Pickled Deer Heart

Now that DH got a deer, it's time to make a hunting season tradition:  pickled heart.

It's a pretty simple process.

First, clean the heart well under running water.  Make sure the water gets into all chambers of the heart and any blood clots get flushed out.

Then, trim off the top of the heart, where the aortas come out.  They are rather tough and not nice to have in your mouth.  Also trim off any fat that might be on the heart.  Some deer have fat, others don't.  In the two pictures below, you can see a little fat (the white stuff) around the top of the heart.

Next, put the heart into a sauce pot that is big enough to cover the heart with water.  Now cover the heart with water ;-)

Put the pot on the stove and heat to boiling.

 Once it comes to a boil, put a lid on the pot and turn the heat down to a simmer.  Simmer for 20-30 minutes until the heart is cooked completely through.  (When it's done, it will be uniformly brown all the way through if you slice it).

Remove the heart from the pot and put on a cutting board.  If you have dogs or cats, don't throw out the liquid that remains in the pot.  I save it and add it to their food for extra protein and a treat.  You could even use it yourself as a soup stock, but we aren't that gung-ho here.  Mainly because the liquid doesn't smell all that appetizing.

Allow the heart to cool enough that you can handle it without burning your fingers.  With a sharp knife, cut into 1/4" slices (slicing 'around', not the 'long way' ie. top to bottom of heart).  You do start at the top and work your way to the bottom, though.  Hope that's not too confusing.  As you are slicing, you may or may not have to do some trimming on the inside, where the valves are.

Place the slices into a deep dish or a bowl.  Add sliced onions and 2 Tbsp pickling spices.

 Over this, pour enough water/vinegar solution (50/50) to cover the heart and onions.

Refrigerate overnight before eating (if you can wait that long!)

As a side note, a deer heart (or other large mammal heart like a hog or steer) makes a great hands-on science lesson for a kid (or an adult!).  When washing out the heart, if you squeeze rhythmically, you can actually imitate the pumping action of the heart in a living animal, with the water moving in and out of the chambers of the heart.  Try it!  Let the water run in one of the aortas but not the other; squeeze the heart to 'pump' it, and see the water come out the other side.

First Deer of the Season!

At this little place here, we are doing the happy dance.  We have fresh venison hanging in the barn.  This is the earliest in the fall that we've ever had fresh venison.  On Saturday evening, DH took his first bow season buck, ever.

DH has been hunting for many years.  Before I met him, he was a deer hunter.  Even while still in high school,  he would get home from school, grab his bow or rifle (depending on which season it was), and hit the woods until after dark.  I've heard stories of him doing homework in the deer blind.  (Now whether he really did or whether he just said this to convince our straight-A chasing son to go out and hunt, I'm not sure.)

In college, and for the first ten years of our marriage, his hunting time was greatly diminished.  He had neither the easy access to huntable land, nor the time to sit every evening.  When we purchased this little place here, he was able to start bow hunting again, for the first time in a long time, because every weekend he could roll out of bed, put on his cammies, grab his bow, walk 250+ yards through the field, and into the woods to his tree stand.  No long drive up north to his boyhood home necessary.

Even so, it has taken until now for him to harvest a buck with an arrow.  Saturday evening, he shot this nice eight point whitetail (could have been a 10, had it not broken off two tines) with the crossbow that he purchased last year.

It wasn't a glorious shot, exactly.  He came in from the hunt with a strange air about him.  I thought he'd perhaps gotten a deer, yet, he seemed kind of down.  It was a weird vibe; part tribulation, part self-disgust.

Turned out he'd gut shot the deer.  In his lack of experience with the crossbow, he'd forgotten it doesn't behave exactly the same as a compound bow, and not exactly the same as a shotgun or rifle, either.  He'd twisted and turned a little, and somehow in doing so, his arrow had gone slightly awry.  It hit the deer, and went all the way through.  Not what a sweet spot shot should do.  The deer was phased, but neither dropped, nor dashed off like a hit deer will do.  Instead, it ran a short way, then walked off out of sight further into the woods.  After waiting about fifteen minutes, with the sky now almost completely dark, DH climbed down out of his stand and went to retrieve his arrow, which he could see stuck in the ground about 12 yards away.

The arrow had blood on it, and another, darker substance.  There was no blood anywhere on the ground that DH could tell with his little tracking flashlight.  With a sinking feeling, he realized the deer was gut shot.  They can go quite a ways with a gut shot before eventually dying.

