Q&A answers

Oh, how far we’ve come. I wanted to put this here as a little encouragement for those amongst you who are just starting out on your journeys. This is Troy and I in our twenties. We have about five deer carcasses here that we scavenged from his hunting partners. They considered this “waste”. We told them we would take it all and we spent hours cutting between ribs, around joints, along long bones, taking every last bit we could to make stew and use the bones for broth. What we lacked in funds we made up for in dogged determination and a willingness to work.

I thought I should probably submit a little report on what’s happening with our decision to eat solely from our farm, but to be quite honest, there’s not much to say. It’s no different than any of the last few years with the exception of my awareness of what’s dwindling.

I’m cognizant of how many steaks were eating because when they’re gone, I’m not going to buy some from my beefy farmer friend. All that lives in the root cellar is all that will feed us. There are plenty of onions and carrots and potatoes and parsnips. We don’t eat much of those. I have a whole wall of shelves full of summer made fermented veggies. There are many jars of pickled whatever and canned summer fruit. I have whole sections dedicated to animal fats in my freezer and cupboards. Those foods all seem abundant. It’s the things we really like that I’m rationing.

The fatty, drippy roasts like beef blade roasts and bone-in whole lamb legs remain untouched, squirrelled away for something special, or just something made special by their appearance on our table. We made the decision to eat chicken once a month because a.) we’re not huge fans of chicken meat and b.) we don’t have more chicken than that. That’s how chicken used to be eaten - it was special, not common. We eat more rabbit, duck, and turkey than we do chicken. Goose, too, is that special meal, pulled out for some romantic dinner pour deux.

Ruminant meat is definitely our staple and one that we would prefer to eat every meal, but we can’t. We just can’t raise cattle made of ribeyes and porterhouses. There is much more to an animal than favourite cuts. Raising them means honouring their lives by honouring the nutrition they provide us with - all of it. Still, I’d be happy to just eat all of those ruminant cuts and forego all other meat sources. I’d say we eat somewhere around 80% ruminant meat. Maybe it’s the PUFAs in omnivore meat

I write this now with rabbit simmering in rabbit bone broth on the stove. I browned them first in duck fat, then added some rosemary and thyme, linden and dried