If I'm not mistaken, only cooked chicken bones are harmful for the dogs. My daughter fed her dogs BARF - Bones and Raw Food and she always gave them chicken with the bones, RAW of course.

@dave, we had time to figure out what you should do with your beef ribs because we don't have a cow to butcher, AND garden to take care of, AND seven children to school, AND a website to manage, AND a Tues. podcast to tape. (Hint, hint) etc

Yes, it is indeed a matter of time. My back is aching me and we're still only halfway finished with the butchering process. What a lot of work! This is why we take the shortcut on the ribs.

Do you have a walk-in cooler? Where do you hold the carcass while processing? Who wraps the meat before freezing? What kind of a grinder do you use? Some of us need to know all the details

We don't have a walk-in although I would love that! We use an extra chest freezer and we use tons of ice. We replenish the ice as necessary. So when we age the beef we put a layer of ice down, then a quarter of beef, then more ice, then more beef and we alternate layers. This last cow was so big we nearly didn't get it all in.

The four oldest children and me do all the carving up. I bone the meat off and hand the pieces to them and they cut off all the bad stuff and so forth. After we grind the beef they pack ziplock bags with 2 pounds per bag. Trish usually wraps the roasts for final freezing.

I used a cheap-o grinder for a very long time and it worked well but a year ago I upgraded to this one: http://www.lemproducts.com/pro...

Works great but the meat does need to be half frozen or it'll gum up the plates. I think this is universal of all meat grinders.

Making beef stock. There are two large stock pots and each pot has half the pelvis as well as one full leg bone, sawn in half so it'll fit. One cow will provide at least 10 stock pots full of beef stock.



Some of my tallow. Note the dark stuff on the bottom. This is the sinkage. Once the tallow is firm I will take it out of its mold and scrape the bottom. Sometimes if I'm feeling industrious I will melt it one final time to get an extremely pure tallow. Trish uses this stuff in her soap and I am always very proud of the tallow I am able to provide her.



Here are some jars of beef stock that Trish pressure cooked into quarts last night. We use beef stock primarily for cooking brown rice. We use beef stock instead of water and we end up with a highly nutritious and amazingly delicious rice. You can see a generous layer of fat in the jars. We will scrape some of that away from the jar before using, depending on what we're cooking. But some fat is good because rice wants an oil of some sort and this fat, of course, replaces that oil. So we can make rice without using store bought oil.



And a peak at the corner of the freezer. We're nowhere near done with the processing but it's filling up fast. It is a deep freezer but you can't really see. There are at least 40 bags of 2# ground, along with a dozen or so roasts.

It is really great to get a chance to see "where food comes from".

Except for a few vegetables, all I used to know was that "food comes from the supermarket".

When I was kid we grew a lot of our own vegetables, and I watched my grandmother kill chickens often, and once we watched grandfather and a friend slaughter a pig. He would also snare rabbits and we would watch them being skinned, we always got a rabbits foot to play with, yes I know some people will think it gross but we thought it was fun to make the foot move by pulling on the tendons or ligaments. These days it is very difficult to find rabbits at the market that aren't outrageously over priced.

You can't even buy rabbit at the supermarkets here. I wish I could.

Wild Rabbits are plentiful here. We sell them for £1 each and that is cleaned and oven ready! Our main problem is deer. The European Union banned the sale of venison (wild), unless it was meat inspected. How are you supposed to take a veterinary surgeon on a deer shoot. Veterinary surgeons are expensive; let alone to get one for a day. However the E.U. do allow wild deer to be sold from non E.U. members that is not meat inspected, but we cannot sell our own wild deer!. Farmed deer is very popular, as it is organic and has little fat. Deer over here are a problem in the damage they do to our forestry, agriculture, horticulture, gardens and even parks.
Hares are plentiful and make good eating, along with Pheasants, Grouse, Partridge and Guinea fowl.
Regards from someone who loves Rabbit Pie.
Neil.

That is quite amazing, Dave -- I've shot, skinned and butchered a few deer, but can't quite imaging tackling a whole cow... and you sure as heck don't waste anything!

We definitely don't. Feels good to use nearly every part of the animal. If you've done a deer, you can do a cow! It's the same exact thing, just 8 times bigger!

Do you think you could have butchered that cow all by yourself if time wasnt a factor? Or is it at least a two person job?

I could definitely do a cow by myself, no problem. But having a helper is a huge help. It is kind of a race against time, especially if the weather is warm. You want to get the beast quartered and cooled down as soon as possible. Slaughtering in 90 degree weather is about the worst case scenario but we've been out of beef for a while and Trish has been hassling me to get moving...

I've been trying to figure out how to stick a question into ATP about freezers. This looks like as good spot as any. So, why do you like a chest freezer instead of upright?

That's a simple answer. My chest freezer holds a lot more stuff than an upright.

Aren't they also more efficient as the cold does not all "fall" out when you open the top?

Definitely.

Totally agree, a chest freezer holds more and is more efficient... and you get a lot more exercise trying to dig stuff out of the bottom! (On the other hand, if I was butchering in 90-degree weather I'd be more than ready to stick my head into the freezer for a while )

But, they are also harder to get things out of, as what you want will always be on the bottom.