Another piece of meat comes into the picture....

September rolls around and Crystal gets a call from her Dad. He says he wants to know if we would like a quarter of a cow. He has a cow that he is getting ready to butcher. Actually, I think the cow was a pet of his ex wife. Now he doesn't want it anymore. We'll only have to pay processing on a quarter of it. So we say we'll take it. Dan the Cow man has told me that processing on Chuck is going to run $200 - 250. So I figure a fourth of that is going to be $50 - 75. Heck you can't beat a bunch of meat for 75 bucks! So on the appointed day we go to pick up the meat at her Dad's house. Processing was like $550 so we wound up paying $143 for our quarter. I talk to Dan and he says there's something odd about that. He thinks that maybe her Dad didn't split the processing in fourths. I don't really care because we got a bunch of meat for $143. Even if we did wind up paying more than a fourth of the processing, its still okay - I mean he did pitch in the cow! I don't think he lied to us though, he said he was surprised that the processing was so high. Plus they divided the meat out into fourths for him, and each person got one of the heart, the tongue, the liver, or something else. We got the heart and he said wait - you can have the tongue too, I don't want it. So thats a good deal! I think we wound up with over 40 pounds of hamburger!

Well, we brought it home and I' must say, it looked so pretty in our new freezer!! We cooked the hamburger a few times and it was fine. The first piece of meat we cooked was a Pikes Peak Roast. Now I have no idea what cut of the cow that comes from, but I will say that it sat in the crock pot all day long wtih some taters, carrots, and onions. It was the BEST crock potted meat I've ever had in my whole life! It was so good and juicy, it was wonderful. If all the meat tastes half as good as that then our $143 was a steal!!

But now I was worried, we're going to have a fourth of a cow in September, then a half of a cow in December. Are we going to be able to eat it all in a year? Also - if the processing for Chuck was similar to this cow, my share of processing chuck was going to cost me $300. Thats more than I was planning, but we'll see.....