Look at THAT!

Table full of pork!

(Again, sorry for the blurry picture - our camera doesn't take good indoor shots, plus the settings were wrong when this photo was taken.)

That's some of the meat from our recent butchering, about to be cut up and processed for storage in the freezer. We butchered the pig on the Saturday before Christmas.

Now, we're crazy busy canning most of that meat, and making jerky, and eating more meat than we'd normally eat in weeks and weeks . . . so that we can empty out the freezer for the butchering of the cow. So far, we've canned chunks of pork, pulled pork barbeque, and ham chunks. We've also made pork jerky, had a big pork ribs feast, and we're gradually eating up bacon - BLT's for lunch today! We're not trying to use up all the bacon, as it's too good to rush through and doesn't take up all that much freezer space, and we're saving one chunk of meat to make a ham for Easter dinner. Other than those items, we're trying to empty out the freezer as much as possible. Later this week I'll be grinding pork to make sausage, which hopefully will also be canned (still doing the research on this one).

When we butcher the cow, in addition to needing lots of freezer space, we'll need to have numerous coolers with ice at our disposal so that we can keep the meat fresh while I gradually can enough beef to have the situation under control.

It's a LOT of work, but the results are remarkably yummy!!!