Homeschooling 101 - Game Prep

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This morning's homeschooling got off with a bang, after I dispatched a rabbit that was a repeat offender in the garden.

Children Learning Through Helping

I met the specialist for my jaw today, my wife came with me and mum came over to look after the children. He seems happy that my teeth are meeting up again and he seems hopeful that I might avoid surgery. I have another appointment next week, but it's still looking like two months of no solid food!

When I came home Grandma was with my eldest showing her how to sew on her new sewing machine. They'd picked a pattern for a toy dinosaur and were busy putting it together. It was lovely to listen and watch them working together.

Home Butchery

Like many skills I think butchery is one you can only really learn through doing. 

Last week I butchered four more lambs and as I get into double figures now (total) I'm getting a little faster and more confidant in what I'm doing.

A Freezer Full Of Chicken

The picture below is the culmination of a lot of time and work! 

All the meat chickens are now safely processed and in the freezer (this is only a third of it).

Curing Bacon

Curing bacon is one of those things I've always wanted to try but never got round to. 

After the pig butchery weekend I decided it was time to take some of that lovely Berkshire pig to the next level and make bacon! 

I chose three joints that I thought would make nice streaky and back bacon. 

 I made things a little harder for myself by making my own cure, I brought the salt, saltpeter and brown sugar to do the mix.

Unfortunately the book I have only has imperial measurements in and my brain wasn't working well that night so I was really struggling to work out how much cure I needed per lb of meat! I got there in the end but metric or cup measures are so much easier! Funny because I'll quite happily use feet and inches for measurements. 

 I made a salt brine to start with to clean the meat.

The Joints only floating in this for ten minutes then dried off on some chopping boards. 

I then got the salt cure ready and weighed out enough for each joint. 

The joints with the cure rubbed all over then get placed in a freezer bag in the fridge. I think it could have happily gone just in the shed to be honest as it was plenty cool enough when I did it. 

After five days these came out, got washed off and then got hung in the shed for a couple of weeks to let the cure penetrate further in.

I tried them with some trepidation.

 I'd always heard that home cured bacon was far too salty and horrible. Not this though! This was lovely, it certainly had a more meaty taste than we've had for a while and there is a fair amount of fat on it as well (as you can see in the picture!) but it fried up a treat!

So far we've eaten one and a half of the bacon joints. They've only been in the fridge for five days, whilst in the bags curing, and the rest of the time just hanging there with no refrigeration, well over a month old now from when they were butchered out of the pig.

We're so dependant on our fridges and freezers I find it amazing to have meat out like this and it still be completely edible after this time. No dates on this meat, just my senses to tell me if it's okay or not.

Skills like this are useful to learn for off grid living and food preservation is one of the key skills to self sufficiency. I think to read about it is fine but it's far better to put it into practice. I'll be doing this again even if I have to buy belly pork to do it with, I've also been reading about lamb bacon....

Anyone else cure their own meat?

Have any recipes you think I should try?

How Many Meals Are In A Whole Lamb?

I got asked on Facebook how many meals are in a lamb?

A tricky question to answer as everyone eats a different amount and it also depends on how you butcher it. I just butchered a whole lamb this afternoon while my little boy slept. I'm only an amateur so please be kind as to my cuts! 

Here are the joints and cuts I got from it:

Two legs of lamb. I've kept these whole but sometimes I will split them to make a leg and a chump joint. I'd say this would easily feed 8 people with probably some leftovers. 

Sausage Making

This is a rather late follow on post from the Pig Butchery Weekend I posted a couple of weeks ago. 

 As we were split into two groups on the Sunday the second group went and finished the butchery while a few of us set about getting ready for sausage making.
We minced up all the pork we'd trimmed off the animal and the shoulders we'd cut up as well. There was a fair bit.

 We then measured it out and added it to the first rusk and seasoning pack. The first one was easy, 4kg of meat, packet of rusk and water, ready to go.

 The second batch took a bit more thinking about, as we had a packet of plain rusk and had to work out the seasoning quantities and the water. Should have been simple but for some reason we were all scratching our heads at one point!

 The other guys came in at lunch time and we started making sausages. The skins were natural casings and had been soaking all morning, but one lot of them was quite hard to tread on the pipe of the sausage stuffer.

