The Inventory of the Cellar

As the harvest/preserving season wraps up for the 2013 season, I organized the cellar and freezer and took stock of how much food we’ve produced and put by for the year. I was a little more detailed in my record keeping this year than I have been in the past, as I work to figure out how much food we actually need, how much it costs and how much I save, etc. 

These records are purely for my own information, but I’m posting them in case anyone is interested (and also, because if they are on the blog, I won’t lose them.)

In the cellar:

246 jars of food (fruit, vegetables, jams, sauces/salsas/condiments, syrups, soups.)

16 delicata squash (each will provide one meal)

6 large pie pumpkins (will equal approx 20 cans of pumpkin)

22 lbs fresh-stored carrots (with more to harvest)

12 lbs fresh-stored beets (I canned half the beet harvest as pickled beets)

17 lbs potatoes (with more to harvest)

? dried beans (haven’t shelled them yet. Maybe 5 lbs? Not much.)

62 heads of garlic (enough for planting this fall, too.)

75 onions

several bunches of dried herbs (dill, parsley, basil, thyme, oregano, lavender)

8 quarts of dried fruit and tomatoes

24 sheets of fruit leather (equals about 96 “fruit roll-ups”)

 

In the freezer:

5 lbs carrots

2 lbs broccoli

5 gallons of soups

4 quarts of chopped green onions

2 lbs chopped bell peppers

7 cups of spaghetti sauce

14 cups of pesto

I chose to can most of our food this year when it was possible, since freezer space is limited.

These totals don’t include the fresh veggies we’ve eaten through the summer, beginning in May and lasting about 5 months. Most meals were planned around what was coming out of the garden.

Meat:

16 chickens

3 turkeys (yet to be butchered)

1 goat (yet to be butchered.)

(hoping this will total about 40 meals’ worth of food, plus broth for soups.)

(There is also hope still for one -or two- elk this year, which would provide a full year's worth of meat, and enough to share.)

Dairy (year totals)

About 50 gallons of milk (I don’t keep daily records. This is a close estimate.)

About 45 dozen eggs (again, this is an estimate. They slow down in the winter, but produce 3-4 dozen per week during the summer.)

I wish I had the numbers to put a value to all of the food in this house right now, but I’m not that organized yet.

But the total cost of all of it?

$175 in locally, farm-purchased fruits and vegetables that I didn’t/couldn’t raise myself.

$60 in garden seeds

$60 in meat birds

Approx $120 in meat chicken feed

Another $120 in egg hen feed (not including the feed cost of the show birds.)

$240 in grain for goats

Not sure of the cost of jar lids, bought about $24 of canning jars this year, plus spices, sugar, etc. that I didn’t keep records of. Estimating about $75 in those supplies.

So total cost for the above listed foods? $824

Also, figure at least 250 hours of work. At least. Honestly, it’s probably a whole lot more, but sometimes it’s hard to decipher work from play around here.

The amount seems enormous, but when it's spread over 6 months or so, it's not terrible... and if I make the effort, I could cut our monthly grocery bill down to about $100 for 5 or 6 months.  That puts us at roughly $233 per month, eating healthy, organically grown vegetables, pastured meat, raw milk and fresh eggs. I realize some folks live on plenty less than this each month, but seriously y'all, we eat really good food!

 

So is it worth it? Absolutely.

 Raising meat chickens is utterly uneconomical, between the cost of the birds and feed, the amount of work required in the raising and butchering of them… if we could find a way to hatch our own meat chicks and raise our own feed, it would make more sense. (I’ve heard you can raise chickens almost entirely on clabbered cow’s milk. I’m not opposed to trying this when our cow is in milk) Turkeys are a much bigger bang for your buck, even when raised from poults. Goats can be expensive, since grain is a requirement, but the milk they provide for drinking, cooking, plus yogurt, cheese, etc. is so worth it… and goats provide a lot of fun, too. (Most people pay more for a monthly cable bill than we do for our goats, and goats are far more entertaining!) We also raise all the hay our animals will use, and they graze pasture during the spring, summer, and fall. This cuts down significantly on the cost of meat and milk production. It’s hard for me to estimate the value of the egg chickens vs. the cost of their feed, since most of our chickens are show-breed bantams that The Oldest raises for fun (and are therefore worthless when it comes to laying.)

