The ultimate sandwich tool

For as long as I've known him (nearly 36 years of marriage plus two years of dating), Don has been a sandwich guy. He could eat sandwiches for every meal, and when he was baching it, he often did.

Fast forward to about ten years ago, back in the days when we had our wonderful weekly neighborhood potlucks. At one such meal, he was mentioning to some friends that, even though we raise our own beef, he's never really been able to make roast-beef sandwiches from our own meat because he didn't have a meat slicer. Hand-slicing beef only goes so far since it's hard to cut it thin enough.

These friends had a commercial-grade meat slicer, and offered it to us on loan.

Don was very excited to try it out. He cooked a beef roast to perfection, read the instructions on how to slice the meat, and set up the machine.

Well, it was awful. It sliced well enough, but it was so powerful that it literally threw meat bits all over the kitchen. Days later, I was still cleaning stuff off the walls. We cleaned up the slicer, returned it to our friends with gracious thanks, and that was the end of that.

More recently, Don has been lobbying to get a meat slicer of our own, so last summer I started researching smaller (and less powerful) home models, and purchased two which I tucked away to be given as Christmas gifts. One model was electric (the Cogace foldable meat slicer), and the other was hand-powered (the Starfrit deli slicer) (note: these are both affiliate links).

Honestly, I wasn't going to get the hand-powered one until I saw a video of it in action, and instantly realized this would be a valuable addition to our homesteading toolbox. Besides, we always opt for hand-powered options of things whenever possible. At Christmas, I wrapped these and put them under the tree.

Needless to say, Don was thrilled with these gifts and couldn't wait to try them out. He started with a beef roast, as well as a ham steak from a pig we bought a few years ago.

Following some online directions, he scored the fat side of the beef...

...then sprinkled it with Montreal Steak Seasoning.

The ham was flavored with a variety of spices.

Using a meat thermometer, he roasted the beef to perfection. This is the beef:

And this is the ham:

Once out of the oven, he let the meat sit for about an hour (it continues "cooking" as well as cooling during this time), then put it in the fridge overnight, letting it marinate in its own juices. This not only cooled the meat, but stiffened it up so it would slice more easily.

He started out trying the hand-cranked slicer:

It was easy-peasey to use...

...and created beautiful cuts.

Then he tried out the electric slicer:

Again, beautiful cuts.

Here are the ham and roast beef slices (plus some odds and ends):

Don's review: Both machines work extremely well, but are NOT as fast as commercial slicers (which is why the borrowed one was slamming meat bits against the wall). The manual cutter cuts as fast as he can turn the handle, about one slice every couple of seconds. The electric slicer is slightly faster, about one slice per second. Both produce identical-quality results (namely, excellent).

The meat doesn't have to be pressed hard against the blade; just light pressure is fine. One thing is the blades are only about six inches high, so with bigger meats (say, a huge ham), the meat would have to be cut in half so the blade can get through.

Encouraged by this success, he started with a larger roast beef weighing six pounds.

He prepped and roasted it in a similar way. Ready to go into the oven...

...and baked. (An accurate meat thermometer is vital at this step.)

Slicing using both machines:

He bagged up the slices in three-ounce bags, which gives two sandwiches per bag. These he froze.

Curious how this output compared to what was being sold in the store, I photographed packages of sliced roast beef: $15/lb.

Of course, most cuts were packaged in quantities well under a pound.

This means, conceivably, the six-pound roast he started with yielded about $90 worth of sliced roast beef.

So yes, these meat slicers were a valuable addition to our homestead repertoire of tools.

Freezer Tetris

Some of you may remember our bad experience with U-Haul when we moved from our temporary rental home here to our new homestead.

The bottom line from this experience is it would be a cold day in hell before we ever rented a U-Haul again.

But we had one problem: Most of our shop tools, farm equipment, and a good portion of our household goods (notably books) are still in our old place, either stored in the barn thanks to the kindness of the new owners, or stacked in a storage unit in town. How to get them up to our new place without a rental truck?

