Hillside Farm

I’ll start out by saying Happy Thanksgiving to you all!

My husband had today and the next three days off work and hadn’t been hunting in a while, so he took advantage of his time and went out this morning. He shot a doe! While his dad and sister came over to help him move it to the barn, I took Elly to her Mamaws house to be babysat while we gutted and dressed the deer.

I was very excited about this, as I had never killed anything myself and had never learned how to gut and dress anything.

Once we laid the doe out, they gave me instructions on how to start cutting and I started. Got a few cuts in and was having trouble getting a good start and making good cuts. I knew better, but I positioned the knife toward me as I was trying to cut through a section of skin, and as the knife cut through, it came toward me and I hit my leg.

Immediately, I looked down to see a small rip in the leg of my black pants, and pulled the rip apart a bit so I could take a quick look to see if it was deep.

TW!

All I could see was a small blob of leg fat. Instantly I knew I very well may need stitches. My husband took me back to the house to take a better look. It was about a 1/4” deep and 1/2” wide laceration. While he went to go get supplies for doctoring, I sat with a cold rag in my head, since the excitement of the moment made me feel like I might pass out.

After thoroughly cleaning the wound, we decided it probably wasn’t bad enough to need stitches. It honestly wasn’t even very painful. We slapped on some butterfly closures and a bandaid and headed back out.

About this time, we went to the in-laws for a Thanksgiving brunch. Biscuit and gravy casserole, fruit, hashbrowns, sausage. Yum!

After spending some time with family, we headed back to skin and and then quarter up the deer. Never having done this, I watched some YouTube videos to give me and idea of where to cut.

I do feel like we lost a lot of meat, between the shoulder being blown out from the impact, and some muscles having a lot of sinews and connective tissue, which would make it very time intensive and likely not worth it to clean all that up from the meat. However, this is typical for cleaning deer, that’s what I’m told.

My weekend is very busy getting ready for a craft show as well as our own Thanksgiving meal on Sunday, so I wasn’t able to clean the meat up as much as it needed. We decided we would wrap it up well, refrigerate it, then get to work on it first thing Monday morning. Our best bet was to save the tenderloins as they were, turn the roasts into jerky, and grind up the rest for sausage or for mixing in with our ground beef.

This deer had a lot of fat on her, and I ended up trimming a ton of it off because we weren’t sure what to do with it. I kept saying “surely we can use this for something.” I hope I cam do some research before we get another deer and figure out how to use more of it so we aren’t wasting so much.

Even though there was a completely avoidable injury involved, I had a great time learning how to process this deer. My husband thought it was funny that my favorite part was skinning it.

Wow what a memorable Thanksgiving! Do you have any unique or memorable Thanksgiving stories?