Christmas 2013

Christmas 2013

Deuteronomy 11:18-19

18 Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 19 Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.

Deuteronomy 11:18-19

New International Version (NIV)

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

A Long Few Days. Pig Butchering :)

We recently put one of our 1.5 year old sows in the freezer. She was a nice sized pig and we put 260lbs in the freezer, or cured to be smoked. I really wanted a picture of Papa standing beside her but the camera had been left in the truck overnight and was too cold to work. SO I got one of all of the pig on the table in the entrance, where we cut and wrapped her. You can't tell but the table is quite a ways away from the straw wall :) I wanted a picture of us making sausage too.. but totally forgot!!! It was a busy few days. We rendered the lard as well and burnt it a bit as we were just doing too many things all at once!

The kids were VERY keen to help so we set up a little table for them and they scrapped the chops off. Papa cut them on the meat saw and then put them on the table and J, L and E scrapped them off with canning lids. R put them in a clean tote to be wrapped. After the tote was full of meat to be wrapped I wrapped it. That's what you call a 'family affair.'
It looks like that is bacon and ribs on the table behind the kids. Ribs ready to wrap on the left. 



 R put them in a clean tote to be wrapped. After the tote was full of meat to be wrapped I wrapped it. That's what you call a 'family affair.' 
Here is a cute picture Papa took after a couple of long days of putting this pig in the freezer. Yes that was Stub.. the wild and hormonal mama pig who kept escaping. 
Baby J asleep on me. I was just about asleep too.. He played hard with the kids while Papa and I were busy deboning, wrapping, cutting, grinding, mixing and making sausage, but really needed some Mommy time by the end of the 2 days.. Papa smoked the sausage in our smoke house and we packaged up 18 bags of 12 hot dogs!!  Weiner roast anyone?? :) We had almost as much Mennonite sausage and Mc. Griggers sausage. We mixed the pork with ground beef from our cow as her hamburger was a bit greasy. We thought she would be tough so we added all the fat we could find.. won't do that again!  It's wonderful stuff. Papa also cured the bacon and a few hams/hocks himself and after curing it for a certain amount of time ( close to a month? I think?) he smoked it just yesterday. Boy are we ever looking forward to having our own bacon again. 

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