To say I’m getting excited for the upcoming hunting season is sort of a joke.  You know when the excitement is getting the best of me when you see me pull out some ground venison from last years hunt and begin the task of seasoning and salting it in preparation to make jerky (see my recipe in the recipe category to the right of your screen).  Well, as usual I’m always trying to improve or invent something better and this year was no different.

I had loaded up the dehydrator with 5 1/2 pounds of my delicious concoction and still had a full 8 ounces of jerky meat still in the bowl.  My mind went into overtime to think of how I was going to make this raw meat into jerky….AH HA!  I’ll make some pemmican!

What’s pemmican?  (In true mountain man lingo)  Wall sunny, lit me till ya.  Pemmican is a mix of raw meat frum a buffler er other four legged critter an sum dried fruit what’s found in the hills.  Sum like wild berries and sum like wild plums.  After the fruit is dried it is pounded up reel gud and made inta a powder.  That there powder gits mixed wit the raw meat reel gud and then the whole kibuddle gits dried same as other jerky.  Whin it’s all done dried up an ya eats sum it is reel gud with fruit and meat flavors blended tagither.  Sort a like eatin Christmas candy.

Well, I went in search of some dried fruits laying around the house.  Trouble is, at my house we ain’t got no dried fruits.  The bananas either get made into cookies or cake before they get dried enough to make into powder, or they get thrown out because of the sticky mess dripping down off the counter top.  Other fruits find the same fate when the flies are more numerous than the fruit itself.  I looked everywhere hoping to even find some raisins but none could be found.  My hopes were just about dashed when suddenly my eyes fell upon a box of Black Forest brand fruit snacks made with Real Fruit Juice with juicy burst centers!  I took a package out and opened it up….six little fruit wonders fell onto the counter.  These ought to work.

I got two more packs out of the box and proceeded to cut them up into small pieces.  The gooey centers made quite a mess on the cutting board and as the pieces got smaller they were really hard to cut up but eventually I had a small pile of the sticky little guys sitting there.  I poked and pried them off the wood cutting board and into the bowl with the meat.  Mixing by hand I tried my best to get the meat and the jelly pieces to blend together, but like common ends of two magnets they did not like each other.  So, what now?

I decided I would make little hand mashed rounds out of the meat and placed each one on a cookie sheet.  Then I took the little pieces of fruities and pushed them into the meat rounds.  They looked very similar to M and M cookies only raw.  When I had all the meat used up and on the cookie sheet, I popped them into the oven at “warm”.  I, being the smartest of cooks I know, also placed a thermometer in the oven to make sure the jerky got up to 160 degrees (F), propped the oven door open with a wooden spoon and walked away.  About 30 minutes later I peeked in to check the temperature…I was surprised to see it only about 120…So I “up’ed” the temp…On my oven setting it was set at 200 degrees.  That should do it and I walked away.  30 minutes or so later I came back and checked the temperature….again surprised it only read 130…I up’ed it again…240 this time.

Well, time got away from me and it was nearly an hour later when I went to check the temperature and wholy mholy it was 180!  The juicy little sprinkles were melted all over the cookie sheet around each of the meat rounds…NOT what I expected.  Well, what is done is done and I left it all there to finish drying but not before I turned the temp down just a tad.

Just before bedtime I turned off the oven and pulled out the cookie sheet.  There sat 7 little dried up rounds of jerky meat with some color splashed here and there in each one of them.  Had I done this back in the 1700 or 1800’s I would have been the laughing stock of the whole tribe.  Not only because it was womens work to make the jerky and pemmican, but also for my fool hearty attempt at putting fake berries in my pemmican.

Well, the next day, I found myself traveling into the woods with Weasel and Squirrel.  I gave them a condensed version of what I just told you about (well, perhaps they got a longer version of it) and then asked if they would like to be the Guinea Pigs to test it…..they both said they would give it a go.  I had only brought one of the seven rounds with me and so I tried to split it 3 ways.  It was very sticky on the outside as the sugary mess had poured out of the little beads of melted fruities and bubbled its way out of the meat like small volcanos spewing molten lava and it ran all down and around the meat leaving the sugar coating the little rounds and no way of touching it without getting it on your fingers….definitely finger licking stuff.

After eating our small portions we all agreed they were not worth making any more of them.  Pemmican it was not.  AND, you will not see a recipe in my recipe category about this.  I’m putting this one in a generic category.

Bears Butt

July 27, 2015

I guess it wouldn’t be right to just let the hay season go by without saying something about it.  July is not necessarily a month we look forward too, but once the hay is in the barn we are all very glad.  It takes all of us to pull off the hay trick each year and as we age it gets harder and harder.  Not sure what the future is going to look like.  At least we are not still cutting it ourselves like we did when I was in my 20’s, 30’s and early 40’s.  We used the 1948 John Deere tractor (that we still have and use once each year) and the sickle mower that came with it.   A 5 foot cutting swath!  It generally took 3 people to run the job.  One on the tractor, one pushing on the mower blade and one resting in the shade waiting for his turn at the blade job.

It took us at least a week of hard work daylight to dark to get it all cut.  Then Bob would run the power rake and rake it all up before a custom baler guy would come in and bale it.  We could count on about 3 weeks of intensive farm work to get the hay into the barn.  It kept us all together, taught us how to work hard and to complain was not an option….allergies?…no such thing.

As I sit here typing this my wrists are aching from picking up the bales I picked up.  My fingers are sore from the strings of the bales.  My back feels like it has a kink in it that needs to be popped back into place.  My eyes are puffy from the hay chaff, lungs filled with the same stuff and I think if I coughed hard enough I’d spit out a bale of hay.  I have lost 10 pounds just working the past 2 weeks.  And you know what?  I’m the second youngest of us dinosaurs that call this farm ours.

It always looks good as each phase of the job is done.  First cutting, then raking, then baled and finally hauled and the fields cleared and ready for irrigating!

Each day we hope and pray nobody gets hurt or worse and I’m certain there have been some closer than we know calls on that one.  So far the worst accident we have had in about 40 years was when Tracker was stacking the wagon and stepped back and off the stack of hay breaking his hip.  That was a bad deal and took him months to heal.  I think he still walks with a slight limp to this day.

And yet the farm still looks good and we continue to do the same things year after year.  I’m not so sure our children want to consume there years with dealing with the farm their entire lives and we are trying to get it sold.  We know deep down in our soles that if we ever do sell it we will kick ourselves in the butts for selling so cheap.

But, as for now, we have a BIG meal planned for this afternoon and the ladies and others have been preparing it for days.  Roast Beef, Roast Pork, Mashed Potatoes with real drippin’s gravy, salads, deserts and lots of beer!  That is the payment for a years worth of work beginning in the late winter with the ditches, fences and assorted stuff that “just happens” during the winter months.  There is always something on the farm that needs attention and always someone willing to step up and take care of it, perhaps reluctantly, but still when something needs to be done we get it done.

During the haying season we are ALWAYS glad to see the last load of hay leave the field…that means the hay season is over and this year that happened this morning.

We tied it down the best we could and hope they made it back home with all the hay they left with and no accidents happened.  They had an hours drive down the freeway!

Thank you all for your help through out the year and I sure hope I see you at the “Farm Dinner” today!  A big thank you to the hay buyers who take advantage of a discount per bale by picking up their hay in the field!  It saves us from having to pick it up and then put it into the barn and then pick it up again in the winter to sell it out to someone who couldn’t take advantage of the discount.

Thanks again!

Bears Butt

July 18, 2015