We hunt for meat, to feed our family. This isn't a sport so much as an extension of gardening.  It's more about the nutritive food value than about a trophy for the wall.  We get rather attached to 'our' deer, and don't shoot them just for the thrill of killing something.  We want our shots to be good, and the death to be as quick and relatively painless for the deer as possible.  Which is why I've only ever taken two deer myself; I only shoot them standing still and standing at a certain angle and distance.  One of mine dropped dead on the spot, the other ran 50 yards and then dropped dead. Both very easy to recover. I don't want to take a chance shot at one on the move, wound it, and have it suffer infection or be brought down by coyotes because I've weakened it.  Death by coyote is certainly not as pleasant as death by well placed shot from a hunter.

So DH really felt bad that the deer was not only suffering, but that we might not be able to retrieve it and use the meat, thus making it a senseless death.

We ate dinner quickly, then DH, DD2 and I went out to see if we could track the deer despite it being night. We spent an hour and a half carefully combing an ever widening area of the woods, beginning at the point where DH had shot the deer.  We could not find any blood, only a little hair and a very few spots of something that looked rather like diarrhea.  More confirmation that it was, indeed, a gut shot.  Possibly intestinal, by the looks of what we were seeing spotted here and there on the ground.

But the trail was pretty much non-existent, and in the dark we weren't making any progress.  So we called off the search until daylight.

In the morning, DH was able to find the deer rather quickly.  In fact, it was just about 40 yards from where we'd ended our search the night before.  All he had to go on, though, was two hairs, scuffled leaves, and a handful of small blood spots, which eventually led to a larger spot of blood where the deer had rested.  And from there, it hadn't gone much further before collapsing.  Near impossible to see with a flashlight on fallen leaves at night.

He feels much better now. Still remorseful that it wasn't a better placed shot, that the deer had to suffer for more than a few minutes.  But glad that he was able to recover the deer in a timely manner, and that the weather was cold enough overnight none of the meat spoiled.

Fresh inner loins cooked in onions were the victor's lunch on Sunday.

DH's 8pt buck;

hanging weight 145 pounds

My First Brussels Sprouts

Well, not exactly the first, if you're thinking in terms of "She's never eaten Brussels sprouts before?".  I have.  And as a kid I hated them from the first time they were put in front of me.  Nasty, mushy things, I can't even recall the taste because it was the texture that was repulsive.

I'm that kind of a person; one that texture/touch/feel matters a lot to.  Tapioca pudding?  Can't do it, feels lumpy and nasty in my mouth. Shredded Wheat or Triscuits?  Ugh, I have a brillo pad in my mouth! Lace on my clothes?  Can't do it, it tickles and itches until I think I'm going to go insane.  Stiff socks?  Nope, nope, nope.  I spend extra money for soft socks and they are one of the few things I actually dry in my dryer during the summer time.  Massage?  Um, don't touch me!!  Most ordinary massage techniques just feel uncomfortable to me and not relaxing in the least.  Forget manicures and pedicures; having my nails filed gives me the willies.

So, for a long time, Brussel's sprouts were out, for me.  Then I realized, as a mature thirty-something, that there were a lot of foods I eat now that I didn't eat back when (like, before I cooked all my food and had to rely on someone else's cooking) and that the difference was mostly in how they were prepared. Preparation can really make or break the texture (or taste) of a food. Going on that premise, I mustered my courage, purchased some 'fresh' sprouts from the grocery store, took them home, and steamed them.  I've found that I like a whole lot more vegetables if they are steamed rather than boiled.

Those sprouts were edible!  Not only were they edible, they tasted good!  Somewhere between asparagus and broccoli was the flavor on my tongue when I bit into a steamed Brussels sprout.

From there, the goal was to grow my own, as is my goal for most of what I eat.  This proved to be a challenge.  I could get the seeds to sprout, no problem.  I could get them to grow into seedlings, no problem.  I could get the seedlings transplanted out to the garden, no problem.  I could get the transplants to grow in the garden, but I could not get them to produce those sprouts!!  The sprouts might get as big as peas before repeated freezes killed the plants, but I just couldn't get them big enough to eat.

Until this year.  Oh hallelujah, I finally got to harvest this little place here Brussels sprouts!  Despite what others might say about the 2012 growing season, with it's drought and it's heat, at this little place here I had the most productive garden ever.

