Pastured meat for 17 cents a pound
In
case you've never gone hunting, there are scads of seasons, even if you
limit your sights to deer. There's bow season, muzzle-loader
season, youth deer season...and either-sex firearms season. That
last one is when you really want to wear orange if you leave the road,
and is when I tend to hear four or five gunshots during a short walk
with Lucy.
It's also when I use my
lazy-woman's version of hunting to bag a deer. Here's how I hunt
--- I sit on our futon, glancing out our big bay of south-facing windows
in between writing blog posts, reading novels, and petting
Huckleberry. A deer super-highway runs right along the southwest
corner of our core homestead, and when I see a deer walking by, I grab
the rifle, walk quietly out the door so I can steady the gun along the
top of the picnic table on the porch, and take a shot.
This year, I bagged a mature doe, the biggest one we've ever gotten. That means the meat is a little tougher than the yearling delicacies
we've enjoyed in previous years, but I'm confident I can make it shine
via brining, stewing, etc. Not counting the liquid and meat we
picked off the bones after cooking them into broth, here's the haul:
- Hams --- 15.3 lb.
- Steak --- 4.4 lb.
- Hamburger --- 4.3 lb.
- Stew --- 5.2 lb.
- Total --- 29.1 lb.
(As a side note, we cut
each ham in half because it was so big. And we saved back a lot of
stew meat rather than grinding it all this time because I've learned to
cook with stewing chunks more. Plus, Mark got sick of grinding,
eventually. On the other hand, Mark turned out to be vastly
superior to me in terms of meticulously cutting up steaks, although I
did have to give him a lecture on cutting meat on a wooden cutting
board.)
Since we've only shot
perhaps five bullets this year, that's less than 17 cents per pound ---
pretty cheap meat! For those of you keeping track at home, I'm
still leading the deer competition 3.5 to 1.5 ahead of Mark. Now,
if I can just nab one more deer this week....
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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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tee --- I've been given some canned venison, and it was pretty good, although probably primarily for putting into stews. If we get another deer, though, it'll have to be canned since the freezer is full to the brim!
Karyn --- We're still learning, honestly. I mostly just did internet searches, listened to the commenters on the blog, and kept trying until things got easier! The first one was pretty daunting, but if you can process a chicken, you can process a deer.
Robin --- I wish I could answer your question, but I know barely more than you do! A friend of Mark's is a gun aficionado, and he picked out our rifle for us. (Actually, he sold Mark the gun.)
In terms of learning to shoot, I figure as long as you understand gun safety (keep the safety on at all times until you're ready to pull the trigger, don't point the gun at anyone, etc.), it's mostly just practice. But I don't mind only being an okay shot as long as it gets the job done.