The garden is amazing, though. The sheer number of pounds of food produced with just $60 worth of seeds in incredible. Fresh vegetables all through the summer months and well into the fall and winter. The fertilizer is provided by the menagerie in the barns, the water comes from our irrigation, and the man-power is provided by Two Little Girls and myself. (Bonus: gardening and other farm chores also provide a great daily workout, omitting what some folks pay in gym memberships.)What doesn’t get eaten provides extra feed for the animals. 

Are we anywhere close to self-sufficient? Not at all. Until I can grown my own wheat and oats, we'll still be making monthly trips to the grocery store. Though I have started looking into the details of raising sugar beets, just as an experiment...

When I sent Littlest One down-cellar the other day for a jar of pears, she came up with them and said, “Do you know what I thought when I went into the cellar? I thought, ‘I’m so proud of my mom for putting all this food in here for us to eat.’”

So is it worth it? Yep, you betcha. And it's even kinda fun, too. :-)

Garden to Table Challenge: Venison Fiorentinis

"Girls, I'll be right back, gonna run out to the garden to get some food for dinner."

Oh man, I was starting to feel like I might never have the pleasure of uttering those words again. But alas, the time has finally come - we are starting to harvest little bits here and there, and the satisfaction of providing fresh vegetables for ourselves has returned. :::contented sigh::: Granted it's mostly spinach, and spinach isn't my favorite food, but right now, it tastes lovely!

And this means.... I finally have another post for the Garden to Table Challenge!

I have a deep, heartfelt love for hors d'ouevres and appetizers. I will happily read appetizer recipes in cook books, mark them and add them to my to-make list... and then realize we have no social life and I really have no reason to make fancy hors d'ouevres in real life. And then I decided there was no good reason not to be making them every so often for my family, just because they're good and we like them. Every so often, I'll make a plate of some kind of appetizer and serve it alongside baked potatoes or rice or salad. No one has complained yet, so I'm gonna keep doing it.

Tonight's dinner was just that - Venison Fiorentinis. The original recipe, which I changed quite a bit, came from The Colorado Farmer's Market Cookbook, one I suggest for anyone wanting to cook with fresh fruits and vegetables (and you don't have to be from Colorado to enjoy it.)

Venison Fiorentinis
1 lb venison steaks
4 cups fresh spinach
1/2 C grated parmesan cheese (the real stuff, not the powdery stuff.)
15 sheets phyllo dough
olive oil

Step one: fry the steaks in a bit of olive oil until medium rare. This takes about 8 minutes, turning once. Remove from pan and let cool a bit.

Step two: Chop the spinach into 1/2 inch bits. Toss it into a bowl with the parmesan cheese. Chop the steaks into tiny bits and mix those in as well. Season it with salt, pepper and garlic powder. This is your filling.

Step three: Fold a phyllo sheet in thirds, then cut this rectangle in half. You'll have two squares. Brush them with olive oil, then put a spoonful of filling on each square, fold it in half to make a triangle. Fill a baking sheet with these, then bake them at 400 degrees for 8 minutes or so, til the dough is golden.


No joke, these little things are pretty incredible. They even convince little girls to eat spinach without the slightest complaint. And as far as sinful appetizers go... well, there are more sinful things. If course, they're so little and cute that you don't feel guilty having "just one more"... several times.

If you don't have any venison steaks in your freezer, you could use regular beef steaks and they'd be just as amazing, I'm pretty certain.

I've never purchased or used phyllo dough before (I've lived a sheltered life.) It thrilled me more than it should have. As I was devouring these amazing bits of goodness, I was fantasizing about all the different things a girl could wrap in phyllo dough. The possibilities are endless. Go forth, my friends, and start wrapping things in phyllo. You will not be disappointed. Especially if it involves venison and cheese.

Interior Decorating

We keep working, a bit here and a bit there, toward making this house our own. Hanging decorations, organizing it so that it's right for our family, and adding those special finishing touches that just make it feel like home.



There. Now doesn't that just make it feel all cozy?



Yep, I thought so too.

Grinding Meat - Revisited

I've had a handful of messages from folks wanting to know more about grinding game meat into burger, so since we just did it this weekend, I thought I'd share the process. I did write a very similar post a couple of years ago on the subject, but I've learned some things since then that I'll add to this post.

