Back from the Butcher
September 11th, 2015 · No Comments · Posted in farming
Got a call from the butcher last night to pick up the meat from the ram-ling we dropped off a week ago. Just in the nick of time, too: We’re serving leg of lamb for dinner tomorrow, the first taste of a ram grown on Spy Dog Farm. (I’m not counting the two three-year-old ewes we slaughtered in January).
This entails another drive to Rut’s Ridge Farm in Greenwich, where, after some intense searching, a box with my name on it was located in one of the freezers. This is quite a facility, with kill room, cage and head restraint for beef cattle, winches to lift heavy carcasses, butchering tables, band saws, at least two walk-in freezers and an indoor smokehouse. My glasses fogged over in the confusion of different temperatures and humidity levels.
Our ram-ling carcass weighed in at 53 pounds, a very respectable weight for a four-month-old considering he’d been raised entirely on grass. (And our pastures aren’t that great.) “He cut very well,” the butcher remarked.
What came back to us was a big box of shanks, ribs, chops, shoulders, legs, stew meat and other miscellaneous cuts neatly labeled and sealed in plastic. I also requested the kidneys, liver and heart. I love organ meat. I will be eating this for breakfast.
Now that we’ve navigated a new butcher, I see more lamb and goat meat in our future. Of course, we’ll be offering the animals for sale to our regular customers as well. But if we can’t sell it, heck, we’ll eat it ourselves.
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