So Don did a little digging and found a big box truck for sale. Not just any truck, either. It's a 26-foot monster that was being sold in a distant town by a furniture company so they could upgrade to a newer model. The price was right, and we had a mechanic friend check it out for soundness. Another friend (a retired professional truck driver) picked it up for us and deposited it at our old place (with the permission of the new owners, of course). Once we're finished using the truck, we'll sell it (doubtless to another person disgusted with U-Haul) and recoup our costs.

So there was the truck, parked at our old house while we transferred title, got insurance, got it registered, paid the taxes, got new license plates, and waited for the weather to cooperate.

Last Sunday, everything came together. We made arrangements with some neighbors to hire their strong teenage children. We left our house at 7 am, drove to Older Daughter's place to drop off Mr. Darcy for the day (where she took him on not one, but two day hikes!), and went down to move some items out of the barn. We were so busy, it didn't even dawn on me to pull out my camera and document the action until we were finished. (As you can see, we'll have to make another trip.)

With the help of so many willing hands -- boy, it was wonderful seeing some of our friends again -- we were actually back on the road sooner than anticipated, which was fine with us. We had a long drive ahead of us and knew the last part of the journey would be in the dark. Don was driving an unfamiliar vehicle. We had a lot on our plate.

The last thing we loaded in the very back of the truck (so they could be unloaded first) were two of our three chest freezers (one mostly empty, one very full). The third (full) freezer will have to wait until the next trip.

We stopped in town to gas up before hitting the highway. I called Older Daughter to let her know we were on our way. As I pulled out of the gas station and tried to roll up the passenger-side window, I heard a horrible grinding noise -- and the window went dead. Oh joy. (Give me old-fashioned hand-crank roll-down windows any day.)

Remember our mantra for moving to a new home: "It's an Adventure." This is just part of the Adventure, right?

So I had to drive for four hours -- stopping to pick up Mr. Darcy -- with the window wide open. In winter. It's an Adventure, yay! Besides, "Could be worse. Could be raining."

After many long and cold hours on the road, we pulled into our driveway. We were exhausted and (in my case) chilled to the bone. The only thing we did before calling it a night was to plug in the freezers.

An advantage of owning this box truck is we're not in a hurry to unload it (except the freezers, of course). Since it's not a rental, we don't have a deadline to return it and can unload it at our leisure.

The next morning, we dealt with the freezers. We removed the contents of the mostly empty one into totes, then moved the empty unit into the barn. Then it was time to tackle the contents of the very full freezer. It took many totes to empty the contents before we were able to move the freezer itself.

This box truck has a lift gate -- and oh what a joy not to have to shove and push and pull heavy items up and down a ramp! We slid the freezer onto the lift gate, and hey presto, it was lowered to the ground. Yeah, I could get used to this.

We put the freezer on a flatbed cart Don made a few months ago, and pulled it around to the back porch.

Then I started sorting the contents. Most of it is beef from the animals we butchered a couple years ago. It's nice to have beef again -- we haven't had any since leaving our old house.

But we had lots of totes filled with meat -- far more, it seemed, than would fit into the porch freezer. Did things multiply on the way home? Time to play Freezer Tetris.

I sorted the meats into rough categories -- ground beef, roasts, steaks. Ground beef was the biggest pile, so I got some boxes and began packing them as tight as I could.

Each box held two layers of meat, and I was able to stack the boxes three deep. Four boxes of ground beef, two boxes of miscellaneous steaks, random roasts as well as a turkey and some pork shoehorned in wherever there was room, and voilà: the freezer was packed to the brim, but in a logical order. I had one small box left over that we put in the freezer in the house refrigerator.

Oddly enough, though we're brand new to this property and nowhere near ready to have farm animals yet, having a freezer full of beef makes us feel less like city slickers.

After all, what farm doesn't play Freezer Tetris once in a while?

How we celebrated Independence Day

We're not doing anything special today. We're not traveling anywhere, we're not shooting off fireworks, we're not doing anything out of the ordinary. But we ARE celebrating independence in our own modest way.

We're working. We're in the middle of a production run of 300 pieces, pulling together the inventory I'll need for my annual sales trip to Portland coming up toward the end of the month. We independently created a business that provides income.

I milked Polly this morning. Got 1.25 gallons. We are independent of buying milk from the store.

