Grinding beef, using boy-power!

We recently butchered our bull. In preparation for processing our home-grown meat, we had purchased a small but (supposedly) good quality electric meat grinder. Sadly, the third time we used it, grinding the meat from the bull into hamburger, the machine broke. So, Allen looked around in Gracias, and found a manual meat grinder in one of the hardware stores, for around $40.

Today we pulled out a large bag of the meat that we'd intended to grind (meat that we hadn't been able to grind, because of our broken machine), and had Josiah and Ben put it through the manual grinder. Because this meat was previously frozen, it has to be cooked before it can be frozen again. We're seasoning this meat to use in tacos. It will be nice to have some "convenience food" in the freezer for future use!

Today we ground, seasoned, and cooked about 15 pounds of meat for tacos. We're thinking of other things to cook in bulk when we do future batches of grinding - perhaps sausage, or meatballs! Yum!

Meanwhile, Allen, Bethany and Gus are cutting strips of beef to use as jerky. Jerky is totally a treat for us, and we're looking forward to having it around the house . . . for a week or so, LOL. Then it will all be eaten! 

Sausage has been canned!

The arrival of our container shipment also meant the delivery of my long-awaited electric meat grinder! We've been saving fatty, difficult-to-use pieces of meat from the three hog butcherings in our freezer, and finally I was able to grind all of that up and make sausage!

Allen and I spent a large chunk of Wednesday learning to use the grinder and double grinding all of the pork and fat - we ended up with about 30 pounds worth!

On Thursday Allen had to drive to San Pedro Sula, but before he left in the morning he helped to create the recipe for our sausage. He wanted lots of flavor, and wouldn't have minded a large amount of peppery heat, but I'm not able to eat foods that are very hot, so he worked to add lots of non-pepper spices, coming up with a sausage that had lots of flavor but only a small amount of heat. Everyone agrees that it's tasty!

Once the recipe had been created, tested, and approved, I started making and canning sausage. I was ambitious at first, making sausage patties and canning those, but that process was overly time-consuming on a day when we also had lots of other work to do, so eventually I fell back to making up most of the sausage as "crumbles." Resembling browned ground beef, this meat will be useful mixed in with eggs for breakfast, in sauces or on top of pizza. I canned 2 quarts of sausage patties, 5 quarts and 20 pints of sausage crumbles.

Would you like Allen's sausage recipe? It's rather crazy with the long list of ingredients, but we can't argue with the results!

2 pounds ground pork (ours was quite fatty, but I'm sure leaner pork would work, too)
4 tsp salt
3/4 tsp ground black pepper
1/8 tsp ground red pepper
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp thyme
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp paprika
1/8 tsp ground cloves
1 Tbsp brown sugar
1/4 tsp basil
2 tsp Complete Seasoning
1 tsp Creole seasoning blend
1 tsp Greek seasoning blend

I now have about half of our chest freezer emptied out! I should be ready for the butchering of the bull long before the bull is ready - Russell had to give the bull an injection of medication to remove an infestation of bot fly larvae this week, and realized after the injection had been given that it was recommended that the animal not be butchered and eaten for at least a month after the medicine is administered. This is hard for us, as it is dry season, and there is very little food available for the cattle just now. The cows will wander our entire property and can find enough to eat, but if the bull isn't tied up or contained in a much better enclosure than the fencing we have around the perimeter of the property he will simply wander away. Since the neighbors don't appreciate our bull wandering loose, we're having to contain him in a very small area and purchase food for him. On the upside, I've read that grass-fed beef is tastier when the animal has been "finished" with a diet of corn . . . so we shall see . . .

Now that the majority of the pork processing from the freezer has been accomplished, we can turn our time and attention back to putting together Christmas gifts from the donations . . . oh, and schooling the kids, planning a wedding, ministry, construction of our new home, and all of the crazy stuff of everyday life! 

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!!!

Another - BETTER - ham report!

We made ham again. You can check out the first ham report here, which involves the ham we brined for our Easter dinner. That ham was good enough, for ham-deprived individuals like ourselves, but we thought we could do better.

And we did!

Two weeks ago, it was decided that we would butcher two hogs on the same day. While Rachel and I knew that a butchering was in the offing before long, we didn't find out it would happen on that particular day until that particular day. The announcement of the immediate double-butchering event found both of us sickly with a cold/flu thing, the kitchen a mess, with the kitchen table literally sitting upside-down, legs in the air, and the freezer all disorganized and looking like no way was there room for adding in the meat of two largish hogs!

