Angela

I spent half the morning skinning and cutting up a deer today. It's too bad that you usually waste half the deer by blasting a hole through it, making the meat around it bloodshot and inedible. I just cut the deer in half and hoisted that half into the pig pen, leaving the nice clean half for me to carve steaks off of. I got 8 meal sized bags of steaks (I have to add more steaks to a bag nowadays because my family is growing so big and hungry (It would have been 12 bags 2 years ago)), and about 8 pounds of hamburger meat for me to grind up. Took me about 2 1/2 hours. If you say we can eat a meal using one pound of hamburger (might be wishful thinking with my eager eaters), that is 16 meals off of one deer! It was a big deer though. Backstrap the size of my palm instead of those tiny nugget steaks we got off the tiny deer last year. Hopefully we will have at least 2 more deer coming our way in the next week. Hopefully we will have 10! You never know with hunters. Sometimes they get something, sometimes they don't. If we get 2 more deer that size, that would be 48 bags of meat and we can eat deer once a week this next year for only 7 hours work. Awesome. Sure beats a chicken, which takes me 1/2 hour each time and yields only one meal. That's 5 meals for 2 1/2 hours work. Cows win though, with about 12 hours work and enough cow to eat 5 times a week for a year! Wish I had another cow growing, I'm getting low......