I try to feed my family healthy simple foods that my great-grandmother (if alive) would recognize. We buy local/organic fruits and veggies as often as we can and I will admit to paying $6-8/pound for grass-fed organic beef. Expensive, but my kids are worth it.
I grew up with an avid deer hunter father. He brought home a deer or two or three every year and I remember my mother carving them up in the kitchen. At least until she wised up and made him bring them to a deer processing plant. But whether we ate venison sausage or roasted backstrap, we always enjoyed eating those healthy lean deer.
My husband and I aren't hunters ourselves, mainly because the idea of getting up before dawn and sitting in a freezing deer blind has no appeal to us. And as much as we love meat, I still have issues looking it in the eyes before killing it. I have a few rooster stories about that... But I do want my boys to know that the hamburger they eat comes from a cow and not from the grocery store. And who knows, if the boys show an interest in hunting when they get older, I might drag my lazy rear out there to be with them.
Now, on to my "Christmas Story."
We were supposed to spend Christmas Day with my family and I could already taste that melt-in-your-mouth lamb roast. Hours before we were supposed to show up, my father calls and starts the conversation with "I had a horrible accident."
Of course I panicked--until I heard the whole story. See, my father was dog-watching my sister's chocolate lab. Dad and Charlie (the dog) were going for a morning walk in the woods when a doe burst out in front of them. Charlie freaked out and started barking, and the deer then freaked out and turned tail and ran smack into a wooden fencepost and broke her neck, dying instantly.
My father, at other times the manly deer hunter, considers all deer on his property his personal friends whom he feeds and waters like pets; so he was really upset. He called the game warden who said that Dad could have the deer for meat, but he could not bring it to the deer processor because my father did not have a deer tag. So this is why we received the morning call.
My father has been ill and it was freezing that day so he could not butcher the deer alone. But I started thinking about those pounds of organic grass-fed meat and I convinced my husband (who had a bad cold) to go early and cut the deer up. He was not happy, but thankfully he loves me and puts up with things like this. We googled "deer processing," printed out a few sets of instructions, and headed out.
I won't go into great gory detail, but I will say my father the deer hunter laughed out loud when we showed up with our Wikipedia deer processing instructions... It was a cold, rainy, blood and guts day. After a few hours, we had a large beer cooler full of cleaned and quartered venison. The boys saw where meat comes from (and they frighteningly didn't seem to be bothered one bit) and I found plenty of excuses to check on Grandma back in the warm dry house.
Later at dinner we mentioned that this was not our best Christmas, and Imp piped up and said "I think that the deer had a worse Christmas!" From the mouth of a four-year-old.
A few days later my mom and dad cut all the meat off the bones and I brought my meat grinder and we had a fun grinding party and ended up with 20 bags of ground venison.
I made my homemade organic grass-fed venison veggie lasagna. Yummy!
I took some pics on my husband's phone of him cutting up the deer so he could show his friends his "manly" side. The other day I was talking to one of those friends and he mentioned the deer pics. He knows we have been looking to buy a new house and he said "You know, your new neighbors might not like living next to rednecks who eat roadkill." Technically it is not roadkill and more like fencekill, but he still cracked me up.
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