Married {with Cows} Blog

1/7/2016 3 Comments

25 things you learn when married to a rancher

You need to be a jack of all trades; book keeper, veterinarian, mechanic, fence builder, welder, carpenter, plumber, electrician, chef, biologist, rangeland manager, equipment operator, advertising expert, trucker, manager, laborer, and the list goes on... BUT more importantly, you need to know when your expertise is lacking and you need to call the experts (even if your husband doesn't agree).
You quickly learn that special dates that were once elaborate planned celebrations are no longer quite as pertinent as they once were. Like when you no longer look forward to weekend trip of spa delights in the mountains to celebrate your wedding anniversary, but a warm meal at a truck stop a few days after you realized you forgot the date.
And vacation? HA! Warm tropical destinations are now replaced by midnight calving checks in -40 weather. Don't ask me how a healthy newborn calf in a warm barn makes you feel better than pina coladas & swimming pools, but somehow it just does.
Business is no longer done with contractual agreements and triple carbon copies, but through a handshake over coffee at the kitchen table, or a cold beer on the porch.
Exercise is no longer going to the gym (or at least promising yourself you would), but hauling buckets of grain to the heifers, square bales into the barn, or wrestling calves at branding.
Calendar dates and appointment times mean absolutely nothing when a fence is down, a cow is lame or a herd is hungry. This includes Christmas dinners, friend's parties, your niece's birthday or that bank appointment you've rescheduled for the 3rd time.
A cute bottle feeder calf is no longer only an adorable photo op, but a piece of your soul; a vested interested, a pay cheque, your blood, sweat and tears, and clothes on your back for the next year. (Adorable photo op is still acceptable, however.)
You don’t want to be the person with the smallest hands on the ranch. You just don’t.
Date night at the movie theater is replaced by book keeping, balancing budgets, cleaning vaccine guns and writing out tags.
The brandings that you once thought were a giant party with friends and a mean hangover the next day, are now a commitment to a neighbor and a guarantee of help when your need comes around. (That doesn't mean the hangover isn't always an option, though.)
You need to butterfly prairie oysters before frying them in the pan for supper. Unless you like cleaning up explosive hot balls of butter & batter all over your kitchen.
Sleeping in? Not even a possibility. Especially during calving. And harvest. And on weekends. And weekdays. And holidays...
A trip to the city means a truck box (literally) brimming full of groceries that will last you for months. It also means a list as long as your arm from friends and family who just want you to 'quickly pick something up' for them.
You WILL get sent to town for parts. It WILL take forever. They inevitably WILL be the wrong parts and you WILL have to go back to face the parts guy who now knows you by name and your equipment even better. This WILL happen for the 5th time in 2 days.
Supper time is not a set time. Animals’ needs come first. The haying and hauling come second. The neighbours' needs come third. The need for food is somewhere much further down the line- even if your husband did promise to be in at 6 and its now 10pm and the meal you worked so hard on is now cold and soggy.
You'll spend more time in muck boots and coveralls than you'll ever spend in those ridiculously overpriced bejeweled jeans you bought last year.
Make-up? The cows don't care what you look like. Throw it in the same drawer as those bejeweled jeans you won't wear.
You'll fight over who has to do 3:00am calving checks, but then instantly be disappointed you slept through some calving action because you won rock, paper, scissors and were snuggled in your warm bed.
Building fence is an ‘art’. An art you do not want to be standing on the wrong side of when rolling out wire. An art that leaves scars, sore muscles and spousal disagreements. An art that is never completed and always on the top of the to-do list.
You can never believe a darn thing your neighbour says about what he sold his calves for, what they weighed, how little they paid for hay or how much he spent on a quarter of land. Finances are never a taboo subject, but when asked the same question twice, you’ll never get the same answer.
Your go-to small talk question is 'how much rain have you got?'
You may actually find yourself dancing and crying when you do finally get rain after a long summer of drought and no grass. And your husband won’t even think your nuts for it. In fact, he may be dancing alongside of you.
Your photos on your phone and camera will be 80% cows, 10% other farm animals, 5% machinery parts and maybe 5% actual people or special events.
Your door is always open and the coffee is always on. Even when your door is closed, the lights are off, your pajamas are on and your coffee is cold.

Your neighbours, friends and family are always there. No matter what you need, what their commitments were or what they’d rather be doing. If you need a hand chasing yearlings, battling frozen waterers when your husband is 8 hours away, or to borrow a feed truck because yours is in the shop; they are the first to offer their help and the last to call it a day.

3 Comments

1/3/2016 0 Comments

Big Game Sausage Recipe

Posted By: Jesse Williams

Both my family & Clay's are game hunters, so growing up I knew that the new year meant deer sausage making time! It often involved a ton of cousins, friends and neighbours, a fair bit of liquor and a long day of fun. Depending on the tags we are drawn for, we usually butcher 3-5 deer per year and split it between 2 -3 families. Since I got married, we have been making our deer sausage with my brothers-in law, but the same trusty recipe from my mom & dad Baron still holds tried, true & my favorite!

Baron Garlic Sausage -100 lb Batch

60lbs of deer/ 40 lbs of pork
Each year we seem to waiver on this. Depending on how much fat you keep from your deer, and if you use trimmings, fat or the whole pig carcass, you will want to adjust the ratio of deer to pork. This year we did 70/30 because the pork trimmings were almost entirely fat. Just fry up a patty sample of your mixture and see if you like the fat content. You can always add more deer or pork to your liking.

We use the same garlic recipe below for our moose and elk sausage.

