I'm not quite sure where to start with this.
It is my belief that I owe it to my animals to be present for their slaughter. I know a lot of people will not get this, they will look at me sideways and think I'm a bit odd. It's okay, I'm used to that. I am quite content with "a bit odd".
I had started to write a bit more in here, but it needed to be split into another post. See here for my little rant that started from this point and how disconnected society is from their food.
Anyway, I do feel that I should be present for the slaughter of my animals for meat. I have been responsible for their care and well-being, I have raised them and given them the best that I possibly can. Now they'll be dying so that I can continue to eat and provide food for my family. It's a mark of respect and honouring their contribution to my freezer.
I made Hubby and Miss Eight watch Lamb Chop's slaughter last year. I think it's important for them to see the change from living breathing animal to meat. I don't want my children to grow up being unaware and disconnected from their food.
The homekill man came out and did one steer at a time. One of them was for a friend. We've been grazing a cattle beast for him and when he asked how much he should pay us, I suggested that when he gets his one slaughtered and butchered, he do ours at the same time.
Having learned from last time, I asked for the offal before he'd even taken a shot. I had bowls and buckets ready for liver, heart and kidneys. It turned out that I also needed a wheelbarrow. I'd asked (half as a joke) about keeping the skin for tanning. Hubby had been in touch with his step-father about the tripes. His step-father adores tripe and onions as much as Hubby still finds the memory of eating them to be traumatising.
There was a lot that I hadn't thought of though that normally seems to go for offal. "Cheeks and tongue?" Bishop (the homekill man) said to me very early on. I took the cheeks. I'd never had them, but I'd seen them used and raved over on a tv cooking show. I wasn't quite brave enough for the tongue (not for eating anyway) and so with equal parts gratitude and disgust, Clegg (the friend who'd bought all of the people concerned with these cattlebeasts together) took both.
I used the cheeks for the steak in steak, kidney and mushroom pies that I made for Hubby. The mushrooms were also grown here. Both Hubby and Miss Eight have raved over these fantastic pies and that the cheeks were perfect in them.
The tail was the next thing to be offered to me. I've never eaten oxtail anything before. For all my father was a farm boy, we never got offal at home. I decided to give it a go and was given both of them, with the 'skirt' that he cut off from the inside of the beast then and there and a few cooking instructions. Never put brassicas in an oxtail stew they all said. I've also since been told by an Irish woman that dumplings are mandatory with this dish.
Now that I have cooked an oxtail stew, I completely get the dumplings. It was thick and rich and oily. It needed the dumplings to soak up some of the oil and tone down some of the richness. It was probably the most tasty beef stew I've ever had, only marred by some of the tiny bones from the tip of the tail that I missed when I was straining out the bones. I got one right on my front two teeth and I felt that for hours.
Heart, lungs, the fatty and tough bits from the kidneys and some of the liver went for dog food. I've been making dog food this way on and off for years. Chop it all up roughly, put into a slow cooker with some minced beef, rice, oats or pasta, some veges and a little garlic and cook for hours. It usually forms it's own thick gravy and freezes well. I froze 24 litres of this that day, and two large bags of offal that I didn't have pots for. It stinks while you're cooking, so if you're able to run the slow cooker out the window on a table outside this is a much better option. I also had two large preserving pans going on the barbecue.
He gave me the suets from both steers too. "Give one to the chooks" he said. "They'll go mad for it." They didn't really know what to make of it for the first day or so. Most of my hens were battery hens that had finished their commercial time. But they did figure it out in the end. I rendered the rest. I have two containers in my fridge and a large amount in the freezer.
I'd told Hubby that he needed to be cleaning up the tripe. I've seen it before when it comes out of the cow, he had only ever seen it partially precooked when his step-father bought it. He wasn't prepared for the smell or the colour. In some sympathy and some disgust, I dragged it over a gate and hosed it down for him to begin with. Then told him that he was supposed to be cleaning it. Five minutes and he sent his parents a text to tell them they could clean it and he'd drop it round in an hour or so. He's 95% sure it ended up in the bin and that they'd been expecting to get it bleached and boiled.
By this stage, Bishop and Clegg were making jokes about how the offal guy was going to be beggared but were also quite happy to see that I don't believe in waste and think it's something that's wrong with people today.
"Oh, that's right" says Bishop, "You wanted the skin." He picked up my animal's skin and we draped it over the gate to the paddock. "When it gets to be too much for you love," he tells me, "Give me a call and I'll come and take it away. Same for the offal you won't get through." When? He said "When it gets too much". I should know myself better, but that made it a point of pride right then and there. I have tanned the skin. It nearly got to be too much for me but I kept hearing his slight condescension and the way he didn't really think I'd be able to do it all.
So he cleaned up and drove away, Clegg taking the cleaned carcasses to the butcher. By the end of the next day, I had about 70kg of food for us and the dog in my freezer. That was before I'd gotten any of the "normal meat" back. It struck me then just how much waste there is.
I posted a link to a video on facebook months ago. This video is apparently an advertising executive explaining to an audience how their own wilful ignorance allows the meat industry to get away with cruel and intensive farming practices. Fortunately, most of the ones shown in the video don't happen in NZ. Sadly though, there was a comment on my post - and I quote:
While it is the truth, the population density doesn't really allow for any other method to produce the amount of food required for consumers. The day of the Rancher who can make money is gone.. .so in order to really fix this, we have to go back to distributed smaller local companies producing the food for local market, however, there is no profit in that anymore... so, how do we fix the problem without creating food shortages? Stopping factory farming stops food production.. how do we replace the food?
Given that we tend to throw away about a fifth of the edible bits of cow when we slaughter for food, I disagree. I've been seeing a push towards "Nose to Tail" eating and found this great blog. But in my experience, suggesting using any of these parts in dinner is met with such disgust and it really doesn't deserve that. What it does need is a little inventiveness, a return to making your own smallgoods and maybe digging out Grandma's cookbooks.
I was sure I had taken some photos during this process, but I can't currently find any of them. I will add them and update this post when I do.
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