SoapZone Community Message Board

I picked up my quarter cow this afternoon! I'd paid $200 down and paid the balance ($808) on Friday for pick up this afternoon. I had to trust Google to get there and gave myself a bit of extra time, just in case.

I couldn't visualize how big a quarter of a cow would be once processed, so I put down the backseats of my Prius and hoped for the best. The invoice I got on Friday stated that it was 109 pounds...okay. Still wasn't sure how that worked in boxes and space. It turned out, it was four boxes of various weights. The heaviest was just under 40 pounds and the lightest was about seven and a half pounds. You could smell the cardboard all the way home.

The pieces were wrapped in a light plastic, but the packaging wasn't consistent. They were labeled with the contents, but sometimes there was just one thing and other times there were multiples. I think one package had T-bone steak on it, but there were two steaks. I initially thought "Wow, that's one thick steak!"

I did NOT get a cut sheet (usually a printout with check marks or numbers besides different cuts of meat). The lady who worked there said all the boxes were packed different and you'll figure it out when you take it out of the box and put it in your freezer. I'd hoped to keep them in the boxes (I largely did that), and would be able to use the cut sheet to know which meat was where.

I put all four boxes on the counter in the new room (I told you it was LO-N-G!) and unpacked each box, wrote the contents on a 3X5 card, closed the box, then moved on to the next one. I only dropped three steaks (the box tipped over into the shoulda been sink now major hole), but I consider it part of the tenderizing. No steaks or other cuts fell on my feet, so I guess that makes it a good transfer.

I got forty-two little bags of ground beef, thirty in one box and twelve standing up in another box that contained a lot of different types of roasts. I pulled out my digital scale because the bags looked so small. The random ones I weighed were a pound or barely over a pound. I think the box with the 30 one-pound bags of ground beef weighed about 34 pounds. An ounce or two here, an ounce or two there...about four extra pounds.

I'd originally planned to make a HUGE production out of the transfer to the freezer (crazy thing. We tried to move the freezer from the patio (about 100 degrees outside) into the house and into the second bedroom that I'd been shifting stuff around to accommodate the freezer. It couldn't make the turn to go into the second bedroom. Turns out most of the doors and such were too narrow for the 30" wide freezer. I'd brought it into the house through the 6' door at one of the new room and through the 6' door at the other end of the new room that led to my kitchen. HUGE open space, but the freezer couldn't get into the bedrooms. I might have been able to get the freezer into the garage (as hot as the patio...so why bother??) but there was about a six inch drop (definitely an "I meant it" step up from the garage into the kitchen) and I would have had to clear even more stuff out of the garage. I'll pass. Maybe next year.) ANYWAY...I'd planned to park in front of the double wide gate, go through the front door into the house, lock the dogs inside the new room, open the double wide gate, drive the car into the backyard and back it near the freezer on the long part of the patio without running over the old glass top patio table, close the gates, let the dogs out, then start offloading the boxes of meat. I ended up parking in the driveway, carrying the four boxes through the house, placing them on the counter, grabbing a small pile of 3X5 cards, and working from there.

I put the box of nothing but ground beef at the very bottom of the freezer, after I figured out how to lower it into the freezer without [losing] any fingers, then put one of the [metal trays] with the Suvie meals on top of it. No, I haven't set up my Suvie yet. I then put the box with the roasts next to the ground beef box, then put the one with the most steaks in it because my daughter may want to dive face first into that one. I also added a plastic crate for odds and ends that I'd originally been keeping in a giant freezer bag when I brought the items home from the store - family skillet meals, Rana pasta, etc. I pulled out the two packs of steamer veggies. I still have to move the four or five pounds of butter out of the freezer. I don't count them as meat.

Tomorrow, I plan to start sorting the meat out of the other freezers and moving them into the big freezer. After I get them out, I'll have a place to put the two pizzas which is currently in the meat freezer, even though they're cheese pizza. There seems to be plenty of room for the other meats.

The order included instructions about how to cook grass-fed beef and why grass-fed beef is better. We'll see. Quite an adventure, but I had beans and rice this evening. I was too done to try any of the meat.

If nothing else, it will be an adventure. Not sure how long a quarter of a cow will last in our family of two. I'm thinking about a year, if not longer. We may make a serious effort to get through this.

Let the experiment begin.

Sorry about the length. It's been quite an adventure. BTW, my kitchen sink should be here Wednesday. The previous one had a dent, so we returned it. I kept hoping it would show up as available at Home Depot. Nope. I finally ordered one from Amazon. I also ordered two (2) faucets from Amazon. They have an LED light to let you know if the water is hot, warm, cold, or scalding hot. It also has a pot filler faucet and a regular faucet [with a sprayer] that can do a 360 degree rotation (not that it matters in the new room, but it works in my kitchen with the sink in the island. Should be great for pasta nights. When it gets here, I'll arrange for my plumber to install it and my Sepura organic waste system.

My daughter and I discussed landscaping. Neither of us has a green thumb, but we decided to tell the landscaper that we would like a pollinator garden to attract hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies (doing our part for sustainability), and did NOT want artificial turf for the dogs. My daughter says that the smell never goes away. I was more concerned about the temperature of the fake grass. We tried to put the cap on the water tank. That didn't go well. When I tried it, it looked like it was kinda on, so I tried to put a paver on top of it. The paver was supposed to hold down the lid. Now it's at the bottom of the 1600 gallon tank which I didn't believe would need help holding itself down...who knew?

That's about it. Adventuring. <SIGH>