As we butcher an elk or deer, all of the small scraps of meat and lower-quality meat cuts go into the "burger bucket." (We use a five gallon bucket lined with a clean plastic trash bag.) Wild game fat isn't the greatest tasting, so we trim most of the big fatty chunks off, but little bits left on aren't really a problem. When we're done processing the animal, we freeze the burger meat big freezer bags until we're ready to grind it. Yes, this means we refreeze our meat once. I'm not gonna recommend you do it too, but I can tell you that after spending a day (or two) cutting up and packaging an animal, the last thing I want to do is stand at the grinder for another few hours. I prefer procrastination. We've never noticed a problem with the taste and/or quality of our burger meat because of it.

So anyway. Thaw your meat if it's frozen, and round up some fat*. Pork and beef fat are equally suitable. Pork fat tends to be less "gummy", making less mess and not clogging the grinder as often. Beef fat is kosher, and we have kosher family that we like to have for dinner on occasion. Either way, you want a pound of fat for every four pounds of burger meat. This makes an 80/20 mixture, which makes great burgers, meat loaves, meatballs, etc. (I've done a 3:1 ration in the past, and it's good too, but the difference is minimal. 4:1 means you buy less fat.) Fat is cheap, about $2 a pound. Find a butcher shop that will sell you fresh fat, already ground. (We ground our own for the first two years, thinking that was the only way. All butcher shops are not equal - find a good one.)

Grind your meat on the coarse setting first. Then, mix four pounds of meat with one pound of fat. We mix by hand, wearing gloves.

When it's well mixed, run it through the grinder with a finer grind plate.

Then package it according to how you'll want to use it - we do one pound portions.

To package it, I put it in sandwich size ziploc bags, press out all the air and seal it, then wrap it in a layer of freezer paper.


This seems to work great - we'll still be eating this meat in August, until next hunting season, and freezer burn hasn't been an issue for us yet. Mark the package with the contents, and load up the freezer. From the deer we processed this fall, we ended up with 24 pounds of burger in addition to the steaks and roasts we kept out.



Notes and tips:
*Work quickly, and keep your meat cold.
*Have every large bowl in your kitchen clean and ready for use. You'll use them all, and wish you had more.
*Two people working is better than one. It makes the work go faster, and it's more fun that way.
*Get a small kitchen scale. Ours is a little digital that goes up to 10 pounds. You'll be surprised at the number of uses you'll find for it.
*We've used our Kitchen-Aid food grinder, and a Cabela's heavy duty meat grinder. The Cabela's one is about three times faster than the Kitchen-Aid, and doesn't have to be stopped periodically to prevent overheating. It was a worthwhile investment. If you're cooler than we are, you could also use an old fashioned hand-crank grinder. We've done it... well, we tried it. That's a whole lotta work.
*For self-sufficiency reasons, obviously purchased fat isn't absolutely necessary for making burger meat. But the taste is better, and added fat keeps the meat moist. A hamburger with no fat is going to be a dry, crumbly burger, and not very pleasant to eat.
*If you're going to make sausage, leave some of the ground meat out of the freezer, and plan to make the sausage soon. It's not a hard thing to do, and worth the extra effort.
*Clear your counters of everything you don't want blood splattered on. Then, consider using a bit of foil to create a sort of tent over the grind plate. Otherwise, your kitchen will resemble a massacre scene by the time you're finished. Grinding meat is messy work.
*Learn the "butcher wrap", or you'll be going through an insane amount of freezer paper and tape. Ignore the directions on the side of the freezer paper - you'll use twice as much. The trick is the work on the diagonal.
*Do buy freezer tape. It looks just like masking tape, but masking tape will come undone when it gets cold. Freezer tape won't.
*This process is the same for any kind of meat you want to grind. We made sausage out of last season's snow goose as well. Burger/sausage is fabulous for any meat you don't love the taste of (like snow goose) because you can easily cook it in a way that hides the gamey taste.
*The cost analysis: $10 for purchased fat, $20 for deer tag, $1.50 for a fourth of a roll of freezer paper and a bit of tape. $31.50 total. 24 pounds of meat at $31.50 equals $1.31 per pound for free range, grass fed hamburger after two hours of work. Not a bad deal.


This post is shared on Frugal Days, Sustainable Ways.

Goose Day 2011

March marks the month when the snow geese fly heavily over the Eastern side of our state, and the Department of Wildlife encourages hunters to shoot as many of the beautiful birds as they can, to help control a burgeoning population. My husband, always being one to help out where needed, packed up his guns and decoys and made the trek to the Eastern slope. He returned with 20 geese, and had a great time.

