so I did that, and scraped off the broth that was stuck to it.  The tallow went into a pan to boil off the water that was left so it will keep, and I’ll use it for greasing griddles.  I heated the broth till it was totally liquid again–it gelled nicely–and put it in jars and processed it at 10 pounds pressure for 25 minutes.  The results:  A big pot of soup for Sunday potluck dinner, with broth and meat, which also lasted us for two more meals; four meals’ worth of cooked meat in the freezer; another meal with meat from the second pot; about 10 quarts of broth in jars for adding to soup or making gravy when I need it later (my version of “convenience food!); and lots of tallow for greasing pans.  One of the boys also wants to make tallow candles, and Esther has her eye on it for making doughnuts!  We’ll see.

Esther and I invented a new dessert this evening: Pumpkin Crisp!  Gayle sorted through the pumpkins (in New Zealand, winter squash are called pumpkins) the other day and found several that were going bad.  Some were beyond salvage, but a couple were still usable.  We decided to try something new with a Butternut.  We peeled it, and sliced it into pieces about an inch by two inches and 1/4 inch thick (they varied a lot, though), then tossed about two or three quarts of pieces with half a cup of sugar and a sprinkling each of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and ginger.  We put it in the casserole dish with about half a cup of water and baked it for 45 minutes or so, then made a topping like we use for apple crisp (1 cup flour, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 cup butter) and baked for another half an hour.  We served it with whipped cream.  Yummy!