Sweet potato fed venison
"We're going to have to
do something about the deer," I told Mark over lunch. "They're
getting in the garden again."
Fast forward ahead an
hour and I hear a gunshot that sounds awfully close. I run outside ---
"Honey, are you okay?!"
"I killed it!" my
husband crows.
It turns out he hadn't
quite killed it, though he had knocked it off
its feet. Mark had to rush inside and reload before putting the
anterless buck out of its misery. But then he was the king of the
farm for the next two days, having saved the garden and
killed his first deer. By local standards, Mark had also beaten
my record from two years ago since my
first (and only) kill had been a
doe.
I can be awfully
competitive, though. Two days later, as I talked
to Daddy on the phone, I saw a deer walking right down the garden path
as if headed for our front door. "I've got to go," I told my
father. "There's a deer in the garden." "Kill it!" he
replied.
I crept down the hall and
picked up the loaded rifle. Slipping
off the safety, I eased open the front door and steadied the gun
against the door frame. As Mark likes to say, he could see the
deer fall to the ground right outside his window --- my shot had
severed its spine and the youngster died almost instantly. Once
we dressed them both out, my antlerless buck was just a hair bigger
than my long-suffering husband's. I told him he was just going to
have to get another deer to even the score.
Which is all a long way
of saying --- this week's lunchtime series is
all about venison. Is it cost effective to hunt your own?
How do you butcher it? How do you eat it? Stay tuned for
the answers, including a special guest post on chimney top smoking.
(If you're a vegetarian,
or just disgusted by pictures of meat on the hoof, I apologize in
advance. You might want to steer clear, at least until we reach
the kitchen on Thursday.)
| This post is part of our Venison lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Looks like we were up to the same tasks this weekend. I posted some stuff about the deer we processed as well, though I'll save pictures and tutorials until next time. This is my second one and I don't feel like ready to give processing tips yet, other than - take your time and let it cool first.
It sure is a process isn't it? Kill, field dress (e.g. gut), drag, hang, skin, cool, carve, dispose of carcass, trim cuts, grind the rest, bag, freeze, cook up scraps for dogs, take a hot shower. Whew!!! You certainly can't do that on a weekday over lunch.
Congrats on your two kills. You'd pay a lot of money for that antibiotic-free, hormone-free, natural, free range meat at the healthfood store! And all it cost was a single rifle shell.
Congratulations on your deer! It sounds like it wasn't your first one?
I'm mostly posting a lunchtime series in hopes we'll get a bunch of tips from more experienced hunters. We're raw newbies and would like to get better.
Drat! I wish I was tacticool!
It's a laser. I think, with 20/20 hindsight, that we might have been better of spending a bit more money on a scope rather than using a laser. When we got it, I didn't understand ballistics enough, and thought that if the light was hitting what I want to hit, that's where the bullet would go when I pulled the trigger. (Yes, I should know better, having taken physics in high school, but I guess I forgot...)
We're both raw beginners in terms of gun ownership, but a gun loving friend of Mark's recommended this rifle, and it has served us well.