So, if you haven't been reading the comments on my face book, I'm pretty sure that you probably have the wrong idea about this post based on the title of the message. No one has fallen down and scraped up their precious shins.
So this week's project is to make homemade beef stock. A few weeks ago, I checked the store, and guess what...they don't sell beef part ingredients for making stock. We'll, I just so happened to get to know a new wonderful family at church and her hubby is a butcher, and we found out a few months later that her brother is Baker, although he is not *a* Baker, that's just his last name. For those of you who don't know "Baker" his name is Eric Baker, and he and my hubby have been buddies for quite a while. Obviously, if you know me and my hubby...they both share the same first name which is why we just call him Baker. We had our bonfire wedding in his backyard.
Hu-mongo thanks to our friends, we were able to obtain all of the *ingredients* even at the
perfect price! So, Saturday our friends delivered the marrow and neck bones, but the cow shins...or whatever cow legs are called from the "knee" down, would have to wait until Monday. To my surprise the shins arrived...all 21.5lbs of them arrived
with fur, WOW...fur makes it a bit more real.
I knew for sure I'd need some back up. So, my other Amish-wannabe
friend (note the hyphen to differentiate that she most definitely is my friend and the wannabe links to the other noun in that phrase) and I got together this morning and embarked on a whole new experience for making beef stock. We did reminisce about how easy it was to just measure out at teaspoon of Wyler's bullion granules. But this way, is the healthful way.....you can can learn why here:
beautiful broth. We know it will be worth all the effort. Although, admittedly we knew nothing of how to accomplish skinning shins, but we decided that its much easier to get started when you have a friend there that is just as clueless as you.
So, we spread the table with paper sacks and tied on our aprons and got started. About 2/3rds of the way through our project my friend reminded me that the book
did say that the hooves were *optional. We laughed about that and decided we would finish skinning 3 of the shins and to just chop the hoof off the 4th one. We did take a few moments to show the kids how the ligaments worked and printed off some information about the anatomy of the hoof, us homeschooling mama's are always looking for ways to incorporate school into our daily life.
Next we obtained permission to use the hack-saw, but before we got started my gracious hubby offered to do the hoof removal. I have to say that was a bit of a relief. Today was prep day, tomorrow we'll start the stock.
The thought of boiling calves hooves isn't nearly as bad after going through the process of skinning them first. Plus, I learned what to ask the butcher for next time....So much for my Amish training.
Unfortunately my
Encyclopedia of Country Living book arrived on the front porch this
evening. It as a whole chapter dedicated to raising cows and butchering them.
Well my awesomely wonderful husband helped us with the hooves. I sat idly by and read through my new book to see if I could come up with some helpful info. He tried out a few different saws and it was quite entertaining watching him. He decided to go out to his wood-shop and build a "shin-stabilizer". (I think he just wanted an excuse to build something with his new
dado set that arrived in the shipment with my book). Next he attached the hoof to the stabilizer by drilling a screw through it, and used 2 clamps to secure it to the table so he could hack-saw through the first hoof section. He decided to try out the sawzall to cut through the second. So very un-Amish like, but it worked well. Round 2: on to separating the joints on the skinned shins....and after a bit of practice he was able to get the 3rd one apart in 2-minutes and 40-seconds...yes, we timed him just to see how good he was! I'd say that's good!