It's hard to describe why this small quantity of sprouts makes me so happy.  Partly because now I won't have to buy any from the grocery store for quite a while (we rarely eat Brussels sprouts, so this amount should feed us six meals or at least six months, LOL).  But mostly because I did it!  I actually got some to go from seed to garden to table.  It can be done!

I Love Eating Local

Recently, DD1 was briefly home from college on a short mid-term break.  One of the things she has missed most in her  almost two months away at school, has been home cooking.  Homesickness has been surprisingly hard for her, and apparently just about every meal in the cafeteria was making it worse.  Her first complaint about college food, two weeks in:

"the chicken isn't right"

A few days after the chicken text, I got this text:  "the corn is mushy".  Followed by, in the next two weeks:  "I'm not eating these eggs, they're gross," "I want real potatoes, not instant," "even the cookies are not good," and "I want milk, not white water." 'White water' is what my family refers to skim milk as.  We're whole milk drinkers at this little place here.

It was a great day when she texted me: "Broccoli for lunch!  Yum!  They got it right!  I think I was the only student who ate any.  I even had thirds."  Eating broccoli was not anything new; my kids all love broccoli.  I used to make baby food broccoli when they were too little to chew it.  But the fact that she was excited and had found something that was cooked 'right' and tasted 'right' that was good news. I thought perhaps the homesickness was abating and that she was necessarily adapting to a lower standard of food; that she was able to accept the commercially mass prepared type of fare the college cafeteria offered.
 
Setting culinary precedents for my children's palates is one thing I never considered when I began cooking from scratch, then growing and preserving our own foods. At first, my incentive was purely financial--it just cost less to buy ingredients and put them together than to buy ready-made or boxed mixes of stuff.  Then came the discovery of how fake stuff in food, and by that I mean imitation flavorings, artificial colors, preservatives, etc, affected DS2's asthma and eczema. It was his health that really nudged me to organic gardening and producing as much of our food as possible.   If bug spray or a chemical additive in his shampoo, lotion, or laundry detergent could have such a negative effect on his well being, what about chemicals on his food?  What about the pesticide on his veggies?

An interesting thing I noted along the way:  when we ate more home grown food, we all got healthier.  When the entire Christian Kindergarten through Eighth Grade school  that my three oldest kids attended was suffering from the flu and strep throat, my kids were healthy.  Not a single sore throat, not an upset tummy, no hint of a fever.

Then came the day when I tried to make an appointment for DD2 to have her pre-kindergarten physical, and the doctor's office didn't have her in their computer. . .because she hadn't been to the doctor since the last round of vaccinations she got about the time she turned two years old!!  She hadn't needed to see a doctor, hadn't been ill, in three years! This was during an age where most kids are coming down with illnesses nearly monthly because supposedly their immune systems are still developing, and are weaker than those of older children.

It wasn't just the kids who were healthier, either.  DH's cholesterol had dropped since his last physical exam a few years earlier, when we were still eating store food even though a lot of it was cooked pretty much from scratch.  He didn't need to take sick days from work (not to say that at times he didn't wish he needed to, but he just didn't get sick).  Similarly, I was healthy as a horse, despite working with the horses in all kinds of weather, including windchills of 20 to 30 below zero sometimes.

It was for money and health that I fed my family the way I did.  It never occurred to me that I was setting them up to be disappointed in the food they would eat when they left my table and went out into the world as adults.

Which brings me back to loving eating local and DD1's recent visit from college.  While she was home, we ate lots of her favorite from scratch things.  One of these, I realized as we sat at the table devouring that particular meal, was not only from scratch, it was totally from this little place here.  I had made venison gravy (venison stew meat simmered until the gravy is naturally thickened and the meat pretty much falls apart) over mashed potatoes, with whole kernel corn on the side.  The venison was from a deer that DH harvested last fall in our own woods.  The potatoes I had grown in the garden this summer, and harvested just a few weeks earlier.  The corn, too, was grown in my garden, and had been canned (my first home-canned corn!) the day before I left to take DD1 to Minnesota for college.

You can't get more local than that.  I love eating local.  It not only tastes good, and is nourishing to the body, but it's nourishing to the soul.  It gives me a great feeling of accomplishment when I serve a meal that was grown and harvested right here, by our own hands.

