Kevin and I decided many years ago that there are things we would rather do ourselves than pay someone else to do. Two of those things requiring the most time and effort are raising a garden and canning vegetables in the summer, and feeding out and butchering our own meat. I don't mean we feed a steer and haul it to the locker when it is ready. I mean Kevin and his dad butcher the meat and his mom and I wrap it. We have evolved exponentially in our technique, thanks to a company called The Home Processor. The job has gotten much more simple over the years with our new equipment, or maybe with practice. We kind of have a system down now. The first thing I typically do is make one big pot of potato soup and one of chili. Butcher day is eventful, and we are all busy at different times throughout the day. I have learned that having food ready for anyone to grab whenever they are between jobs works best for all of us.
The guys do all of the nasty jobs to get the meat ready to be cut up, and then they use their electric meat saw to slice the steaks and roasts. They use a meat tenderizer on the cube steak out in the garage as well. They bring us this meat in these huge, stainless steel bowls we get from the Amish store, and then we wrap it. First the meat gets wrapped in saran wrap, and then butcher paper. We use the industrial sized rolls of these two products, so it goes fairly quickly, all things considered. The packages of meat are labeled with a trusty Sharpie marker. The kids love to do the labeling. They also run back and forth between the garage and the house delivering whatever is needed. Empty bowls, gloves, knife sharpeners, light bulbs, spare parts. They help out however they can. My niece and nephews like to help out as well, so it has become something of a family affair. We try to keep it fun. Butchering has to happen when the weather is cold enough, so sometimes it falls around the holidays. This year we kept Christmas music on while we worked. There was a lot of singing involved.
All of the excess meat is trimmed and cut up for hamburger. They run those pieces of meat through a big meat grinder, twice, and then they change out the attachments on it and run it through the machine a third time, loading the meat into the hamburger bags. This is happy news for us girls because we use to wrap the hamburger along with everything else, one pound at a time, and now it goes directly from the garage to the freezer! Woo hoo!
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| Here are some beef roasts. |
We butcher for some of the same reasons I can vegetables. Besides the hundreds of dollars we save, we like knowing where the meat came from and how it was handled. We like to make our hamburger as lean as possible. We enjoy the security that comes from knowing our children will be fed for another year. I know these projects are a lot work. Believe me, I know. They cost us lots of labor and precious time. I am always so relieved when we are done, but when I look in my pantry or my freezer I feel richly blessed. I think about mothers who wonder where their children's next meal will come from, or who have to make hard decisions at the grocery store when the price of meat is too high. I am thankful that I won't need to think about it for another year. It is so worth it.
