When you kill and process a beef you need to use all of the meat. Do you have favorite cuts? I like Rib eye and Chuck roasts but am happy with all the cuts. I love Gr. Beef and enjoy a good meatloaf. Growing up we all loved liver but the last time I fixed it I didn't really enjoy it. I have eaten heart, tongue, and really liked the sweet breads when my wives Grandma prepared them. I guess I am a good eater........

I know what you mean, Paul. I love 'em all.

Well, I don't love liver so (shhhhh) I give the liver to the pigs to eat.

Rib eye is my favorite cut by far. The filet mignon is somewhere in there but I never can find it so it goes into roasts, I suppose. You would never believe how good Trish's roasts are. She cooks them in the crockpot and wow, there are no words.

The lower legs contain all that connective tissue and consequently it is completely worthless meat for anything except stew meat. You can't even grind it. Well. Trish takes that and pressure cooks them into jars. When you open it up you find the connective tissues have "melted away" and the meat is the most tender you've ever had.

The heart is the best tasting meat, I think. We never freeze it, choosing instead to cook it the day of slaughter. So it has become a ritual that once we get the animal quartered and under ice, I take the heart and clean it really well, slicing it into thin slices and cooking it on my steel griddle over a bit of tallow with salt and cracked pepper. It is truly an amazing dish and I always look forward to it. Trish loves it, too, until I tell her that it's heart and then she spits it out!

Let's hear it for prime rib roast!
Which is really uncut rib steaks, I think .
My favorite holiday treat

I am amazed, my American friends won't eat innards as they call them. Of course we call them offal. Liver is lovely if mixed with minced (ground), pork and made into pate!
We have probably the same cuts of meat as you, but with different names. Shin of beef is ideal for pie making, when cooked slowly first, then added to the pastry. We have stuffed hearts and of course tongue that is pressed and eaten cold in sandwiches, or on a meat platter.
Many pubs have Ox roasts on a Sunday. Ox is a breed of cattle and quite delicious. They spit roast it and you get an awful lot for your money. It also makes Oxtail soup, a classic soup, and the taste is incredible.
My Grandma told me that the more work a cut of meat does on an animal the better it tastes. Although it also takes a lot longer to cook,it but is worth it.
Rib of beef makes the most fantastic Sunday dinner, with Yorkshire pudding. The gravy and beef dripping is to die for.
Saltmarsh lamb is very expensive and the ultimate. For the sheep do not eat grass, just what appears on the seashore like seaweed etc. The taste is something one must try.
Regards.
Neil.

Loved this thread! Love that nothing goes to waste.. but I wouldn't want to tackle slaughtering a cow, especially in 90deg temps! I've helped my father w/deer plenty of times when I was a youngster, done rabbit & birds as well. But I never was part of the "killing" part, just the skinning/gutting (we always took the critter to a butcher for the chopping up as Father didn't have the right kind of tools or the know-how to make this kind of steak & that kind of roast.. if he'd done it, we'd have nothing but massive roasts & ground meat!). And an entire cow would last DH & I 2-4 years as we eat beef less than 4 times a month.. can't afford it! Not when ground beef is over $4/lb! Yikes!

Dave - Do you tan the hide too? *jealous*.. always wanted a cowhide, but can't have one w/cats/dogs. They'd think it'd be 1) theirs or 2) dinner.

Toni, I mentioned the hide up above.

http://garden.org/thread/view_...

Ah, didn't see the hide part, just the pork & venison part. I know you're supposed to rub a lot of salt on the inside of the hide before you store it in the freezer.. at least that's what my father always did. He'd get a 5lb bucket of kosher salt & rub it all on the inside of the hide, then roll it hair side out like a jelly roll, put it in a garbage bag, & then store in the freezer until it was time to send it to the tanner. He used a tanner in WY for his elk hides and they always came back soooooooo soft. But they were also dehaired and I think, if I had a cow hide, I'd wanna keep the hair on it, especially if it had a nice pattern. Does a cow hide show color patterns on the skin like the hair pattern? I know on rabbits sometimes they do, sometimes they don't (a black & white rabbit may have a white skin, or they may have a splotched skin).

*jealous!!* We were thinking of moving to TX earlier this year, but that fell through. That's good.. I would have made a lousy Texan.. sorry. But I was looking at around Garland.. hoping to find a small farm (2-3 acres) so I could raise piggies & chickens. Fresh pork = nomnomnom. Never heard of anyone getting sick from eating freshly slaughtered beef.. had it before, it just doesn't taste as good as aged IMO.

We processed the two front quarters tonight. Thought ya'll might enjoy seeing the work in progress. I was working on the big leg on the right side (but of course I took the photo but you can see where I work.)

Dave, your kids are growing up learning some great skills... is that the way you were raised, or have you learned all of this via some other route?

Speaking for myself, I grew up in a city but married a farm boy and "came of age" during the "back to the land, Mother Earth News" time period. Then eventually got divorced and married a "city boy" -- well, more like a town, not a city -- and brought him over to the country side. LOL -- at this point we have sort of merged lifestyles, where I've discovered the stores are full of chickens and you don't have to pluck them, but still think the homegrown ones are a lot better tasting, so I guess you could say I'm kind of conflicted now. I do totally envy eating your own homegrown meat and vegetables, and raising your family the way you and Trish are!

Don't any of the seven children look like Trish? I thought the oldest girl did, is she not in the picture? After all, Trish did have them, she should make some imprint there.
Its a lovely family, anyway, and so willing to work.

Dave, it is wonderful to see you and the children working together, they are learning some real life skills, kudos to you and Trish. Thank you for sharing.