We picked strawberries again yesterday evening. Got about eleven pounds. So we are independent of buying strawberries.

I watered the garden. We are growing beans, corn, potatoes, fruit, broccoli, brussels sprouts, onions, herbs, peppers, tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, carrots, melons, pumpkins, etc. It provides independence from purchasing those items.

We fed the bull and made sure the livestock had fresh water. We are entirely independent of buying beef.

We fed and watered the chickens. We are independent of buying chicken meat and eggs.

Our girls went to their job. They are learning to be independent young women.

This is what we did (or are doing) today. How is everyone else celebrating?

500 pounds of meat

We got the call from the mobile butchers that our meat was ready. This is the combined beef from butchering Ruby and Chester a couple weeks ago, cut and wrapped and ready to pick up.

This is the best time of year to drive to the town of Potlatch because the scenery is so beautiful with all the winter wheat beginning to green up. It's like driving through Ireland.

Here's the inside of the butchers' walk-in freezer, with trays of meat neatly wrapped and labeled.

These folks keep their facility squeaky-clean. We like doing business with such an ethical family-owned company.

Here's the meat, loaded in the car.

On the road again...

I zoomed in on this kestrel from quite a distance so it's a little blurry, but they're such handsome birds.

While I was gone, Don had the unenviable task of cleaning out the chest freezer in an effort to fit all the meat in. He did an impressive job.

We ended up with one section completely full, and one section three-quarters full. We also put 70 lbs. of ground beef in a neighbor's freezer.

The exact total came to 510 lbs. Figuring in feed costs and other expenses, we estimate it costs us about $1.40/lb for our beef... and that's for ALL cuts, from ground beef and cube steak up to T-bones and tenderloin.

This much meat is quite timely, because lately I've been collecting a few depressing headlines, to wit:

• Fruit and Vegetable Prices Are Rising
- The cost of fresh produce is poised to jump in the coming months as a three-year drought in California shows few signs of abating, according to an Arizona State University study set to be released Wednesday.

• Soaring Food Inflation Full Frontal: Beef, Pork And Shrimp Prices Soar To Record Highs, which included a charming graph:

• Why Meat Prices Will Continue to Soar
- The average price of USDAchoice-grade beef has soared to $5.28 a pound, and the average price of a pound of bacon has skyrocketed to $5.46. Unfortunately for those that like to eat meat, this is just the beginning of the price increases. Due to an absolutely crippling drought that won’t let go of the western half of the country, the total size of the U.S. cattle herd has shrunk for seven years in a row, and it is now the smallest that is has been since 1951. But back in 1951, we had less than half the number of mouths to feed.

• Beef prices hit all-time high in U.S.
- Come grilling season, expect your sirloin steak to come with a hearty side of sticker shock. Beef prices have reached all-time highs in the U.S. and aren't expected to come down any time soon. Extreme weather has thinned the nation's beef cattle herds to levels last seen in 1951, when there were about half as many mouths to feed in America. "We've seen strong prices before but nothing this extreme," said Dennis Smith, a commodities broker for Archer Financial Services in Chicago. "This is really new territory."

• Why Meat Prices Are Going To Continue Soaring For The Foreseeable Future
- [T]he supply of meat is going to be tight for the foreseeable future even as demand for meat continues to go up. This is going to result in much higher prices, and so food is going to put a much larger dent in American family budgets in the months and years to come.

• A Perfect Storm for Higher Beef Prices
- The price of beef has been rising ever since the Great Plains drought forced ranchers to reduce their herds. The price went up even more this winter because cattlemen did not want to transport livestock to market during the coldest part of the winter.

For the last few years, we've been striving with greater effort towards food self-sufficiency on our farm, and these headlines illustrate why. I don't know if anyone can ever be truly self-sufficient (our "circle" of self-sufficiency isn't closed by any means), but at least we can work toward that goal. And meanwhile, I urge everyone to try their hand at food production of some type. Any type. Prices aren't coming down any time soon.

These prices increases are going to hit a lot of people hard. As it is, I know a lot of people who are simply unable to afford beef. At least now we have lots of ground beef we can donate to our church's food bank.