Merry Christmas from the Country Huntress family to yours!
Hope everyone has a great day with friends and family!
This book was one of my presents and I can’t wait to try out the recipes! 
Month: December 2015
From Field to Plate
When my interest in hunting first started, the idea of providing meat for my family is what pushed me to sign up for the hunter education course.
This past weekend, I served my first meal from the doe I shot weeks earlier. It was a great feeling!
I used my new meat grinder to make ground venison for a delicious meatloaf recipe. I’ll share it later this week, everybody loved it!
Everyone has their own reasons for why they hunt. Providing meat to eat is probably my biggest reason. I can’t wait until I have my own family and I’ll know exactly where the meat they’re eating came from. It’s feelings like this that make me so happy I got involved in hunting.
Butchering A Deer
When I got back from my hunting trip, I had four deer quarters to butcher.
Meat to butcher!
My family has always hunted with farmers so they’ve harvested and processed their own deers for decades. Thanksgiving morning my brother came over and taught me how to butcher the meat.
We both started with one leg. He showed me how to work the filet knife between the different muscles to start separating the meat. He said the knife will do the work, just follow where the tension is. It was interesting to see how it was all connected.
He also showed me how to use your hand to feel where the muscle goes. Eventually, we got out our first big steak. Then came what he said was the most important part—cleaning the meat.
Our workspace for butchering the deer
I got off all of the film that keeps the muscles together. Then I worked to cut off all of the silver skin, that part wasn’t easy! If any of the meat had fat left on it, I also cut that off. It took awhile, but when I was done we were left with really nice cuts of meat.
The reason he said this step was so important was all of those parts added to the gamey taste of meat. So the less of that on the meat, the less gamey it’ll taste.
It took us a couple of hours but we finished butchering two of the quarters. We were left with steaks and stew meat mostly. I learned a lot, my brother was really helpful at showing me how to do everything. It was nice being able to learn the family tradition of what they do after someone gets a deer.
He took two pieces of meat we’d cleaned and grilled them in a cast iron skillet. With only salt and pepper to season it, it was a delicious piece of meat! Not too gamey at all!
The first steak from my deer!
A few days later, I finished butchering the last two quarters. It took me a few hours. It probably wasn’t the best butchering ever done, but it was a good feeling to do it myself. It’s a lot of hard work, but rewarding to see all the meat you’re left with.
For Black Friday, I purchased a meat grinder from Cabelas. I’ll be using it for the first time this weekend as I grind stew meat to make a venison meatloaf. I can’t wait to see how it turns out!
Do you butcher your own deer or take it to be processed at a wild game butcher? Share your family’s tradition below!
Shooting My First Deer – Part 2
If you missed Shooting My First Deer – Part 1, read it here!
I had just shot my first deer and now the hard work started as we began to track the blood trail.
Kelli and I began make our way through the thick salal bushes that were much taller than us. To be honest, I don’t know how she cleared a path for us to follow because the second we went through, the path was swallowed up by branches and leaves again.
Following the trail!
Trying to follow a blood trail in that brush seemed impossible. We worked our way to one clearing and no blood was to be found. We looked in every direction she could’ve gone but nothing. We each took turns going back into the salal to try and see if the blood trail moved farther into it in another direction.
Eventually we decided to move from where we were to try and get farther back in the brush near where we saw bushes move. We made our way back in and again came to another small clearing. I looked down and there was another patch of blood—back to tracking once more!
Country Huntress 