My week
Every Feb at Living History Farms we do a two day, all-staff, hog butchering event. As one of the farm site supervisors, much of the responsibility for this falls on me, and I am very tired. Let me tell you butchering three hogs is not as fun as they make it sound in school. It did offer us some interesting opportunities however. The morning the first day was the killing, scraping, and gutting. I have participated in butchering many times now, but I stuck my first pig, (cutting the jugular to let the blood out) yesterday morning, and if you'll pardon the pun, I butchered the job. Luckily for me and the pig it was already dead, which is not the common practice today, nor was it then. One of our volunteers made gritvurst which is sort of a blood pudding, but he must really like it, because to my knowledge he didn't share with any of us. Yesterday afternoon, I got to show off. We took a break from blood and gore to go play around with my new barn. I am currently building a log barn at my farm, and so everyone came over to see and try all the steps to take a round log to a hewn beam as well as nothcing methods. The weather couldn't have been nicer, and a few cold ones after work sure didn't go wrong either.
Today we had to cut up the meat into its prospective bits. We have a volunteer who's a meat safety guy at a local pizza toppings factory, who came and showed us how to cut St. Louis style ribs, and picnic roasts. We are going to end up salt curing 4 hams and two sides of bacon to eat this summer, after we finish up with the curing and smoking. Very salty. We also packed a saltpork barrel and rendered about 60 lbs of lard. Very greasy. On an unrelated but ironic note, a local caterer had offered to provide a free lunch, (yes there is such a thing) to LHF employee's in the hopes that we would recomend him to people who book our rental facilities. Any guesses what he fed us today? Pulled pork sandwiches and St. Louis style ribs. In the afternoon we stuffed sausages, but I managed to sneak away to my farm on the pretext of smoking some of the meat, as my farm has the only working smokehouse. I say it was a pretext, because really I snuck away to play with fire and meat, after I turned my chicken coop into a Miller High Life dispenser. Over all, had fun, but am very tired.
Hope I didn't gross anyone out too much, but thought someone might be interested.
Today we had to cut up the meat into its prospective bits. We have a volunteer who's a meat safety guy at a local pizza toppings factory, who came and showed us how to cut St. Louis style ribs, and picnic roasts. We are going to end up salt curing 4 hams and two sides of bacon to eat this summer, after we finish up with the curing and smoking. Very salty. We also packed a saltpork barrel and rendered about 60 lbs of lard. Very greasy. On an unrelated but ironic note, a local caterer had offered to provide a free lunch, (yes there is such a thing) to LHF employee's in the hopes that we would recomend him to people who book our rental facilities. Any guesses what he fed us today? Pulled pork sandwiches and St. Louis style ribs. In the afternoon we stuffed sausages, but I managed to sneak away to my farm on the pretext of smoking some of the meat, as my farm has the only working smokehouse. I say it was a pretext, because really I snuck away to play with fire and meat, after I turned my chicken coop into a Miller High Life dispenser. Over all, had fun, but am very tired.
Hope I didn't gross anyone out too much, but thought someone might be interested.