Filling the Deep Freeze

Tricia made a soup with the soup rounds that were at the very bottom of our deep freeze and that was the end of the steer that we had butchered two years ago.  There was an echo in the bottom of the freezer, but things were about to change.  After dropping off our bull at Elliott's Slaughterhouse, he hung and dry-aged and then was processed according to our instructions.  Tricia called today and the beef was ready for us to pick up.  She and Russ made the 14 mile drive to Morse, Louisiana to pick up the beef.  She backed up to their freezer while they assembled our order.

The beef was packaged and was frozen and ready for transport home.

Tricia had our large ice chest in the back seat, a big blue molasses tub in the front seat...

and a tarp laid out in the trunk.  The car was quickly filled with meat.  She was thinking that she might have to make a second trip, but one trip sufficed.

She and Russ quickly brought all the meat inside and began stacking it in the deep freeze.

A couple of years ago, I made some dividers with plywood to segregate and better organize the freezer.  On the right hand side is the hamburger meat.  With the steer from two years ago, we learned that we didn't order enough hamburger and we ran out quickly.  This year we ordered 68 two-pound packages.  There is also the liver and debris separately packed in the hamburger compartment.

The photo below is before we got it all loaded, but the central compartment contains brisket, roasts, fat (that we will render tallow with) and bones (that we will roast and make beef stock with).  The bones and fat weighed 45 pounds, 36 lbs. of it bones and 9 lbs. fat.  The left compartment contains T-bones, ribeyes, soup rounds, and other assorted steaks.  Once it was loaded, the freezer was completely full.

The butchered bull weighed 358 pounds (hanging weight).  It costs $0.43 per pound to process, plus $25 to butcher and $12 for the debris.  That totaled $190.94 + $17.67 sales tax, bringing it to a grand total of $208.61 for a large deep freezer full of meat.  We enjoyed some of the delicious hamburger meat tonight.  I may be biased, but fresh grass-fed meat has great flavor that is hard to beat!

They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To

This evening I went to retrieve the milk cows as they were eating grass way out in the pasture and ignored our calls to come to the barn to get milked.  Tricia was gathering together the bucket of fermented rice from the feed room in the barn to feed the chickens and they waited right outside the barn gate for supper.

That white behemoth by the barn door catches your eye, doesn't it?

That is our old deep freeze.  Although I shouldn't really use the word old.  The thing was only six years old when it bit the dust.  We were going to haul it off to the landfill, but I don't like hauling things to the dump.  Not when they have another use.

I remember when I was in junior high school, I showed sheep.  We had a red barn out behind the house and right outside the door, my dad had placed an old chest-type deep freezer that no longer worked and we used it to store sweet feed and Calf manna in.  The rats couldn't get to the feed in the deep freeze and it was sealed tightly and kept out moisture.  When you opened the door, the great smell of the sweet feed and calf manna hit your nostrils.  Sweet feed still brings back good memories of childhood.

So back to that white "eyesore" by the side of the barn.  I remarked to the salesperson at the store that we bought it from that it didn't last but six years. Surprisingly, I was told that is really all you can expect out of them these days. They aren't built to last. They also aren't built to be kept outdoors in the garage.  They don't have the insulation in them that they had back then.

My brother still has an old chest-type deep freeze that he inherited from my grandmother that we called Bumby.  It was and International Harvester brand and had a big 'hood ornament' right above the handle.  It kept the ice cream and other stuff frozen solid.  Well, forty-something years later and that thing is still running! Amazing.  Things used to be built to last - with pride.

I guess I have to look on the bright side.  It gave me six good years as a freezer and now it will give me many more good years as a storage receptacle for chicken feed.