As a side note, the three of my kids who so far have left this little place here for other dwelling places all cook. They do so because they don't feel cooking is a bother. Rather, they see it as a way to eat decent tasting and textured food. Not only do they cook in their own homes and/or dorm kitchens, they all scam home grown food off of me every time they come home to visit.  I can't tell you how many jars of dilly beans and other things have been raided from the cellar by DS1 and taken back to South Carolina with him.  Or how many jars of blackberry jam (DS2's favorite) have been smuggled to the U.P.  I do know how many potatoes DD1 took back to Minnesota with her though; just as many 'real potatoes' as she thought would get her through until she comes home again for Thanksgiving break!

Some Improvisation Required

My chicken coop used to have a very nice glass window in the front side.  A large, wooden framed window that I had gotten for free at the end of someone's driveway many years ago.  Then, about two years ago, the glass got shattered.  I'm not sure exactly what happened; I went out to feed the chickens on a very cold, windy Christmas Eve morning and found glass all over the ground.  I don't know if the wind rattled it just right, or the cold was just too cold in combination with the wind, or what happened. All I knew for sure was that there was shattered glass in front of the coop, and a big gaping hole letting in not just cold air but whatever chicken-eating critter might come along.

Using what we had on hand, DH and I removed the window, covered the frame with visqueen (thick plastic sheeting), and then put the window back into place (it sits in a sill DH made for it when we originally installed it and is held in place by a piece of wood on each the top and bottom, that swivel.)

That quick fix lasted, until this week.  The visqueen had apparently been through too many sunny days, windy days, rainy days, snowy days, hot days, cold days, and it gave out.  On an extremely windy day, I went out to find it in shreds, and my chickens once again vulnerable to the elements and four-footed chicken killers.

Not having DH home to help me with another quick fix using more visqueen, I called on my Marine Mom skills to adapt, improvise, and overcome.  I dug into my bin of old sheets that I keep around for tossing over the plants in the garden when an early frost threatens.  I pulled out a fitted sheet that was just a little bigger than the window frame.  I removed the frame, put the sheet around it, then stuck the frame back into place.

Voila!  Rain can't get into the coop (well, unless it's really driving hard), and neither can coons or possums.  And the chickens, while they don't get a clear view of the outdoors, do get a custom drapery for their window until DH gets home and can help me with a more permanent solution.

my temporary solution 

Love my quick fix?  LOL

Got The Hubby's Out of Town Blues

DH is traveling again.  Nothing new; he's been doing it for almost 18 years.  And, even before that, we spent three months living apart during the week while he worked at a new job hours away  and the boys and I stayed behind at our old house until the lease was up (and DD1 was born; between being 7 months pregnant and having 3 months to go on our rental agreement, relocating the whole family didn't seem like the best decision at the time DH accepted the job that paid twice as much as the one he had).

Just because he's been away, frequently, for so many years doesn't mean I have gotten used to it.  Doesn't mean I particularly like it.  Sometimes, it is nice to have a break from him--come on, wives, admit that you've thought more than once that you'd just like your hubby to go away for a while so you didn't have to deal with his dirty underwear on the floor, chest hairs on the bathroom counter, beard hairs in the sink, the farts and belches. . . But usually his absence is just disruptive to the routine of life, and kind of lonely.  He's my best buddy.  How many of us aren't lonely when we're separated from our best buddy for too long?

I'm not sleeping well in his absence.  The bed is too big, and too empty.  Not to mention cold.  He's my furnace.  Who needs an electric blanket with a big warm hubby next to them?  I think I should put the flannel sheets on the bed, just until he returns.

He calls when he can, but, it's just not the same as being able to talk to him face to face.  Especially when two minutes into a conversation, the only time in 24 hours I've heard his voice, he starts to cut out because of call waiting on his cell phone and says "Oh, got to go, I've got a work call coming in, sorry."  Sorry.  I know he's sorry he can't stay on the line until I've had more time with him.  But that doesn't make it any easier for me.  In fact, it just adds to the feeling of his job being more important than I am.  Of his job trying to pull our family apart.  Being two time zones away from each other, I'm usually fast asleep by the time his  ten-to-twelve-hour (and sometimes up to fifteen hour!) work day followed by dinner with his traveling crew ends.  And when I'm getting up in the morning, it's still the wee hours of the night where he is, so we can't talk then either.