I wish I could tell you that I am able to find some enjoyment in plucking geese, but that would be a lie. It's flat out miserable work, and hardly worth it for the amount of effort involved. We plucked two, saving the down for another pillow. After that, we gave up and he just skinned the rest.

I won't post the pictures: I know I have some vegetarian readers who wouldn't appreciate them much, and dead geese aren't all that photogenic anyhow. There are a few pictures on last year's goose blog if you're desperate to see them.

The girls have absolutely no qualms about a pile of dead geese by the fence. We hung them by their feet on the swing set as we plucked. Cora alternated between "helping" to pull out feathers, and swinging alongside a dead, half-plucked goose. It never occurred to her that it might be a little strange. Chloe held wing feathers in her hands and ran about the yard pretending to fly. They have a healthy understanding of where their food comes from.

So now we have feathers all over the yard (and the house, and our clothes) but we have a pile of snow geese in the freezer too. So it's all worth it in the end, right? Eh, well... maybe.

Notes on Self-sufficient eating

Tonight's dinner: wild Nebraska pheasant (procured on our recent trip to the miserable, flat prairie-land of Nebraska) with wild rice and home-grown steamed kohlrabi and carrots.

The carrots are stored in the basement in a plastic tub full of damp sand. This seems to be a fairly useful way of storing fresh carrots, the benefit over freezing them being that we can grate a fresh carrot on our salad even in the dead of winter, or have carrot sticks with our sandwiches. I froze some and stored some fresh this way, and I'm glad for it.

However.

Always wear gloves when digging blindly in a sand bin full of carrots. Not all carrots come through this storage process in as great of shape as we'd like, and grabbing a handful of sand mixed with rotten, slimy, mushy carrot is unpleasant. Really, really unpleasant. At least gloves decrease the gag factor a bit.

Another note: If you're going to be eating wild meat killed with a shotgun, buy a shot detector. How cool is this? It's a miniature metal detector that you use to 'scan' your meat to check for little bits of shot. Side note for those with less experience: a shotgun shell (not bullet, as my husband will surely correct you) is used for killing small game and wild birds. It's a little round packet of tiny little BB's that spread when the shot is fired, thus effective spraying the animal as it tries to get away. Very useful, but it has a tendency to leave little bits of metal scattered throughout the bird that you're going to be serving your family for dinner. The little shot detector thingamajig makes breaking one's tooth a bit less likely. Good investment.

The food I've put by for winter is holding up quite well - I was afraid it would be gone by January, but there should be enough in there to last another few months at the rate we're going. We eat something self-provided for most every meal. The grocery bill is surprisingly low, even for the fairly healthy diet we eat. I'm afraid we're going to drown in apricots if we don't start eating them faster though, and I'm pretty sure everyone will be getting a jar of peach salsa for Christmas next year. On the other hand, we're working our way through the strawberry jam at an alarming rate, thanks in part to the fact that we discovered how tasty it is when mixed with homemade yogurt. It's such an interesting process, seeing how much of each thing we need to have on hand to last a whole year. Some day - maybe - I'll have it all down to a science, with written records of exactly how much of each thing I need to make. Until then, we'll try mixing canned peaches with the yogurt instead, and maybe back off the PB&J's just a little. :-)

What are all my other homesteader/foodie friends doing to keep their bellies full this winter?

I roasted a goose!

Two goose posts in two days...

There have been two whole snow geese in my freezer since March. For eight months, I've feared preparing a Roast Goose. Have you ever read up on how to roast a goose? Virtually every article and recipe start out the same: "Roast goose has a bad reputation. It can be greasy, fatty, and livery, unless you know how to do it right."

That's not encouraging. I've never roasted a goose - I sure as heck don't know how to do it 'right'.

I checked in the Little House Cookbook. It involved seventeen hours of cooking on a wood stove with the draught open. I have a good supply of kitchen appliances, but a woodstove with a draught is one thing that's missing.

My Better Homes and Garden cookbook - the standby for everything I could ever want to cook - doesn't actually have even one goose recipe.

After scouring the internet, and finding several different articles and suggestions, I settled on this one from Hank Shaw of the blog Hunter, Angler, Gardener, Cook. Based on what I had on hand, and what I read in a few other blogs, I made a few changes: I stuffed the inside of the bird with apples and onions, and I let it roast til the breast was about 142 degrees.

