a homegrown BBQ lunch

Yesterday the butcher came to cut up the beef that had been hanging in the cool store in our driveway for nearly 2 weeks. The meat had aged; the fat was a different colour and parts of the meat were covered in ‘ageing,’ which looks like a type of mould, but isn’t.

David, the butcher, said the meat looks excellent, and could pass for wagyu beef because of the marbelling. Yum! This is a porter house steak.

The cow weighed just over 220kg. It all fits in our 340l chest freezer. There’d be at least 30kg of sausages. As david cut the meat, he put the scrappy bits in a bucket, which later got minced and turned into sausages.

[We ate sausages for lunch today and they were so good. Very meaty and not greasy, like other sausages. Monte had flavored them with dried basil, thyme and sage (and some with red wine too). Delicious.]

We got all kinds of cuts, like eye fillet steaks (Monte’s favourite), porterhouse, scotch fillet steaks (my favourite), corned silverside, round, bolar, blade, topside – all in steaks, stewing meat, roasts and mince. Everything really, except for T-bones, because we elected to have that cut into porterhouse and eye fillets (a T-bone is eye on one side and porterhouse on the other). Certainly enough to see us through a huge portion of the year.

sausage meat

mincing

sausage mince

hard at work

sausage making

Of course I had to get cooking straight away. I made a huge Bolognese pasta sauce, using about a kilo of minced meat and tomato sauce from our own tomatoes (and onions, wine etc). The issue will be to avoid eating all our favourite cuts first, as well as increasing our intake of red meat.

sausages cooking on the BBQ