Of course, as always, we managed to overcome adversity (why we deserve quite so many opportunities to overcome adversity, I've never figured out) and we got the job done. We pulled lots of food out of the freezer and put it into coolers. We even found a few items that, frugal as we are, we couldn't condone putting back into the freezer. Anyway, we pulled out those three chunks of leg meat remaining from the previous hog butchering, and decided to go ahead and let them thaw out, brine them, and bake them up into hams. Then we could freeze up cooked ham meat for lots of future dinners! Obviously we didn't have time to deal with them on the same day as butchering, but they needed to thaw for a few days anyway, so that worked out fine, and also opened up some prime freezer space!

After the meat was thawed, which took a few days, we mixed up the brine and set it to soak. Rachel made some additions to the solution, to improve the flavor from last time. We didn't have room for three hams in the fridge, so we set this all up in a 5 gallon bucket, and then had to remember to keep freezing soda bottles full of water, and switching ice bottles in and out of the bucket to keep the meat cold. For a week.

But it was worth it!

Yesterday we pulled out the meat, rinsed it off, and baked it. This time, the meat met our expectations. There's nothing we want to change or improve for next time. We had a delicious ham dinner at our house, Russell and Iris had a delicious ham dinner at their house, and there's leftover ham in our freezer for future delicious meals.

No question at all - we make ham at our place!

 

* A note for people who know terms: the word "ham" officially refers to the meat of the upper back leg of a hog. We made brined hams and brined pork shoulders (from the front legs). In my non-butchering suburban past, I learned to use the word "ham" to mean a delectable salty sweet meat made from pork, with no regard for what part of the animal was used. In this post I used the word "ham" as I did in my childhood, to mean salty sweet pork meat. I wanted you to know that I do know the correct usage. I just don't care enough to make myself use the word correctly right now. LOL

Here's what you've been waiting to see . . .

Nahhh, not yet. I know you're waiting to see pictures of the Rottweiler puppies, and I'll post them next (oh, if you're on Facebook, Rachel has already put some up on the Sowers4pastors page there). But first, I wanted to show you what we had for lunch today:

These are white flour biscuits - they just have a slight brownish tinge because Rachel used our homemade lard in them, and also put in some of the cracklins. In case you're not familiar with cracklins, they are a byproduct of lard production. They taste sort of like bacon, except they aren't salty (unless, of course, you salt them).

The biscuits were super yummy. We're likin' lard.

Here are some of the quart jars of lard in our kitchen, from Rachel's lard-making event:

Next up: PUPPY PICTURES!!!!!!!

I'm a Facebook flunkout . . . but . . .

I signed up for Facebook a few years ago, but I just couldn't get the hang of it. I was heavily involved in an internet homeschooling forum anyway, and I just didn't have the time to get up and going on another online social outlet.

But Facebook is everywhere, and people keep asking us if we have a Facebook page for our ministry. Today, I'm proud to announce that we (okay, really just Rachel - oh, also Kendall. Thanks for the online help Kendall) set up a Sowers4pastors Facebook page! Taa daah!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sowers4Pastors/460968363934043

Now keep your expectations low here - we just got started on this, and we're learning as we go. But, if you would "Like" our page, that would certainly encourage us as we work to make it a more interesting and useful place for you to visit. "Liking" the page will also give you notifications of updates as we post them - if you are a Facebook user. If you don't use Facebook, you should still be able to read our page, you just can't be interactive with it, and you can't "Like" it - which sounds kinda sad, doncha think?

Oh, and we've been sooo busy the past few days - we butchered two hogs on Monday, and Rachel rendered lard (much more successfully than I did after the first butchering) - and actually produced more than five gallons of lard!!!!! Today I'm working on paperwork for requesting another batch of motorcycles for pastors, while Rachel has been working on the new Facebook page . . . oh and she and I are both sick with a cold/flu mess that just won't go away. That's all for now!

Do you "Like" us? Well, do ya? LOL

Whoopeeeee - I have achieved lard!

Throwing long-standing tradition to the wind and following the advice of bloggers who have achieved lard before me, I threw all of the cubed pork fat and skin into the crockpot. I can use the crockpot, basically for free, during the hours when there's a large amount of sunlight.

At the end of the day, I was able to pour off the accumulated grease into a clean, hot canning jar. In the morning, I had the results you see above.

The fat had not all been rendered at the end of the day yesterday, so it's all in the crockpot again today, making more lard.

