Like most endeavors that I undertake, this one didn’t turn out as planned. Also like most of my endeavors, this one is comical. Which is good, because when something goes the route of the unexpected, it’s always best when it’s funny too.
This year Derek and I bought in on a cow. Yes a cow. This isn’t new territory for me. I grew up eating farm fresh animals. Either from our own family stock or from friends who raised bigger things {like cows and pigs.} So, yes, I’m familiar with buying part of a cow. I’ve just never been the one to do it. That was always a mom and dad kind of ordeal.
But up here in PraCan cattle ranches abound. So it seemed pretty silly not to buy in with four other friends on a North Dakota original, grass-fed, cold-weather-tested cow. So we put our money down, expecting to get some ground beef, T-bones, roasts…the like. My wonderful friend Jessi and her husband, Craig were kind enough to organize the whole thing. So when the butcher had done his job, I got a call that the meat was in.
Jessi said that we got a little more than expected…and asked if I had any extra coolers. I didn’t. But I headed over to pick up my share.
Now, I was under the impression this would be a quick in and out kind of thing. Which explains why I wore my jim-jams. You see it was about 7pm on a Saturday night and Derek was out of town. Obviously I was in the middle of a crafting and eating marathon at my Minot bestie’s apartment. {No need to be fancy.}
But again. Unexpected. When I got there I found out just how much extra we had received. See, there is no way to tell exactly how much meat your cow will provide…until it’s hanging. Yes, hanging. Like on a hook in some butchery somewhere. Ours turned out to be a real fatty…putting out 700 pounds of meat more than we anticipated. All in all we were looking at nearly 2000 pounds of beef. Which meant that Jessi and Craig’s garage was turned into a temporary meat packing plant.
We put out tarps and divvied everything up. Each share included 57 lbs of ground beef. That’s the only number that sticks in my mind. Fifty-seven. That’s a lot of beef. Everyone also got a vast array of steaks, roasts, soup bones, stew meat, you name it. So much that one friend’s freezer looked like this once she got it all jammed inside.
And my freezer looks like this.
Which is fine. We just won’t be buying meat for a while. Probably not until we move.
On a different note, it is delicious. And you can totally tell that it was grass fed. It’s weird, because I didn’t think I’d notice. But it’s so good and has virtually no fat on it.
But I’ve learned a lesson from all of this. Next time you want to split a cow, split it 6 or 7 ways. I also learned that a dead, packaged cow can still take up a lot of space {like 10 coolers.} And that butchers make good money {I saw that butcher fee.} And that even thought it was a lot of meat, and I spent quite a bit of time in my jim-jams sorting it out, and it was pretty comical, and we may have to try really hard to eat it all in the next 12 months…I’m glad we did it. Even if only for the funny story we can tell later…
“Remember when we bought that cow and it was an obscene amount of meat?…”
Amy
