OK – this is not one for the vegetarians, but we are happy to finally be restocked with beef – especially now summer is here, so BBQ’s with salads are all the go at this time of year!
I spent a few hours at my cousins place packing and labelling – and choosing how we wanted our meat divvied up. We don’t care much for roast beef, for example (prefer lamb or chicken when it comes to roast dinners) so the roast cuts I just got cut into steak sizes.
Picked up a lot of bones – some to make stock, some for friends dogs 🙂
Having learned some lessons from previous stockups, this time I am ahead of the game. Its no fun diving into your freezer with a hammer and chisel trying to get dinner out.
So – heavy linings of newspaper to soak up blood hopefully will sort out some of that problem. Sometime tomorrow or the next day before the freezing process has completed, I will take it all out and reposition so cuts don’t meld into each other – even though I have done several linings of newspaper.
Can I say dinner tonight was divine.
My lovely husband’s main skill in the kitchen is cereal (I say this in a nice way… he is marvellously domesticated and I am a most grateful wife due to the fact that he LIKES IRONING!!)(whereas I am allergic) But I am the chief cook.
However – Youtube can teach you almost anything and boy oh boy can he bbq a steak!!
So tonight I bandicooted some new potatoes and steamed them and made up a salad – all from the garden of course. We indulged in the eye fillet steaks first because they are (were) sooooo goooood!
The supermarket isn’t going to do much good out of us for the next few months!!
Cheers
I’ve been reading your posts for a couple of months and really enjoy them. I live in the United States in the state of Pennsylvania and your seasons are totally opposite of mine. It’s nice to look at your flowers in our winter time. Thank you for sharing!
Hi Charlene! I went to Pennsylvania a long time ago in my ‘travelling the world’ phase!! I had a penpal in Mars, and went down to her college to spend a bit of time with her which was awesome! Do you have snow now?? Glad you are enjoying the summer posts while huddled up in winter! Thanks for writing! 🙂
Hi Lisa, congrats on the full freezer!! Have you considered using Ziploc bags to store the meat in? I know it’s not environmentally friendly (they can be washed and recycled where we live), but they don’t leak blood and keep freezerburn away longer than the butcher paper. Anyways, that’s what we use when we do our deer up. And because I forget to thaw the meat out too often for supper I can just throw the whole bag of meat into a sink of warm water, ha ha! Have an awesome day and supper sounded delicious!
Hi Amy! Good advice about the ziplocks!! I am keen to give that a go next time we get a side – not sure I have it in me to unpack and rebag the whole freezer now!! haha Love your defrosting technique!! I HATE thawing in a microwave and never do because I can’t get it right ever!!
Where do you get your deer? Do you hunt or know someone that does? Or local butcher? We have a few deer farms here but I have never bought it before.
We hunt and eat mostly moose (the butcher just does it up like he would beef), the nice cuts of the deer we save as well but make sausage from the trim. Next year we plan on butchering our moose ourselves but we don’t have a garage or outbuilding to hang it in so it’s a little bit harder for us. We are also thinking of making our own sausage this year too, just have to get around to it, ha ha! So yeah, we hunt for our deer. They are whitetail deer or mule deer. What kind are raised on the farms? I know that fallow deer and red stag are raised in New Zealand.
In Tasmania, only the fallow deer. There are farms, but deer were introduced into the wild for hunting – and are a bit of a problem as their numbers grow and for some reason protected with limited hunting seasons to protect the populations for the hunters…. Not being native they impact on the environment, farms & other animals.
Butchering a moose would need a ton of room!!! I am always surprised at the size of those creatures! We didn’t get sausage this time around. I use more mince (ground) than sausage.
Sausages are a luxury for us as well. We saved the trim from butchering the pig to mix up with the deer so they’re super tasty 😉 Fallow deer are very beautiful but I can definitely understand the frustration with how their population is being managed.
Your sausages sound good!! Mostly in Tassie we are free from a lot of pests – both insect and larger feral animals like foxes. We have very strict quarantine laws coming into the state from the mainland! Its almost like entering another country! 😀 Still… so far saved us from noxious fruit fly and other undesirables!
It’s always good to have a full freezer, whether it’s meat or veggies!
That salad looks awesome!!
We are certainly not going to starve in the near future!! 🙂
Ergh. Fruit flies are so annoying, we had such a problem with them last summer- they were coming in through the screens. Alberta (the province we live in) has done it’s best to keep rats out. There’s a problem with goldfish in some lakes though- people were releasing them into the water. It’s pretty hard to keep out invasive species and diseases with such ease of travel.
I’d hate to be fighting fruit fly! My mainland family and friends have so many problems too! Australia as a whole lacks a lot of pests and diseases that are out in the rest of the world… but slowly things creep in of course as you say with the ease of travel. Thats why our quarantine laws are crazy strict. (remember all the fuss about Johnny Depp sneaking his dogs into Australia a while back and people couldn’t work out what the problem was? 😀 )
The big moat around us helps somewhat 😀 😀
Hahaha! I remember that Johnny Depp escapade, I just figured it made a lot of sense, you know, with Australia’s rabbit and rat issues (and camel and pig too, right?). I think we miss out on a lot of crazy exotic hitchikers as it gets so cold here. Last year when the Zikka virus was really big in the news we heard a lot on how the mosquito that carries the virus can’t survive our winter weather.
Handy thing being able to freeze pests in their tracks!! Yes to the rabbit (got one living in our yard at the moment!! Cheeky beggar!!) rats (sigh – never rid of those in the country but happily very very seldom seen inside here) also yes to the camels, pigs, goats, dogs, cats, deer, foxes…. pretty much everything that is familiar in other countries that wasn’t native here. Its incredibly hard to manage!!
I’ve got a good recipe for crockpot rabbit curry if you want it 😉
LOL