I'm still looking to improve my end product. There's something at the bottom of my jar that isn't lard - I think maybe I didn't strain the lard quite thoroughly enough. I'll work on that, with the next jar, and see if I can do better.

Thanks for listening to me babble about lard! LOL

Update on the Lard Project

Yesterday's attempt to render lard was a dud.

Apparently, I am using an inferior type of fat. The fat around the organs is much better for making lard than the fat under the skin. Secondly, our hog wasn't all that fat, as it wasn't fully grown when we butchered it.

I cooked the cubes of skin/fat in a cast iron pan for over an hour, to no effect. The pieces were even sticking to the pan, in spite of my using the lowest heat. I am certain that melting fat shouldn't stick to the pan!

I tried adding water, as suggested by some of the instructions I read, but when the water had boiled away we were not really any further along in the process.

When I stopped working on this - because I needed to turn my hand to cooking dinner - I had achieved slightly melted, slimy/greasy cubes of skin and fat. I stuck the mess in the fridge, and this morning I found that I had, in fact, rendered about a tablespoonful of lard.

Due to these disappointing results, I went ahead and started on Plan B today - the cubes of fat are now in the crockpot. During the sunny hours, using the crockpot is "free" power, so I feel okay about using this method, in spite of basically wasting propane on this project yesterday.

If nothing else, the dogs are sending me signals that they think the results of my experiment - however it turns out - would make highly acceptable dog food! LOL

Off they go . . . to MK Camp!

Early this morning, Kirstin drove some of her siblings to the nearby city of Santa Rosa de Copan, to catch the early bus. They're headed to the Loma de Luz Hospital, which is 7 to 8 hours from here, by car. I'm not sure how long the trip will be by bus, but certainly it will be longer! I once traveled by bus from La Ceiba to Gracias (about an hour less than the trip to the hospital) and that trip took 12 hours - but I was on a bus that stopped frequently. The kids were able to catch an express bus, so their trip should be faster and more pleasant.

Every year, the missionaries at the hospital, on the north coast of Honduras, host and run this camp. We're really grateful for all of their hard work! The kids love going and spending the week with friends they rarely get to see.

Since I have a bit of extra time today, I'm going to try my hand at rendering lard for the first time, using fat from the pig we butchered back in March. We're nearly ready to butcher another pig, so I need to use up what's currently in the freezer, and a lot of what's left is skin and fat. I'll report back on how that goes, once I've done it. Of course, I'm feeling like I'm trying to blog with one hand tied behind my back, since my photographers are gone for the week. But I'll do my best.

Some canning "firsts" this week

Recently, Rachel tried making apple butter for the first time. It came out so well, she decided to make a big batch and can it, so we'd have a supply of apple butter in our pantry.

As it happens, we've only canned using the pressure method so far, and apple butter only needs to be water bath canned. We used the same pot for this, but found that water bath canning is much faster and easier. Boo and Rachel worked together peeling, coring, and grating up all those apples.

Rachel spiced the apples and cooked and cooked and cooked until eventually the mixture was relatively smooth. We don't worry about getting it extremely smooth, as we don't mind chunky apple butter.

We ended up with 16 pints of apple butter. That should keep us for a while!

When Rachel and I went grocery shopping this week, we discovered that the local berries, known as "Mora" are in season right now. We really enjoy these berries cooked up as a cobbler, but the berries are only available for a few weeks each year. So, we decided to try canning up some of these berries.

This was another first for us, as we had to do some guesswork/adapting to come up with a recipe for canning these. We're new to canning, and we're still most comfortable following a recipe and set of directions to a "T", but we had to wing it this time, as there aren't any directions available for canning mora berries!

Boo and David sorted through the berries, to pull out the bad ones and make sure no stems or leaves made it into the canning jars. Then Rachel canned up 14 quarts of berries. Off season cobbler for us!

We're needing to can some more chicken, as we've used up our supply, but I don't supposed we'll be getting to that anytime soon - we're all pretty tired of canning at the moment. At the same time, we're feeling pretty proud of our canning accomplishments, and especially of our recently acquired skills in new areas!

The Ham Report

Yes indeedy, we ate home-grown, home-butchered, home-cured ham for Easter dinner! And the results?

It was good.

There is room for improvement, as we cure the three other hams-to-be in the freezer, but we definitely enjoyed the ham we created this time!

Now, here's how we did it:

I pulled the cut of meat (from the rump of the pig) out of the freezer on Monday morning, to start the thawing process. We weighed the meat, using our not-so-very-accurate bathroom scale, and came up with about 9 - 10 pounds (including the bone).

