Meat Cutting

We got the opportunity to watch some of our sheep being processed at the slaughterhouse.


This is a typical carcass of a US line sheep.


First step is breaking the carcass in half.



This is the cross section. This is not a very meaty loin compared to some of our sheep.


We had one lamb show up with a spool joint. This is usually the designation for a mutton. She was only 6 months old. The carcass on the left has a break joint and is a lamb. The carcass on the right has a spool joint and is a mutton.


Frenching the racks.


Trimming all fat off.


Bagging the boneless roasts into netting .


The packages are prepared to be vacuum sealed.


Here they are being packaged by carcass into the boxes.

We learned a lot watching the crew work on our sheep. Our biggest impression is how much fat our sheep have on them. These are entirely grass finished and not fed any grains yet they had more fat cover than I expected to see. I can only imagine how fat they would get if fed grains.

The lamb that had to be marked as mutton was also interesting. Most Black Welsh are slow growing and it is unusual to have one grade out as a mutton when less than a year of age.

The meat cutting and packing crew was 8 people and it took about 20 minutes to fully process one carcass. That is one reason for the high cost of food. A good slaughterhouse has a very skilled set of workers and they spend a lot of time making sure the meat is cut to order. The difference between a small place like this one and a huge assembly line is obvious. The smaller plant cares and every person is skilled and can do most of the jobs. They know how to cut meat to individual orders and are willing to keep individual carcasses separate and tracked for us. A far cry from huge plants where each worker only does a single cut all day.

It's a pleasure to have such a good partner in providing our customers with good meat.

History Lecture to small Vision School Class

I was asked to give a short lecture to a very small 5 person class of Vision students about clothing from the timeframe of 1625 to 1750.

I dressed in my mantua and full Golden Age of Piracy outfit made from Reconstructing History patterns.


Spinning on a hand spindle. I am not very good at it.

My wheel is completely inaccurate but it is the only one I have so I used it.


In addition to demnstrating spinning, talking about the difference between woolen and worsted and touching briefly on the way textile manufacturing was organized at that time in history. I also gave out my top clothing and costume myths and we talked about them. My top myths are:

1. Historical movies are a good way to see what the clothing was like.
   
2. Stays, bodies and corsets are tight and uncomfortable and you cannot breathe or work in them.
   
3. Lower classes only wear hand me downs from upper classes.
   
4. Lower class clothing is cut the same as upper class clothing just from poorer fabrics or less embellished.
   
5. Fabrics are all coarse and rough.
   
6. Only browns and drab colors are available.
   
7. Scottish wore tartans and Irish wore green.
   
8. Clothing was unshaped and baggy. 
   
9. Poor people didn't hem or mend their clothing.
   
10. Embroidery and embellishments were only for the wealthy. 
    
11. Women could show their shoulders. 
    
12. Women could not show their feet or legs.
    
13. No one had underwear.
    
14. No one took a bath or washed their clothing.
    

I had a good time, the kids asked good questions and I think the teacher learned more than the kids.

Making Cider!

Our orchard was primarily used to grow apples for cider. My mother had Kate's Sweet Cider as a business when I was in high school. We still own the crusher and press and had hoped to get it all running. This year we had a huge crop of apples. We couldn't get pickers and so most are feeding the sheep but our neighbors from Stone Cottage Winery came over and we made one press load of cider from the remnant apples.


First the apples had to get picked. The Helleckson's used the low effort picking method.


Ken and I walked on the ground and picked what we could reach. The apples had frozen and most had fallen so it was not really easy to find good ones. Any that looked too bad we tossed to the ground for the sheep to eat later.


The wine press was brought over. Ken had done a lot of work on the apple crusher to get it ready to run and so we used our crusher and the Helleckson's wine press.


Our first discovery was that the angle was wrong for the entry funnel and the crusher tossed apples right back at us. We put the table up on blocks and built a quick makeshif shield and got the apples crushed.


Brent watching the juice come out.


It was dark before we finally finished and started the cleaning process.


The cake of apple leftovers.




Final cleaning of the main pressing bladder.

We picked about 3/4 of a bin of apples and got about 30 gallons of juice. Ken and I kept about 5 gallons which we have frozen. It was really nice to finally have real cider again.