One thing 'they' talk about with geese is the huge amount of fat in them. Apparently this isn't so much an issue with wild snow geese... at least, it wasn't with this one. Hardly a bit of fat on the silly bird, just barely enough to baste it with every 20 minutes or so. Because of this, I covered the whole roasting pan with foil, hoping to get some actual drippings. Not so much a success, but at least it wasn't dry.

So anyway, the verdict: roast goose is really good. It's tender, juicy, and has a mild but definitely distinct flavor. And it really wasn't that hard. Other than pricking the skin to allow the fat to drain (which was probably unnecessary with this particularly fat-less bird) it wasn't any different than roasting a chicken. I served it with basmati rice and home grown roasted beets. The carcass is in the crock pot now, hopefully turning into goose broth for soup this week.

I'm glad I finally sucked it up and tried it - it wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting. I'm pretty sure it won't take me another 8 months to roast the next one.

A goose feather pillow - finally.

Back in March, hubby went on a goose hunt and came home with six geese. If you'll remember, I kept some of the goose feathers with the intention of making a pillow.

The first step in making a goose-feather pillow is to freeze any creepy crawlies out of the feathers. I filled a trash bag with feathers and stuck them in the freezer for two weeks. Then I pulled them out for a week (giving any remaining eggs a chance to hatch) and put them back in for another four weeks. At the end of this process, any lice, etc. are supposed to be dead. I hope.

The feathers then sat in my craft room until July, when I finally got around to making a muslin sack for them. Of course, Two Little Girls were more than happy to help stuff the pillow.



And then the plain muslin pillow sat for another three and a half months until today, when I finally got around to making a cute little pillowcase for it.



The inspiration for the pillowcase came from Sew Liberated - the book that also had the pattern for the cute little apron I made awhile back. Of course, I had to return that book to the library months ago, so I just worked from memory. I'm happy with the result though.
Simple applique using scrap fabric and a hand-drawn pattern, and the blanket stitch setting on my sewing machine. This is the kind of project that in and of itself isn't terribly exciting or unique, but it's one I'll love dearly since I know what went into making it.

Truly, it wasn't hard. There is no good reason for the fact that it took me six months, other than that I just kept getting distracted. I informed my dear husband that I'd like to make more. The look he gave me made it clear that he has no intention of spending that much time plucking goose feathers again. Darn. I guess I should give up on the idea of a goose-down body pillow then...

Plan B

Well, big game hunting seasons are all over for us now, and no elk. Or bear. Thankfully, he brought home a doe one evening, so there is 40 pounds of venison in the freezer. Poor guy spent a LOT of time driving and hiking in the mountains to no avail aside from that one deer. And one deer won't feed us all winter like a big elk (or two) would have. I'm proud of him for trying though. You win some, you lose some, right?

So that means we move forward with Plan B. If we won't be able to eat wild game all winter, we'll start calling around to find a good price on a healthy, grass fed beef. There's a huge upside to buying half a beef: it's already processed. We don't have to stand in a barn for twelve hours cutting meat off of a carcass. We don't have to grind our own ground either, a process that takes at least another 12 hours, if not longer.

With the twenty five pounds of the venison we intend to grind, I'll make more homemade sausage. The sausage is the most important to me of everything - have you ever seen the price of natural, nitrite- and nitrate-free sausage? It's outrageous, and oh man, I love sausage! I'll share the recipe soon.

If all else fails and we really can't find a healthy beef to buy? Well, I guess there's always Plan C: become vegetarian. But I think my family would protest.

So what do y'all do about meat, if wild game isn't an option? Would love to hear how everyone else is faring this fall with getting meat put by.

Green stuff

It's wild asparagus season again.



We'll just eat this fresh - steamed, grilled, in soup, and raw on top of salads.

We're still eating salad twice a day. This is what I harvested yesterday - I'm getting this much about every other day now.

The girls are over that initial novelty of eating salad fresh-picked from the garden. They're back to saying things like, "Um, Mom? I'm kind of sick of salad" and "I not like lettuce no more!"

I promise I'll stop showing you pictures of greens... just as soon as something else is ready to harvest. Let's all hope, for the children's sake, that it happens soon.

Actually, I got creative with some of the garden spinach tonight and made manicotti using some elk sausage and farmer's cheese as well.