 Alan made it look easy and did the magic twist and tying of the fat sausages as well!

 We all got a good share of sausages and mine went into the freezer as soon as I got home.

They didn't stay there for long though! Looking forward to making some with my own animals one day, great way to use up lesser cuts of meat.

Anyone else make their own sausages?

Smalec - Polish Pork Dripping

There was a lot of fat on the pigs when we were processing them at the weekend, so gets added to the sausages but there was still a lot there. 

One of the guys was Polish and wanted to make smalec. This is basically like dripping but with pork fat instead of beef and the fat is flavoured. 

It was simple to make. We first minced up a good amount of fat. 

 It was then rendered it down on the hob until it started to separate.

 Then an onion cut in half was added to flavour the fat, he did this on sticks so he could stir it round.

 He took this outside to cool for a while then once it was cold enough to pour into plastic containers he broke up the onion and shared it between three tubs.

 Once cool it solidified.

 Apparently they spread it on bread instead of butter with a sprinkling of salt and fresh onion on top.

I tried it on some fresh bread (without fresh onion - no way can I eat that) and a bit of salt, it was lovely, a great alternative to butter and one worth remembering encase things ever got harder and dairy products were harder to get.

Stores for a long time as well as fat is basically a preserve.

Apparently they sometimes flavour the fat with apples instead of onions. I think I still prefer beef dripping but this is genuinely good to eat. The girls liked it as well!

Who else has tried this or something similar?

Pig Butchery Weekend

#####This post contains pictures of dead animals#####

I received a message the other day from a group I'm a member of asking me if I'd be interested in attending a butchery weekend.

The idea of the group is a great one, to share our skills and help each other learn to become more self reliant. 

The weekend would consist of butchering two pigs, one roe deer and some pheasants, we'd be shown how to do it by an ex butcher who grew up doing it, with lots of hands on experience for everyone as well. 

The amazing thing was that the only cost was for our share of the meat that we got to take home at the end. 

The pigs were some beautiful rare breed Berkshire pigs from the smallholding we were staying at and the deer from a local game dealer.

 It was amazing to get some hands on experience, I do a fair bit of butchery but to do it with someones guidance was so much better than a YouTube video.

 I particularly enjoyed the deboning of joints, such a handy skill and so hard to do to start with.

 I also managed to do the butchers knot. Something that I've never been able to do! I must make sure I practice it now and keep the skill in my mind!

There was such a lot of meat on the pigs and plenty of opportunity for us all to have a go. It was also with a great group of lads, lots of laughing and joking around.

We were set up in army style tents and did start to loose light. so we moved outside and then on to using a tilly lamp (I was impressed with how much light they give off!) Here we did the roe deer and the pheasants.

We had a feast that night of meat cooked over a BBQ and then Kevin (the host a different Kevin to me!) made two stews, one pheasant and one of deer as well as a huge tray of crackling! I was stuffed and went to bed full!

Our accommodation for the weekend was the same tents that we'd done the butchery in.
I was surprisingly warm the whole night, although I was the subject of much Micky taking when people realised that I had taken my pillow with me! I might be outside but I will have some comfort!

The next day we went on to sausage making, but I'll leave that for another post!
A great weekend though and I made lots of friends.

Too Much Meat?

The other day I showed a friend a picture of one of our freezers and he accused me of eating too much meat. 

Now I admit that this is a fair amount of meat (and only one of our freezers). This one is full of chickens, some lamb and some mutton, all raised here and  butchered by my own fair hands(except the mutton which was done at the abattoir).

What this friend didn't think about was that this is our food stored for a large chunk of the year. We still eat a fair number of veggie meals, probably at least two times a week, maybe more in the summer. I still visit our local butcher, but now for bacon, sausages and faggots, as well as advice and a good chat, the rest is our own.

Our food isn't delivered every week from the supermarket, or picked up from the butcher. So yes it looks a lot, but it feeds a family of five and lasts us a long time (we also have friends over for dinner and BBQ's a bit as well). If everyone had six or nine months of their meat in front of them (vegetarians  excluded obliviously) it would look a lot as well I'm sure!

Chicken Processing Mk3

We managed to get the last of this years meat birds processed on Sunday afternoon. 