Sandy, my childhood was a mix of city and country life and although we always had extensive gardens, we never did raise animals. I'm entirely self taught in that area.

texaskitty111, many of our children have a few traits of Trish visible but our oldest is the one who looks like her the most.

Thank you Margaret!

I spent many years as an educator, and it's always bothered me how so many kids today (and even their parents) don't have a clue where food comes from or how to prepare anything that you don't pop into a micro wave, heat and eat. The last 13 years of my career before I retired, I worked in an affluent suburban school. We started a school garden just to give the kids some kind of idea where food comes from, and the work involved in making that happen. We donated the food we produced to some local food pantries. I think they began to appreciate what the farmer does for them at least a bit, and I hope some of them enjoyed it enough to try it themselves. Many people in politics are just as clueless and the results of that lack of knowledge shows itself clearly in some of the stupid, well meaning, but uniformed types of agricultural legislation that occurs far too often. Dave, you and Trish are providing your children a most enriched curriculum of life. Your kids won't want for knowledge about how to survive and will understand the relationship between man and his environment. We take from the earth what we need, and we give back as much as we take. Hats off to you

Thank you Tom. I really appreciate that.

I think the great thing here is that the kids will all have skills with which they can get a JOB as teenagers. A butcher, farmer, carpenter, who knows what else. That's opposite of what the public schools teach children in this country, which is all academics. There are no more shop type classes being taught. Children need to learn a skill.

>> Children need to learn a skill.

Edited to say:

Ooops, thread drift.

Sandbox forum:
Thread Title: Education: practical and academic

My wife's friend had a son that went off the rails and got in trouble at nearly 11 years old. She was distraught with him as he was brought up her way: but the school he went to allowed no competitive sports at all. Not even board games like chess or draughts are allowed. So with her permission I put in him in our Army cadets. The first night there the instructors told the parents; he or she will get a good education, they will be taught how to cook, sew, wash and iron. They will go to camp and learn outdoor skills. Go gliding and many other sports. They will also learn discipline and a trade.
Of course he still had to go to school, but went to the cadets three nights a week. If as usual he did not go to school, he was reported to the Army cadets, and he was made to pay for it.
He came out of the cadets at sixteen as a sergeant cadet, with now a good education from them; both academically and life skills. He liked electrical stuff, so did an apprenticeship in electrical engineering, and now earns lots of money doing that.
Children are our way forward. Until we can show them from our experience the practical and academic skills we have learnt, and indeed been taught. Then they will slip into the behavioral problems and obesity, we have in the UK. A lot of children here sit in the parks, drinking high strength cider and smoking, that surely is not a way forward.
Dave and Trish are doing the right thing. I had to learn from an early age. My father used to give me a wallop if I missed a rabbit on the farm, with my little .410 shotgun; sat on the back of his tractor.
Regards from England.
Neil.

How much tallow do you think you can get out of the cow? And do Trish use it all for soaps or do you use some of it for like candles & stuff?

I've had an unusually busy week this week, so I haven't made time to join in the fun on this thread

I have been reading along, though, and wanted to toss some thoughts in. Sometimes Dave and I do things for so long that we forgot exactly why we do them, I think!

Re: ribs- These days we have children old enough to help, obviously. But that's really recent. It used to be that this job was just Dave and I and they were little "go-'fers". Last year they took over about half of my job, and this year I've had the pleasure of just snuggling with my baby and pitching in now and then with the freezing. I'll also organize my freezer when we're all done Oh...back to ribs. When it was just the two of us, we're so exhausted that no one wants to grill ribs for dinner. We then have the problem of how to store the ribs if we don't eat them right then! They don't fit nice and tidy in the freezer because the rest of the animal is taking up all that space. So the only thing left to do is cut them out and call it good. Gotta do what you gotta do, ya know? Maybe next year I'll fire up the grill while they work on the rest. I do love me some ribs!!

Freezer: Obviously we go through a lot of food around here! We have 2 chest freezers, one big one, one about half the size. In general, the big one is used for beef/pork and the other for everything else- veggies, grains, breads, make-ahead-meals, fish, frozsen pizzas- whatever. As we start working our way down, I'll condense everything to the big freezer, and clean out the little one. Then, we'll get down to just enough to fit in the little one and we'll move and clean out the other one. At that point, I defrost and clean out the big freezer and start pestering Dave to harvest since I'm out of food I make very good use of boxes, but mostly milk crates to keep everything organized. So I'll pack in all of the ground beef into 4 crates, and stack them on top of each other. I don't care about the stuff at the bottom, since it is the same as the top. We just move through it top to bottom. By using the crates, stuff doesn't really roll out to the bottom and get lost. I also almost never have to dig around to the bottom to find something. I think cleaning everything totally out every year helps as well. No 10 year old freezer burned food- we eat everything and start all over again.

Yes, out of 7 children only one favors me (and possibly Raffle Boy a bit as well). Those Whitinger genes are very strong!

Tallow- We get a LOT. Probably 8 gallons or more. I use probably 5-6 for soap. The rest gets used for various things like Crisco replacement for greasing pans, oiling tool handles, and we save some for sausage making or any other time we want some clean animal fat. While I do have all of the supplies to make tallow candles, I really dont care for the smell. I could make the candle over the grill fire if I absolutely had to in an emergency, but otherwise- no thanks. I'll stick with my soy candles

Tom- thank you very much! I had a lot of talks with our almost 4 year old during the process. He was upset because he "liked that cow". We had to talk a lot about how we took good care of the cow so that she could feed us for the year. Once he finally accepted all of that (which took most of the day) I had to convince him that we didn't need to shoot all of the cows!

Trish, I have no idea how you and Dave have time to post here at all -- but I'm so glad that you do make time! You're truly "living the dream" as many of us would see it... and doing a great job of it too