Wacky Wednesday #4: "The Wursts"

This week is being spent on the farm in Iowa, so I'm adding some 'wackiness' from our farm experience.  The trip has been great and has included all the standards: present opening, cookie eating, wine drinking, wii playing,  cookie eating, baby holding, cookie eating, snow playing..... did I mention the cookies?  I may need a size bigger pants to make the trip back to Oregon.  

It has been bitter cold, but also beautiful.

I should mention I took these photos from INSIDE the house.

The big excitement of the trip is that it is time to butcher.  As in "kill a cow and make meat out of it".  In my parent's basement.  Really.

So, my ancestry is purely German.  My great-great-grandparents were immigrants from Germany in the late 1800's.  For my entire life (and my dad's entire life, his dad's entire life, etc, etc) a cow and a pig are "processed" sometime in the bitter cold of winter so there is meat to eat for the year... and of course, a couple varieties of "wursts" (we are Germans, that is what we do).

I have to add that I have not actually participated in butchering and processing meat since the mid-1990's.  I've been on about a 15 year hiatus coming from living in different states.  It is also the first time that Marty has ever participated.

There is some prep work that happened before we got here.  The cow was actually killed a week ago, skinned, gutted, cut into quarters and has spent the last week hanging in the walk-in cooler to age.  (Located in my parents basement.)  I used to find it great fun to take friends downstairs to show them the dead cow in the basement.

Marty jumped right in and found himself the cow apron.  Seems fitting, huh?

My Uncle Dave & my Dad at the saw cutting up the beef. 

Might not look like what you imagine for a place to process meat, but believe me, it is very clean. 

My cousin, Carly using the grinder to process the hamburger.

Some of the meat in the walk-in-cooler.  There ended up being 3 of those blue bins full of hamburger.

One bin of T-bone steaks.

Wrapping up some roasts.  My mom, Aunt Marlene & Aunt Jolene.

Uncle Dave mixing up the hamburger.

It's a mini assembly line.  Jo is wrapping, Ron is taping, Carly is stamping (date & what it is) and Anna is separating everything to be weighed out.

And where do we store all this meat?  My mom has two freezers like this in the basement.  It is also filled with all sorts of goodies from her giant garden.

 Today was day one.  There were 225 packages of hamburger that were wrapped up and divided out among the family.  Just over 300 pounds of hamburger.  That is a lot of burger.  I have no idea how many packages of steaks and roasts were made.  It was a lot.

Tomorrow everyone comes back over the make the "wurst".  The wurst of the day is Rinderwurst.   The kids are excited to see the cooked cow tongue, heart and kidneys (which I guess also goes in the Rinderwurst.... well whatever doesn't get eaten).  I'll have to write about that tomorrow.

We are still enjoying the "wurst" from last week.  That is the Liverwurst.  It came from processing the pig and in my opinion it is quite tasty.  But I have also eaten it my entire life.  Marty wasn't quite as fond of it.  I have to admit, it doesn't look very appetizing, but it is good.  We eat it spread on Ritz crackers.

Liverwurst

Pretty wacky stuff, huh?  Not sure how many people can honestly tell me that they have actively participated in butchering a cow or a pig.... much less in their own basement.