Butchering 6 Lambs Before the Cold Sets In

Got a candlelit breakfast. Our eyes and bodies waking up with the sun. We had to move breakfast back another 15 minutes. Boys, how many lambs we got to kill today?

I think 7.

Okay, 7, that's it? I thought we had 9. So some, some have died or gotten killed already.

We've killed like 2.

Yeah, did we eat those? Oh good. That's the bad and the good news is there's 7. We need to get it to where we have 12. Oh my gosh, 8 pounds 4 ounces. We're getting serious about some brisket for my birthday. Birthday's coming up in 3 days. What you got planned?

I have a corned beef brisket recipe.

Oh, have you ever brined a corned beef? Oh, would it be pink?

It— so it can be if I put beet juice in it, or like the sauerkraut juice. But it's not if I don't.

What have you done so far?

So the only thing I have left in here is garlic, but I've done salt, sugar, cinnamon sticks, juniper berries, allspice berries, coriander seed, thyme, ginger.

Um, where did somebody first come up with this?

Peppercorns, mustard seed. This is only 3 quarts of water.

Okay.

So I'm gonna have a whole gallon. When it's done. Okay. But because I have to cool this before the meat can sit in it.

Okay.

I have a quart of ice water that I'm gonna add to it to cool it down.

Okay.

And so it'll be a gallon.

All right.

And then you flip it.

You're helping put away the dishes. Thank you.

You see? You see the sesame slices?

Different stage we're in. I just keep pinching myself. Ready? I'm in here making—

making this—

beef broth. Hopefully beat Fitz. And the boys are milking. Was it long ago we had to do everything? So therefore we weren't able to do this much, including having to clean out the dishwasher. Time has changed this house. Good job, bud. All right, you got it. We got a little behind on towels. Thank God for washing machines. We forget to be thankful for that kind of thing, don't we? I'll show you where Oh, look, more wood chips. My forefathers washed their clothes right down there in the creek, so they're definitely like me and wore their jeans 14 days in a row. Oh, I'll go do that right now. I'll go do that right now. Here's a garden peace hack for you. We want to treat our wives like the number one that she is, like the queen that she is. You don't feel it? Act it. Oftentimes emotion follows motion. And motion is what true love is anyway. When she asks you to do something, 3 choices. 1, the best one, do it right away. Stop what you're doing and do it right away if at all possible. If it's something you can't do right away, like right now we need to check the light bulbs over in the cabin, you go to the second thing and put in a timer. Okay? Number 2, you could set a timer. Okay, where's my phone? When would be a good time to go there? Let's just say 2 o'clock. Timer for 2 PM to test the lights at the cabin. If that doesn't work, if it goes over 24 hours— you can't set a timer on your phone— that's when you put it in your calendar. And you actually have to check your calendar every day. Oh, good thing I looked at this. Henry Gideon, you got tutoring in 20 minutes. Yeah, we should go do the chickens. Let me get this beef started and we'll go.

Word, that's all you have to do.

Okay, so it works until it doesn't. Little, uh, sibling quarrels brings me back here. Seems to work most of the time. Hey, do y'all get along most of the time with chores? Sure. Okay, well, if I'm out here, let's train Harriet. All right, we're working together this morning, so we're gonna go back so we can pour the milk. And now the rest of us are blitzing on the kitchen. Did I jinx myself? Because I said, hey, they cannot— look at them, they're all going and working. And then they weren't. So we're gonna group, we're gonna be like an Eastern shepherd when sheep go astray. Time to bring them together, bring everything together, reestablish the security. And I was thinking of inviting the community that we started over the weekend to come. Hey, if you want to see how we process lambs, come on. But I said, you got to get along with each other first. I think that straightened them up. Your cream separating. I really gonna have to trust you guys for a minute, and I'm gonna have to— I have to go feed the chickens. Just got in our brewer's yeast. Took a timeout. We all blitzed on the kitchen. How does it look? It's getting there. We got it a bit under control. Some rotten apples going to the pigs. We got you started on the meatball soup, Lily. Yeah, got meatball soup for everybody today. What's your plan, buddy?