It isn't easy to keep a family together like this.  Not when Dad has to miss birthdays, important school events, and other milestones.  On one hand, the kids say "Oh, I'm used to it, Dad's been gone my whole life," as a way of dismissing his travels.  On the other hand, they are now old enough to realize that having Dad popping in and out frequently wasn't ideal, and that they don't have quite the same type of relationship with their father that their friends have with theirs.

It's hard on a mom to see that. It's hard on a wife to have her husband gone on their anniversary more years than he's home for it.

Some would say that at least we are still married, and that the kids have had a Dad involved with their lives.  Yes, that is true.  There are worse things than a father/husband whose job takes him away regularly.  Yet, then again, it seems like we're always in transition; being a mother-run home for a week or two, then a two-parent home for a few weeks, then a one-parent home again.  It's tough with fluctuating power.  You just get into the groove of things, then they change up and you have to get into a new groove.  Yet as soon as things start to run smoothly in the new groove, DH is coming home again or leaving again, requiring yet another transition.  It's hard to make plans, it's hard to maintain consistency.  It's hard to feel secure.

I didn't intend this post to be a downer.  Usually I try to keep my posts upbeat, or at least informative.  Maybe this one, while not much of either, will at least touch some wife/mother out there who is going through something similar and let her know that she isn't the only woman in the world dealing with this.  If that woman is you, well, I send you a big cyber hug because right about now, you're probably really craving hugs.  I know that I am.

Farm Justice

We've had a few chickens go missing around this little place here lately, as well as two barn kittens.  Then DD2 found a possum eating cat food one evening when she went out to check on the barn cats and make sure they had water.  The same evening, I found legs and feathers from one of my pullets--a pullet who had been happy and healthy earlier that day--also in the barn.

So, we had a suspect in the crimes.  The evidence--fresh chicken kill--combined with being caught near the scene of the crime, was pretty damning.  It was time to administer some farm justice.

For those of you who love all animals, and believe that people should just let them live their lives however they choose, I would suggest you stop reading now.  For those of you who know how farm justice works, or those who are seeking what to do in similar situations, say, the slaughter of your chickens, let me tell you how this particular case played out.

Used to be, our dogs were our possum and woodchuck dispatch units.  Little Dog, our Jack Russell Terrier, was particularly fond of killing possums and would gladly drag out of hiding possums bigger than he was.  Old Dog, too, used to delight in shaking possums until their necks snapped.  However, Little Dog passed away almost two years ago, and Old Dog at age twelve and a half, is too unsteady on his feet to shake anything but his own tail.  So, it's now up to me to rid this little place here of livestock annihilating critters.

Since possums tend to be nocturnal creatures, moving around in the dusk and darkness, it's kind of hard to catch them in the act.  It's even harder to shoot them holding a .22 in one hand and a spotlight in the other.  So, to even the odds in my favor a little, and to make sure the offender doesn't suffer unduly during the carrying out of it's death sentence, I employ a live trap.  This works well for raccoons too.

The latest case went like this:

1. I set a live trap in the barn near the cat feeding area, and baited it with a dish of cat food.  Experienced cats won't bother the trap, having learned not to go into it.  Kittens, however, don't have this knowledge yet.

2.  Released a kitten from the live trap the next morning.

3. Reset trap that evening, and baited it with more cat food.  Told the kittens to wise up and not make the same mistake twice.

4.  Checked barn in the morning, found wise kittens greeting me at the door, and an unhappy looking possum in the live trap.  Possum proceeded to hiss at me and show me it's needle sharp teeth.  I laughed, because I have the upper hand, and there's nice sturdy wire between the possum's teeth and my body.

5.   Carried the live trap out of the barn.

 

6. Went to the house to fetch the camera (so I can have pictures with this post!) and the .22.

7.  Returned outside.  Took mug shot.

7.  Ignored the cute and innocent demeanor the possum was now using to try to convince me I had the wrong critter.  Uh, huh, not going to work, buddy.  It was only minutes ago you were threatening to eat me alive with those sharp teeth if only I'd let you out.

8.  Conducted swift trial:  you are a possum, possums kill chickens, I have had dead chickens lately, chicken feathers found in barn, you found in barn, now found in trap in barn, case closed.  Gave possum the death penalty.

9.  Put the end of the .22's barrel up to wire opening in live trap.  Aimed at possum's head.  Released safety, pulled trigger.

10.  Dead possum.  Took out of trap (after death throes ended), tossed body into loader bucket of tractor, transported body to woods where the local wildlife will benefit from the death.

Farm justice.