Since my family eats paleo/primal (which essentially means that we eat whole, natural foods and avoid processed junk), we have found that it is very, very economical to buy an entire cow and stock up the freezer. (Interested? Check out Mark’s Daily Apple for more info on Primal living, which is a good jumping off point.)
We’ve done this three times now, the first time with half a cow, the second with a normal sized cow, and the third with a cow that was, essentially, one humongous cow. As in, about 700 pounds of grass fed beef. As in, if we didn’t own a mini-van, we woulda been screwed getting it home!
We went to pick up the beef (all neatly packaged and deep frozen) just few weeks ago from Cross Creek Cattle Company in South/Central Texas (near College Station). Cross Creek is awesome! We absolutely love the owners, their customer service and, most of all, the product. If you’re in Texas and looking for a source of grass fed beef, check them out.
At any rate, we arrived home after a lovely drive to the country, unpacked our 700+ pounds of meat, and found ourselves with an entirely full 15 cubic foot freezer, along with a 10 cubic foot top loader and the bottom freezer portion of our garage fridge. A LOT of beef! We were set for probably a year!
And then…the horrible morning.
I’m lounging on the couch, Don goes out into the garage, and all of a sudden I hear him calling for me. The freezer was left open (my fault; I’d pulled some ground beef to defrost the night before) and everything was melting.
Let me repeat that: EVERYTHING WAS MELTING.
Fortunately, the meat had started out really, really, really, really deeply frozen, so even though we’re talking hot Texas temperatures, we weren’t yet to spoils-ville. But there was no refreezing this meat. No refreezing FIFTEEN CUBIC FEET of meat.
So what did we do? We put the kitchen in our still relatively new house to good use. Yes, folks, over the course of one Sunday and part of a Monday I cooked an insane amount of food (when I went to bed on Sunday, I had twelve–count ’em–twelve roasts cooking in the stove and a variety of crockpots.)
And now my freezer looks like this:
The upside? We are set for easy meals for about, oh, forever! (And we still have meat in the other freezers, too.). Where’s the BBQ? I guess it’s at our house!
Got any food crises to share? I’d love to hear about them. (You can rest assure my freezer fiasco will end up in a book…maybe your story will, too!)
Nightmare! I often think ‘All our lovingly raised, dispatched, plucked and made oven-ready chickens in our big freezer in the barn – what would we do if the freezer broke down?!’ I guess you have the only answer possible! Wow! Hard work!
Oh, I wish we could keep chickens! We didn’t take advantage at our old house, and at the new one it’s not permitted 🙁 Would love fresh eggs…
But yes…tons of work! I felt like I was living an episode of Hell’s Kitchen!
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