Try this:
1 1/2 lb farmer's cheese mixed with 1 egg, half a cup or so of grated parmesan, some italian spices like basil and oregano and a handful of chopped spinach, all mixed together til it's creamy. Use a Ziploc bag with the corner cut off (making it like a parchment bag for cake decorating) to squeeze the filling into uncooked manicotti noodles.

Then mix up a red sauce - tomato sauce, paste, crushed tomatoes or diced, whatever you've got, make it pretty soupy - with some onion and sausage or ground beef, garlic and other spices. Put the noodles in a casserole, pour the sauce on top, making sure to cover the noodles completely (this is what makes it possible to start with uncooked noodles.) Then bake it (covered) for 45 minutes or so, put on some grated mozzarella, bake another 10 minutes uncovered to melt the cheese, and you're done. Serve with (more) salad. Manicotti's never been this easy. My children devoured it. Even the salad, because I told them they couldn't have manicotti until their salad was gone. I'm sneaky like that.

Duck... Duck....

GOOSE!

Six of them, actually.

The Man of the House returned home from a successful goose hunt in Sedgewick, CO with half a dozen geese for us! I'm thrilled, and so proud of him. He had a great time, and now we have six tasty meals to look forward to. (If I can figure out how to cook goose. Which I'm told is nothing like cooking other fowl.)

I'm blessed in that I generally enjoy the work that goes into our food preparation. I love to bake, I love gardening, I even rather enjoy a day spent butchering an elk.

Cleaning geese does not fall into the above category. Cleaning geese is not fun. It is messy, rather smelly, and to be perfectly honest, it's just downright unpleasant. Part of it is the fact that these are gorgeous birds. Not just regular old geese, but snow geese. As I was moving them into the cooler this morning, I was amazed at just how soft they are. So there's the part about tearing out their beautiful, soft white feathers that's... well, it's not fun. It's kind of sad. (I'm bound to get attacked for this post. Before you berate us, look up snow geese. Their population can not be supported by the habitat available. In order for some of them to live successfully, some need to be eliminated. I don't like it either, but it's the truth.)

So anyway. Plucking geese. Not only is it sad, it's messy. Feathers and down flying everywhere, sticking to everything, no matter how much you try to get them into the trash bag. And it takes easily an hour to pluck a goose if you're not experienced (and we aren't.) We tried the dunking them in boiling water trick (which enhances the "smelly" aspect considerably,) and that did help, but it also made the down stick to everything even more. Blech.



So we each plucked a goose, and we decided we'd had enough of that. Too much flippin' work for the gain, and we were running out of time before The Man had to go back to work. He breasted out the remaining four geese - that is to say, he essentially pulled out boneless, skinless goose breasts from each one, and we discarded the remainder of the carcass. I'm slightly unhappy about this. Granted, there's very little meat aside from the breast. (Geese have scrawny little legs for being such large birds!) But the carcasses apparently make a rather tasty broth similar to beef broth, and the fat can be rendered and then used for all sorts of things. (I'm pretty sure pioneer women used goose fat for dry, cracked, chapped hands. Not to mention it's supposed to be fabulous to cook with.) So we're missing out on that - the broth and the fat. But somewhere during the process of plucking those first two birds, we decided we'd forgo the broth and fat for the amount of work that it would've required. If we had more time, we may have decided otherwise.



Let us not forget the usefulness of such an even when it comes to homeschooling: during the cleaning and gutting process, Andrew and Chloe explored the innards of a bird, identifying lungs, gullet, heart, etc. She was more fascinated than she was disgusted. (Not so much for me. I'm glad he's around for those lessons.) The girls enjoyed playing with feathers and Cora was rather fascinated with their feet and poked at them repeatedly. Chloe exclaimed, "Hooray! Now we get to try goose!" Love what that stands for - her willingness to try new things, and the fact that she's comfortable with the knowledge of where her meat comes from.

I saved a trash bag full of feathers with the intention of making a feather occasional pillow for the rocker in the living room. We'll see whether it happens or not - it might be a bigger project than I'm imagining.

I'll have to let you know how cooking it goes. We're going to save it for when The Man is actually home to enjoy it.

Overall? I'm glad geese aren't a regular part of our diet, but I'm betting it would get easier with time. And I'm thankful for the wild meat we're provided with. I just wish it didn't have so many down feathers.