I thought the hard part was finding a deer to shoot. It is certainly time intensive, but the hard work is after the deer has been shot. First step is to cut out the guts, thanks to my friend Sam I was able to do this without any of the insides getting cut. I was surprised at how not gross the insides of the deer were. The anatomy of the deer is incredible, everything is packed in there just so. It allowed me to imagine what my own insides might look like. Lastly, I had to drag it out of the woods. It wasn't a particularly big deer, but hauling out a 100 lbs. of dead weight is tiring. Thankfully it wasn't too far to the road.
After returning from travelling during the Thanksgiving weekend, Kaitlyn and I spent a couple of hours Sunday evening making sausage from the ground meat. We used two recipes that we got from my brother-in-law, Andy. One is a spicy recipe, ours didn't turn out quite as spicy as Andy's. We used a little less crushed red pepper. Our sweet sausage is really good. We used maple sugar that comes from our friend Mitch and Penny in Bowdoinham. I was surprised that Kaitlyn enjoyed making sausage as much as she did, we had a lot of fun. We packaged it into little one pound packages. We had 20 pounds of sausage meat and about 25 pounds of steaks and stew meat. It is really comforting to have this food stored for winter. Every time I think about the deer or eat some of the meat I am grateful for the life of that deer and I appreciate the sacrifice it has given so that I may be nourished.
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