780

Sorry -  I just can't seem to quit talking about this dumb steer. It's pretty much the biggest thing going on around here right now. Literally.



seven cubic feet of Beefy

Oh my, ya'll. Beefy came back from the butcher the other day, all nicely paper-wrapped and stamped. All SEVEN HUNDRED and EIGHTY pounds of him. For the record, that's a serious lotta beef. I'm still a little giddy over it. Our chest freezer proved to be woefully inadequate, only holding a little more than half of it. I spent most of the morning scrambling to throw out just about everything in our other 2 freezers to make room, and we still needed my parents' upright freezer and 3 coolers. We managed to unload about 250 lbs or so on friends, neighbors, and coworkers, but we still have the chest freezer and the upright freezer full to their tiptops with beef! I wish, wish, wish that I had gotten a picture of the back of the minivan (it took 2 of us over an hour just to unload) - the whole back, from the front seats to the back hatch, was stacked 3 feet deep with little paper parcels. Unreal.  I DID think to get pictures of it in our freezers. I only wish I had also driven over to my folks' place to get a picture of their freezers, too. SEVEN HUNDRED AND EIGHTY POUNDS.





I had to throw out nearly everything in our freezer to make extra room (but I couldn't bring myself to part with all those chopped bell peppers from last autumn!).





Even Big Ugly had to get in the mix. That's what we call our extra refrigerator. Doesn't everyone have an extra fridge in their kitchen?

There was still an extra couple hundred pounds of meat that wouldn't fit, so we took it to my parents' place, which is fortunately right next door, and filled their upright freezer to bursting, and still had to use 3 coolers to hold it all. That left us with six 2-gallon bags of "dog bones" to do something with. I managed to fit 2 bags of them into 4 soup/stock pots to start cooking down to boullion.  

Doesn't that look tasty?

I'm actually not entirely sure what happened to the other 4. I'm pretty sure one got thrown outside to the neighborhood dogs. I was frankly too tired and overwhelmed to even care about the rest... though now I'm wondering if they're still around and I can make them into broth. I can't help it. I'm hard-wired to find a use for everything.

And speaking of thrifty - I did the math, and at the end of all this, Beefy clocked in at just shy of $1.00 a pound. Shut. Up.