I used the recipe on this site for our home cure. The pink salt (instacure #1) was the only ingredient I didn't have in the house. I was able to order a package of this salt on Amazon, and Josiah brought it to us in his suitcase last Sunday.

On Monday afternoon I mixed up a double batch of the water, brown sugar, kosher salt, and instacure. Allen found a perfectly sized tupperware amongst our plastics, and this container held the meat and the liquid with no room to spare - so that the meat was completely submerged. We put this into a cooler, and added several 3-liter bottles of ice, to keep it cold. You can, of course, just put the meat in the fridge, but since we had just had a trip to San Pedro Sula (where we stocked up on some special grocery items) and had also received some edible goodies from Josiah's mom (thanks Johanna!), our fridge was pretty full. The cooler with ice bottles - changed for fresh ice every day - worked just fine.

Late Sunday morning we removed the meat from the cooler and from the liquid cure, washed it, plopped it into a baking pan, and started baking our ham in the oven at 350 degrees. Oh, I also took a couple of strips of pig skin with attached fat (which have been in the freezer since the butchering) and draped those over the top of the ham. I did this because a store-bought ham normally has the skin (and the fat under the skin) left on one side, and ham cooking directions generally say to cook the ham "skin side up." Our ham was completely skinned, so I hoped this would help keep the meat moist during the long baking process.

There are some things I'll do differently next time:

Although I followed the directions which said to cure the meat one day for each two pounds of meat, our meat wasn't quite cured all the way through. A few spots deep inside the meat, while perfectly edible good pork, weren't ham. The fact that I started off with a frozen ham might be a factor. Next time, I'll thaw the meat for at least a day before starting the cure, and I'll give the curing process a couple more days.

We'd have liked the ham a bit saltier. I might add more salt to my next brine, or I might just see if the additional curing time adds to the saltiness of the end product.

A small amount of the meat had a bit of a chalky texture. I'm not sure why this was - and as we were eating the ham at a family holiday dinner, I didn't take the time to examine if this was meat from any particular area of the ham. I suppose this could have been caused by the cure, or the baking process, or even the diet of the pigs - I just don't know. I'll need to do some research about this, and see if I can improve the texture for next time.

At any rate, we've definitely achieved ham! I'm happy, and with three more hogs in the pigpen (one of those belongs to Russell), I'm thinking we'll have a lot more ham dinners in our future!

Bacon . . . HOMEMADE Bacon!!!!!!!

Sunday morning we had bacon and eggs for breakfast. We don't currently have chickens, so we didn't produce the eggs, but . . . amazingly enough . . . it was homemade bacon!!!!! Oh, and our apologies for the poor photos in this post - we've been teasing Boo that she was so distracted by the bacon she was unable to concentrate on her photography!

Of course, this was meat from our recent pig butchering. I found a recipe for making bacon, which didn't require any ingredients I don't have. Here is the recipe, along with detailed instructions.

There was a bit of trial and error involved here. I followed the instructions on the website, except that we had already removed the skin from the pieces of meat. Oh yes, and the website said to trim the meat to a nice rectangular shape. No way - I'm not wasting any potential bacon in order to have my meat look tidy. Every bit of our meat became bacon, and the slices are . . . rustic . . . in shape. Fine with us; we'll call this "Artisanal Bacon" and pretend we paid more for the trendiness of it. LOL

I halved the recipe, and still had lots of the mixture left over, after I had coated the meat with it. Then the meat sat in the fridge from Monday until Saturday, soaking up the "cure." On Saturday morning we baked the bacon in the oven for several hours at a low temperature (as directed on the website).

Here's what the meat looked like after it was baked, and before it was sliced (this is one of the two pieces). Please notice the artisanal, non-rectangular shape. LOL

After the baking, Rachel sliced some of it up, and we fried a few pieces. They were toooooooo salty! Oh my, almost inedible. Turns out, five days was much too long to let the meat soak up the cure - probably because my pieces of meat were small (because we butchered a small hog).

However, the next morning, I pulled out more of the meat, and I soaked some of the slices in water for 20 minutes before frying them. These were perfect!

And so, we had delicious bacon and eggs for breakfast!

Later, we used some of the bacon to flavor a yummy bean soup Rachel concocted for dinner. The soup also contained home grown miniature tomatoes.



I'm not sure any of my new homestead-y skills impresses me quite as much as having achieved homemade bacon. I'm mighty pleased!