All right, you and yourself will get the lucidor ring. I'll go bring the sheep down, then we'll get them in the lucidor ring. All right, then me and yourself will start butchering, and as we're done, you'll— we'll hang them up somewhere for you to cut them in half.

For us.

Okay, thank you, Becky, for the reset. We needed that.

I'm not done.

I get caught up in the projects. Come here, let me give you a high five.

I'm not done because it's got all— I have to do the freezer now.

Look what she did. Wow, it was bad. That's pleasant. I can't figure out how to get this drawer out, so we're gonna have to bring the cleaning to it. I've just been laboring away washing that inside, and you figured out how to get it out. What? Heck yeah, buddy! That was not easy. That is no job for a queen, guys. You see your woman struggling, let's, let's, let's help her. Okay, she didn't ask. She actually told me to go, but let's go tell her we just got— she wanted to get the drawer out. Let's tell her we just got it out and we want to show her how to do it. Got the drawer out. I'm just going to show you how we did it. Do you want to see it real quick or you want to see it afterwards? Okay, boss mom in there, social media training. Do you guys want to go kill a lamb while we're Or do you want to wait till after lunch?

We'll go kill 2.

2 lambs?

I'm gonna bring hot chocolate over there because— and I'll heat it up on the faux white fire.

That's nice. Jonah's got us a fire going. Shall we go, guys? All right, let's go this way. Bright, cool, fresh air. Oh yeah, I like it out here. I like it out here. Are you coming? All right, cool. I think you need a little bit of warming up, huh? Time to butcher lambs. Jonah says there's 6. We got alfalfa. I believe we'll be able to get them all in this cage without alfalfa. Jonah's herded them over here. They're already getting in there on their own for the minerals. What? How is this happening? This doesn't just happen, y'all. They're hungry for minerals is how that happened. They just walked in there themselves. Here's what we're gonna do. We'll put the alfalfa out and let the big, big ones out. Okay. Yeah, I don't think we're gonna need more sheep getting out. How many we got? We just got 6. I'm getting hungry for lamb bit soup right now looking at these guys. I'm out of— I'm out of lamb bits, I'm out of beef bits. And are you keeping the fire going? I mean, as long as they're right there, do we just let them graze a bit just outside? What do you got, Lily? I got hot chocolate. Are you gonna make it for them out here?

Yeah.

Henry's got to stay by the fire because he doesn't have a sweater.

Wait, why don't you—

why aren't you wearing your jacket?

All right, I got mine ready for the Hanger. Did you— oh, you got two hangers. These are so cool. You could just make this homemade camper. This is just a hook from the hardware store, a scrap board, and an O-hook on a little just janky pulley. The sun is out. The damn bra— there you go. Two down, four to go. That's a nice pin for them. They can be on grass, they've got their water. Let's show you this freezer, Beck, how to get the drawers out.

Well, that's that one.

Yeah, that's that one.

That's easy.

Well, the surprise was that we cleaned them.

I know, that's great. It looks wonderful.

All right, let's try this meatball soup of Birdell's. No, next time, Lily, you gotta make them rice. You're gonna have rice for supper. You'll be okay. It's a little— it'll be a light, light lunch for you. And then go get me a couple of eggs. Really? We don't have any eggs in the house?

Nope.

Well, we're living on the edge, y'all. So how'd the soup turn out on this cold day?

It's good, it's just really hot.

Just— I liked it. Not everybody eating Gap soup.

None of you are forcing us all.

The boys wanted rice, but they had bagel this morning. All right, just had lunch.

I try to get stuffed.

