In article >, George Shirley
> wrote:

> I generally try to get a feral hog at the same time. Venison and pork
> link sausage is one of our favorites. Since there seems to be hundreds
> of thousands of hogs running around our countryside maybe I will get the
> chance.

We've got a boar and feral problem up here, but the bastids is hard to
hunt in our terrain. Lots of sloughs and small water holes throughout
the farmland, and they like bedding down in the reeds and rushes there.
That makes them damn hard to spot, and on foot you run some pretty
serious risk of getting badly hurt. I wouldn't go with fewer than three
people. Just about rut time for deer up here, so I'm starting to plan
some hunting trips. We've got both whitetail and mule deer.

> I stock up on vacuum bags quite often. Today I emptied the clean, used
> vac bags bucket and turned them back right side out and used a few of
> them to vac seal some nice Angus ribeyes I found in the "used meat" bin
> at the supermarket. Some call it the "Manager's Special" and it's where
> the meat is coming off the "sell by" date. I've got a freezer completely
> full of that sort of thing, running from chicken to beef and pork
> roasts. I encourage other shoppers to think it's "icky" meat just so I
> can hog it myself. I do that sort of shopping for my eldest, grown-up
> grandkids because they have to work and I don't. <G>

We had a supermarket merger here, and my favorite stores are gone,
along with Safeway's used meat bin. Sad making. Still, there's a
warehouse club close by that has some decent pricing. Picked up a full
ribeye for under $70, and got 34 nice steaks out of it, vacuumed and in
the freezer.

I still remember shopping with Mom, she'd always look for the beef that
wasn't bright red... she always maintained the older stuff was more
tender, and she was right. These days, though, people seem to want the
bright red stuff. I guess they think fresher is better.

My latest experiment is sauerkraut... A small batch is in a 1 gallon
crock right now, a mix of green and red cabbage, and some shredded
carrot. Fingers crossed!

--
³Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness
sobered, but stupid lasts forever.² -- Aristophanes