When I was little, we used to raise our own butcher pigs just for sausage. Nowadays, with an anti-pig husband (sigh!), our best luck is to buy a mature butcher pig.

Spice Mixture (for 100 lbs)

Mix together & sprinkle over the ground meat:
1 cup sea salt (or non-iodized salt)
1 cup black pepper
1 cup garlic salt
1/4 cup tender quick

Add to meat after the dry ingredients:
1 1/2 cups minced garlic in 3 cups of boiling water*

**This is my mom's trick. Soak the minced garlic (you can buy it minced at the store, or spend hours peeling & mincing yourself) in the boiling water. We do these up a bit ahead of time, put the 3 cup mixture in jars and let the water infuse with the garlic. The liquid helps to mix the ingredients together, and the temperature helps keep mixing hands warm, especially when the ground meat was frozen previously! You can add more boiling water if needed to make the meat easier to mix.

Clay & his dad mixing the ground meat

We have used several different mixing methods over the years, but my favorite is by hand (probably because of all the fond memories I have mixing sausage with my cousins when I was a little girl!). We weigh the ground deer and pork and place them on a sturdy table. Then it is all hands in! We sprinkle the spices over top and pour the water/garlic on top, letting it soak into the meat.

When we don't have as many hands on deck, or the meat isn't quite as thawed as we like, dad uses an electric drill with mixer on the end to thoroughly combine the deer and pork inside a rubber maid container. Because we sometimes grind the meat ahead of time and freeze it, we try to put it out in a slightly heated shop a day or two before its needed, to slowly thaw it. We also freeze the meat in garbage bag lined milk crates (for easy stacking in the freezer) so it does take quite some time to thaw them all the way through.

Casings

Mom says the best casing are sheep gut casings. We seemed to have had the best luck at our local butcher shop, as other sources have given us casings that broke very easily and made sausage making a nightmare. I am sure there are many different types and sources that work, but we tend to stick to what has served us well in the past.

Soak your thawed casing salted water prior to use. Keep them in the water until you are about to thread them onto the sausage press. Don't allow them to dry out.

Sausage Press

We have tried electric sausage presses before, but they are difficult to regulate and you often spend more time pinching off busted casings than you do making sausage. For that reason, we just use a hand crank (10lb) press that you can easily adjust the speed on. It sounds old school but it will be faster in the end because you won't break as many casings.We have used lever-style presses in the past, however it is much harder to keep a constant speed and consistent sausage size.

We try to fill a casing completely, wrapping it in a circle on the table (covering the table in plastic with a splash of water works best for easy sliding). We then transfer the entire coil over to the wrapping table to be cut and twisted into appropriate sizes. We base our package sizes on who will be eating the sausage (family of 2 versus family of 6).

A ring of sausage that we then pinch off into smaller portions depending on package size

Smoking

Clay smoking garlic sausage, Dec 2015

We LOVE to smoke our sausage (and essentially all forms of meat!). We have just a small propane powered smoker, so we don't tend to do all of our sausage, as that would take forever. We just use the pre-packaged smoked wood chips from your local hunting store. This year we tried Hickory Smoked flavoring and it was delicious!

Life Hack: If you only have a small smoker, like us, but want to smoke a lot of sausage- get creative! My dad is famous for finding unique ways to expand his smoker. In recent years, he's used a pop-up style ice-fishing shack, with the smoker placed inside, door open. The entire shack then becomes a smoker. He has also used a tarp over top of an old square clothes hanging line, with the smoker inside.

Packaging

Some people get fancy with their packaging using vacuum sealers, but even doing 3 or 4 deer per year, we always run out before the year ends, so paper packing works just fine for us. If you are planning on keeping your sausage for long periods of time in the freezer, maybe a vacuum sealing system would be better for you to prevent spoiling.

We purchase freezer paper (paper on one side, wax on the other) from our local grocery store. You can usually buy it in 50 ft rolls. For 300 lbs of sausage this year, we used about 250 ft of paper, however it will vary based on your wrapping technique and size of packages.

Tape seems to be a big issue for us. You can purchase Freezer Tape which is specifically made for wrapping items for the freezer. It looks like regular masking tape, but trust me- masking tape doesn't work! The second it hits the freezer it loses its stickiness and just falls off! I had some freezer tape left over from a few years ago, stored in cold storage (our c-can), and when I took it out to use this year I was very disappointed. Apparently it cannot be frozen (prior to use). It wouldn't even come off the roll! So if you do manage to find the elusive freezer tape, store it inside for next time!

I have purchased Freezer Tape at our local grocery store before, however this year it was impossible to find. You may want to try you local hardware store or Canadian Tire, although it can be quite tricky to get a hold of.

Because we were low this year, we tried a number of different tapes. All-Weather Scotch tape (blue) seemed to work great. We actually found it in the painting section at Canadian Tire. It looks a lot like painting tape. We also tried a very thin, plastic sealing tape recommended by our local hunting store, but it was hard to use, and had to use a lot of it to make it to stick.

Labeling

We don't do anything fancy here. We just use permanent marker to write the type of deer sausage it is, and the date. This way we can identify how old something in the bottom of our freezer is (although we never seem to have to worry about freshness when it goes so fast!).

After all that work, now sit back, kick your feet up and enjoy the fruits of your labor!

We would love to hear your feedback, comments or suggestions if you make your own deer sausage. We are by no means experts, but we do have a ton of fun and get a lot of satisfaction knowing we have a freezer full of meat to enjoy all year round. Cook up a batch & enjoy!

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