I want that to be my big meal. I want to skip supper for an intermittent fast, get digested, sleep good. It's funny, last night I ate the meal with the family. I ate carnivore, but I felt bad for regretting it. But that's just where I'm at with my health journey. It just feels so good when I intermittent fast that and then go into the breakfast just really well slept. Anyway, the electricians are done on the cabin. Let's check it out. So proud of this It looks so good, so cool. The boys are butchering. We have some friends from out of town here for a brief visit. Was able to visit with them, show them the cabin. How you doing, bud? Uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh. You haven't done anything in here. As if we weren't busy enough. I'm gonna render some tallow. All right, Josiah wants me on that one.

Joking.

Jonah's on this one now. We'll see who does do it faster. There he goes with our lamb. 20 till 4 and we cleaned the house this morning. It'll be nice going into a clean house, clean freezer and fridge. Oh, you gotta do it at some point. Oh my God, it's never— there's never a good time. It would be good to go in there and our pantry fridge and freezer is clean. Let's go look at it.

The next shot should be you opening the cooler.

All this—

let's stare looking at it.

All right, there we go. Austin, you got the next shot. Wow, I like it. You like it? Okay, is this not nice? I guess it's nice. We got it cleaned up. By the way, we've— we made a mistake. We put our butchering area here. The, the shed slopes that way. It actually doesn't slope this way. I don't know if that was bad design. My idea was I didn't want organic matter going into gravel because then you're going to grow grass. I thought I was so smart, but it drains this way and just look how cluttered it gets. It's just awful. But then I don't know if it was Jonah or the beautiful one— who, it was you? You said, why don't we make this our butchering bay? Why don't we? It'll be more in the shade in the summer when we're butchering. I mean, we put the butchering shed over there because the water's there, but it's not hard to bring water over here. This will be nice. It's in the shade. It'll, it'll drain that way. It's perfect.

I could also get the big fireplace that we have that puts out so much heat. Yeah, put it over here from when we're butchering in the winter.

All right. Sounds good. I like it when the kids have ideas for the farm. One of his ideas I'm gonna have to relent. He wants to put tin around it. I like the open-air feel. You're talking about my genius tin idea, but it's his farm, so it's the mindset I need to get into. Tallow! We got tallow. So easy. I wonder if you guys can help me. If somebody can watch this, I'm gonna process the liver and heart, and I can do 30 minutes of office hours before dinner. Just these from, from the butchering, washing the knives, making sure we dry them. The, the saw, we'll need the saw tomorrow and we need the knife sharpened. How's the leftover Mexican? It's good. How is it, boys? Question, you like this better than the, than the soup lunch? Yeah, both of you. Why? I don't know, there's more food.

Super greasy.

Is it the, uh, tortilla?

No, it's just carrots and meatballs. That's all the soup was.

I'm thinking, yeah, I'm thinking yum! I don't even need to eat tonight, I'm so full. I ate 3 bowls. How many did y'all eat? 1. Wonderful on that soup. Yeah. It was a good soup. Just went on our walk. That was refreshing, helping us digest. Beauty says it's cold.

It was downright chilly.

To me it was refreshing. Of course, I grew up here. I got Carolina blood. Gonna do something with this 8.5-pound brisket. I swear these recipes are born from people just having a bunch of stuff around and just throwing it on it, and it was like, oh, that's good. Well, let's look at it. Let's get it together.

It's so nice.

Come here, John, you want to see this?

Oh, what?

So nice.

Now I can have people over and I'm going to be embarrassed.

Yeah. What's this?

We've got the tallow.

I need the tallow. We should probably also check the kefir, huh? It's been 2 days. I think it was Saturday night.

Sunday night.

So Monday, Tuesday. Okay, okay, it's done. I'll process that. You love me. I fantasized about brisket biscuits during that entire fast, and you're going all out for me, girl. That's an interesting strategy, sitting on the counter doing dishes. You're gonna put weights on it?

Yeah, I'm using these steaks as a weight, and then I'll flip it tomorrow, and then I'll flip it the next day.

Yeah, everybody's in bed. I almost forgot to say good night to you guys. So happy day See you tomorrow. Had such a good time with the teens. We invited them back tomorrow for the land processing, and many of them responded. That's going to be very interesting. Let's do this. Let's go. See you tomorrow. Happy day.