Meat

Monday evening, while Monica and Zach headed into town to play games with a group of teenage homeschoolers, Matthew and I and Logan took on a quite different task. After coming back from Chile to an empty freezer (Ok, so it was empty before we left), we were really feeling the drawback of having missed out on hunting season. However, about 2 weeks ago, our neighbor across the street pulled his truck into our driveway and unloaded not one but TWO deer for us! Praise the Lord! We initially took some meat off and cut up a couple roasts and ground up some hamburg but then the weather was so cold that the deer hanging in the garage were frozen and it was hard to even cut off a chunk of meat. But, the last couple days, temperatures finally rose above freezing so last night we tackled the big deer and got it all skinned, cut up, ground up, wrapped up, and froze up=) Matthew did 95% of the work and Logan and I helped when we could.

Logan has enjoyed this process from start to finish....

Matthew's creative pulley system....

Getting the skin off....

Alana helped the first time around....

It takes a lot of work to keep that grinder working right....

Logan got to stay up late to help Daddy, his job was to cut the meat into a smaller size to fit into the grinder....

The deer are from inside the city limits of Hot Springs, fed off of nice juicy lawns and have fattened right up for winter. Because there are soooo many of them in town and they are safe where no one can shoot them, the city has hired some men to safely shoot some of them to cut down on the amount that have become a real nuisance. Our neighbor was one of those men - so despite missing hunting season we still will have some meat!