Oh. My. Gracious. I wish you had been here on the farm last night. The sounds coming from our farm were horrendous and our neighbors may never speak to us again.......wondering what ugly rituals we were performing in the dark.
Let me explain. Wednesday evening, a guy from the local slaughter house came to pick up our pigs, Pork Chop and Bacon. Well, it was bitterly cold that night, 8 degrees with a terrific wind making it feel more like 10 below zero. I couldn't stand the cold on my face so I went back into the house while Joel, Jeremy and Slaughter House Jeremy tried to wrangle the pigs into his cattle trailer.
It took them over an hour and a half to get Bacon in, but Pork Chop was having none of that business! Slaughter house Jeremy came back with the empty trailer Thursday and he and Joel positioned it so the open door of the trailer fit neatly into the gate opening of the pig pen. Joel placed the pig's food bowl in the trailer and even laid out a trail of food, hoping to entice Pork Chop into the trailer sometime during the day.
Ha! She was too smart for that and never ate a bite all day Friday. Well, Slaughter House Jeremy came back after work last night (Friday night) with 3 other men. Joel, Jeremy and I joined them and it took the 7 of us to round up Pork Chop and get her into the trailer. And it still took us almost an hour!
Joel and I stayed outside the pen and used flashlights to give the men light to work by. At first they had to rouse Pork Chop out of her comfortable home. Then, they used large sheets of plywood and an extra gate we had and used them to attempt to corner her. Oh, how I wish I could have videotaped the antics of her squealing and running in between the men.....doing her very best to avoid getting cornered. It took many tries using the wood and gate to narrow the space in which she had to work, and then she made the fatal mistake of going toward the trailer and they had her trapped.
Pigs don't like to be trapped. At all. Just trust me on this one. She refused to go up into the trailer and three men held firm using a piece of plywood up against her so she couldn't retreat back into her pen while one man stepped into the narrow space beside Pork Chop. After a few minutes of struggling, trying everything to goad her into going into the trailer, Slaughter House Jeremy yelled for me to get his rope from the back of his truck.
Ha! Remember when we tried to lasso the pigs months ago and I said we needed to buy some rope? Well, we bought rope, but nothing like Jeremy had. This guy was the real deal. He had an authentic, stiff roped lasso like a cowboy uses on cattle and another longer rope that was built of much sturdier stuff than the loose rope we purchased.
With much exertion, one of the guys was able to tie the lasso around Pork Chop's neck and Joel ran the other end up through gaps in the trailer walls so when the end was pulled, it made the rope taut. Then the other looser rope was tied securely around Pork Chop's belly and I ran that rope through a gap on my side of the trailer. Joel held onto the lasso rope and pulled when Slaughter House Jeremy yelled, "Pull!". Another man held the rope on my side and he pulled as the lone guy straddling Pork Chop did his best to "shove" her in the right direction.
THAT was when the blood curdling screams and squealing began. Holy. Cow. It was truly ear splitting! I mean, really, imagine it for just a moment. It's pitch dark out. Temps in the 20's with a light breeze. Stars are shining brightly above but we had no moon, so outside our sphere of flashlight the night was solid black. And this pig is pitching a royal fit, squealing loud enough to be heard a mile away. It was definitely a new experience for the three of us.
One more final shove and pulls on the rope and suddenly she was in the trailer. Everyone hustled to get the gate to the trailer closed and secured and once inside the trailer, she stopped carrying on. No problem. Don't know what you folks were so excited about. Harumph. What a pig! Slaughter House Jeremy hitched his truck up to the trailer and we thanked the 4 guys profusely for all their help and acknowledged that there was no way the three of us city folk would have EVER gotten these pigs into a trailer alone.
Well, yesterday Rita called me from the slaughter house and said that Bacon weighed in at .......wait for it.......378lbs. Seriously? And now this morning she called to say that Pork Chop weighed in at 388lbs.! I think we're gonna have a lot of pork real soon. Good thing we just bought 2 new huge freezers. We even got to pick what kind of cuts we wanted from both animals.
So next week we'll be picking up boxes of smoked and cured bacon, tenderloins, whole and half hams, sliced ham(both thick for the grill and thin for the breakfast skillet), boston butt for smoking on our Big Green Egg, and shoulder roasts, baby back ribs, and the remainder will be made into sausage patties.
I even asked them to save the fat so I can render it down into lard.....lard makes the best biscuits ever! Anywhere you use Crisco, I use lard....and it doesn't have any hydrogenated fats which are so bad for you.
We have friends who have been asking us when we were going to have some pork, so, I guess we'll give them a call next week. It's going to be interesting to see how much meat this translates into. I have no idea at all how much space this is going to take up in our freezers. And I'm very curious about the flavor of the meat. I'm sure I'll be posting about that in the upcoming months as we try the various cuts of pork in the pan, on the grill, and in the smoker.
The moral of the story: Take your pigs to the slaughter house early in November when they weigh closer to 250lbs.
Lesson learned,
Debbie