Next week, however, we're going to make our first attempt at homemade ham, and will possibly have that ham for our Easter dinner. I'll let you know.

Pictures of the pig butchering - part 2

WARNING: IF YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE PICTURES OF A HOG BEING BUTCHERED, DON'T READ THIS POST! If you are interested in our butchering, you might want to read Part 1 first.

Below, you can see pictures of the guys removing the skin off the pig carcass. We'll be using the skin to make pork rinds (for now, it's all in the freezer, until I have a chance to find out how to cook pork rinds).




There was so much skin! I shared with Russell and both the workers, and still have a pile of it in the freezer!


Here's the almost finished skinning job. After this was done, the guys were finally ready to cut chunks of meat!


Here's a fresh pork shoulder.


Here are the ribs, about to be cut off the carcass. I can't look at them without thinking about them on the barbeque grill.


If you squint, and use your imagination, you can see what I see when I look at this picture . . . two hams!

That's it for pics of our butchering. In answer to an obvious question, we butchered this pig while it was still awfully small because we didn't have housing for it any longer (we still have three smaller - but growing - pigs in the pig fortress), and also because we wanted this first butchering to be a less daunting task than it would be with a larger pig.

Now that we have a bit of experience, we can take on a larger hog, and eventually be ready for butchering a cow!

Yikes!

I just went through the photos from the butchering. Boo did a great, thorough job of documenting the whole thing . . . but the pics seem a bit graphic to me. I'm going to have to sort through them before I figure out what I will and won't be posting.

Ohhh, here are a couple of pictures that just look like meat, rather than looking like dead animal. You (most of you) are okay looking at meat, right?

Here's Russell holding up a small ham (ummmm, sorry about it still having the foot attached).


And here are some ribs, just ready for the grill!

The pig is dead

Here's the pig, just before . . .

The bull is looking on. Is that sympathy?

Things are a bit busy just now. I'll post more pics in a bit.



9:45am update: Today is Allen's one day off for the week. He's trying to stay out of the butchering . . . so instead, he and Gus are making up some bookshelves! We had the lumber already sanded, just needs to be cut, nailed together, stained, and sealed. We need these bookcases to use them as a "wall" between Gus and Josiah, when they share Gus' room, so they can each have some privacy, and a place to put things (um, like clothing, for instance).

Having carpentry going at the same time as butchering is keeping us on our toes. Of course, I still have my regular chores to keep up with (laundry and dishes), and I'm wanting to put out a nice lunch for the workers, so I have a couple of chickens roasting in the oven.

The butchering crew is working steadily on cleaning the hair off the pig's skin. I'll explain how they do this, with pictures, later.

2:15pm update: The butchering is done! I've got all the meat packaged, and it is either in the fridge or the freezer. Allen kept the liver, but we gave away the rest of the organ meat, the head, and the back.

I need a rest. Pictures will come after I've had some time off my feet!

Gearing up for the slaughter . . .

I'm really busy today, trying to get everything ready for the butchering tomorrow. I'm glad we decided to butcher the hog while it's still on the small side, because Allen and Russell figure I'll be dealing with about 70 pounds of meat - that sounds like a LOT of meat to enter the kitchen all at once!

I'm figuring on freezing some of the meat (note to self: go clean and organize in the freezer, to make more space), and sticking some into the fridge to deal with a bit later (note to self: clean out the fridge, too). I'm hoping to can much of this meat, but I don't think I should try to take on canning the same day as butchering. The meat in the fridge will be canned in the next couple of days, and the meat in the freezer can be successfully thawed and canned after that.

In other climates, people butcher when the weather is cold, so that the meat can sit out (in a safe but cool place, like in a shed). This gives the workers time to process each piece of meat, and is also said to improve the flavor of the meat. Of course, we don't have that option. We'll be cutting up this hog and preserving the meat as quickly as possible, before the meat starts to spoil - and I'll be doing this while Rachel is out of town, which isn't the very best plan, but we'll make do.

Anyway, today is a preparation and research day. If possible, I'd like to try curing ham and bacon, but that might be too much to take on along with our first butchering.

Now I'm off to go watch more videos and read more step-by-step instruction guides (oh yeah, and clean out the fridge and freezer). Wish me luck!



2:30pm Update: The chest freezer is cleaned out! Ben and I did a thorough job organizing and cleaning out the frost build-up. There should be plenty of room for as much of the meat as we wish to put in there!

Now I'm back to the more restful work of researching on the internet, while my hands thaw out. Then I'll tackle the fridge!