We'd gone on a disastrous shopping trip to a local city to try to choose some tiles for the bathroom. We should have known better than to take the three kids and think we could make any decisions! We left about two hours later, none the wiser but all of use with slightly shorter tempers! We called and had lunch at my brothers which was really good fun, then dragging the kids away, hurried home. 

I knew I had six chickens to butcher before it got dark! 

I got outside around three, the sun sets around four O'clock so I knew I'd have to work quite fast! 

The girls wanted to assist again so we got everything ready. Bowls of warm water and clothes to wipe down, knife and sharpening steel, chopping/rest boards, two buckets (feathers and guts) and a plastic bag to pluck them on so I wouldn't get soaked. Hot water on the BBQ as well so I could wet pluck them again.

The girls got involved straight away again, watching me work, then helping to pluck feathers. I let them spend time picking off the pin feathers once I'd finished the bulk of the main feathers. They loved helping and asking about a thousand questions and they both made me laugh lots - they can be so matter of fact at that age! 

My eldest stayed out with me the whole way through, my younger daughter couldn't quite manage it, but it was getting cold and dark. It was lovely just to have the company and to have her talking to me about anything she wanted. By the time I had plucked all six, it was just after four o'clock, gutting them didn't take long but light was failing. I then bagged them up and left them to rest in the shed.

I was speaking to my butcher the other day and I was saying how when I jointed some of the last lot up the skin didn't stay on that well. He told me that I hadn't let them set long enough and to leave them somewhere for a few days first.

So I'm taking his advice and before I do anything with these chickens I'm going to let them sit and settle first. I think I'll probably joint up four of these and leave two birds whole. It's far easier for me to grab a meal sized portion and cook it up that night rather than always having to rely on a roast and using the left overs (which we do as well!).

How do you store your chickens in the freezer - jointed up or whole for a roast?

Also I now have a big bag of chicken livers in the freezer and I'm wondering what to do with them - does anyone that read this blog make their own pate and do you have a good recipe? I'm totally in love with pate but have never made any myself before.

Chicken Processing Mk2

I got myself more organised on Sunday and butchered 9 more chickens.

I set up a patio table with chopping boards on that could be scrubbed down (this is waste sheet material that can be thrown away afterwards). I sharpened my knife, had a steel to sharpen it as I went and two bowls of hot soapy water to keep everything clean. 

I also had two buckets, one for feathers (that can be composted) and one for feet and guts. I also had some plastic feed sacks on hand, one to sit on (it had rained in the night) and one to have on my lap to stop the wet birds from soaking my trousers. 

A large saucepan of water was also warming on the BBQ. 

The birds for slaughter were pulled out before they'd been fed and kept in a crate away from the others until their time came. 

I started with batched but found it was far better to do one at a time, slaughter, drain, dip in hot water, pluck. 

None of them went very quickly but I learnt that having the water the right temperature makes a huge difference. Unfortunately my thermometer doesn't seem to work so I just had to guess. One bird was dipped too hot so I ended up skinning that one as the skin ripped too easily. 

Once I had all the birds plucked I then wiped down and set up for gutting, never a nice job but it went quite quickly.

I separated the birds up into ones that looked good as whole birds and ones that were better jointed. I kept five birds whole and cut the others into breasts, whole legs and wings. 

I then used my new vacuum packer to bag the birds up and separate the jointed ones into meal sized portions. Three legs or breasts seemed about right for our family. 

I bagged and froze the stripped carcasses as well so I can make a big batch of stock when I get chance. 

I certainly felt more organised this time and it went without a hitch. That said there as some things I'd change: 

• I'd like a chicken plucker, it's not great doing them by hand. 
• I need a bigger saucepan or something to hot dip the birds into, mine is only just big enough and soon needs topping up with more hot water. 
• The bench I butchered them on was too low, my back was hurting as I was bending the whole time, I proper work bench would be ideal. 
• An outside sink would help an amazing amount, something I might have to consider installing! 

So some hard work, but the freezer has certainly been stocked up! 

I've still got six birds left and I'll leave these a while longer to see how big they get, it would be great to have some big ones to save having to buy a turkey for Christmas. 

What do you think? Is there anything you'd do differently to how I set it up this time?