A Bloody Mess

After hanging out at Clare's today, I decided to come home and deal with most of the remaining venison I still have left to cut up (I still have the one backstrack left to process, but most of the other stuff is done.)

Tonight it was grinding and jerky time. I've already got meat for stews and roasts in the freezer, but, I wanted to grind a good portion of the meat, mixing it together with ground pork before freezing it. So I got out the grinder attachment for our Kitchen Aide mixer, and went to town. I have to say, I've ground various types of meat before, but never has the meat been so juicy and bloody. I ended up having to keep my hand in front of the grider because as it was churning out the ground meat, it was also shooting little squirts of blood all over the place while making a nice and juicy squelching sound! So I fed the chunks of meat into the grinder with one hand, and used my other hand as a backstop to stop the blood from squirting everywhere. (This sounds a lot grosser than it was. The blood spatter was small, but there was a fair amount of it!)

Anyway, I got all the venison ground up, then dumped in a couple pounds of ground pork from Dad and Sandra, mixed it all together, and ran it all back through the grinder. Then I divided the meat into 3 Food Saver bags, and vaccuum sealed it for the freezer.

Prior to grinding, I also took some of the strips of meat that I cut for jerky a couple days ago, places toothpicks through them, and suspended them from the top oven rack. Then I set the oven on 180 degrees, propped the door open and inch or so, and started the process of turning the strips of meat into venison jerky. I'm not sure how it will turn out (or what our gas bill will be like this month), but hopefully everything will turn out fine.

At any rate, here are some pictures of the venison.