Baa, baa gray sheep...
Vegetarians might want to skip this. Tomorrow we will get the lamb (now on the edge of mutton, being almost a year old and an estimated weight of 150 pounds in dry weather...) and then proceed to another adventure in country living, killing and butchering same.
I mentioned dry weather. It's not dry weather. It's cold and raining the kind of slow, meditative rain that may not deliver many actual inches (or it can) but can make you feel cold and damp from six feet inside the window of a warm house. I'm hoping the sheep is in a barn, not out in the field collecting water in its wool, because--while this weather might well be comfortable for a woolly to be outside--a *wet* woolly is a lot heavier than a *dry* woolly and I will be some of the muscle hoisting it up.
Why gray sheep? Some of you will ask that. Because a white sheep that isn't show-ready hasn't been white since it was a cute little newborn lamb with cute little sharp hooves and a cute little curly-topped head that is about as soft as an iron doorknob. Wool has a natural oil in it, and it's curly, and the two together mean that it collects and holds dirt amazingly well. The majority of sheep I see in the field are gray for that reason.
Anyway. Tomorrow if all goes well, B- will finish trimming and shoeing other peoples' horses in time to zip across to his place, put the lamb in a cage in the back of his pickup, zip over to the town nearest our destination where we'll rendezvous in the parking lot of the Post Office, and then I'll lead him to J-'s place where all the deeds will be done. The plan is to slaughter the beast tomorrow evening, hang it in the barn overnight (it's supposed to be down near freezing, which is perfect, and the barn is coyote proof) and then do the cutting and wrapping the next morning. Which means that tomorrow I need to supply us with plenty of plastic bags, both the big black trash bags and the freezer bags for storing the meat, and we need to be sure all our working knives are sharp-sharp-sharp.
I'm looking forward to lamb korma, rack of lamb, leg of lamb, ground lamb to stuff into things, lamb ke-babs...
I mentioned dry weather. It's not dry weather. It's cold and raining the kind of slow, meditative rain that may not deliver many actual inches (or it can) but can make you feel cold and damp from six feet inside the window of a warm house. I'm hoping the sheep is in a barn, not out in the field collecting water in its wool, because--while this weather might well be comfortable for a woolly to be outside--a *wet* woolly is a lot heavier than a *dry* woolly and I will be some of the muscle hoisting it up.
Why gray sheep? Some of you will ask that. Because a white sheep that isn't show-ready hasn't been white since it was a cute little newborn lamb with cute little sharp hooves and a cute little curly-topped head that is about as soft as an iron doorknob. Wool has a natural oil in it, and it's curly, and the two together mean that it collects and holds dirt amazingly well. The majority of sheep I see in the field are gray for that reason.
Anyway. Tomorrow if all goes well, B- will finish trimming and shoeing other peoples' horses in time to zip across to his place, put the lamb in a cage in the back of his pickup, zip over to the town nearest our destination where we'll rendezvous in the parking lot of the Post Office, and then I'll lead him to J-'s place where all the deeds will be done. The plan is to slaughter the beast tomorrow evening, hang it in the barn overnight (it's supposed to be down near freezing, which is perfect, and the barn is coyote proof) and then do the cutting and wrapping the next morning. Which means that tomorrow I need to supply us with plenty of plastic bags, both the big black trash bags and the freezer bags for storing the meat, and we need to be sure all our working knives are sharp-sharp-sharp.
I'm looking forward to lamb korma, rack of lamb, leg of lamb, ground lamb to stuff into things, lamb ke-babs...