Alotta Monkey Business

Jerk

Written for {{item:1985857}, prompt: National Craft Jerky Day; and it's actually written for today!

When I first read the prompt I thought, "I can write about this, after all, I was out shopping on Black Friday and encountered a lot of jerks. But this isn't that kind of jerk at all."

What struck me as odd was my wife's cousin and his wife came for a visit yesterday and being a country boy and growing up on a farm, he is big into preserving meats. They butcher beef in the fall and he bow hunts for whitetail deer as well, so he has access to really good meat and enjoys crafting his own sausage, meat sticks, and jerky. He brought us up a few gallon ziplock bags of his latest treats, some homemade jerky (two types), some meatsticks, and even some homemade pepperoni sticks.

Some are beef, some are venison, and all are super delicious. I had just finished doing a blog entry and was taking a bit of a break with my wife, who's learning to play the guitar and had grabbed a chunk of jerky to snack on. My presence seemed to make her a bit nervous, so I thought I'd log back in for a bit while I enjoyed my jerky. I opened my email and was looking at today's prompts and saw it was Craft Jerky Day, and here I was munching on a hunk of homemade craft jerky. How could I not write about it?

I've dabbled a bit in making jerky and sausage in the past but never quite mastered the art. I have an electric smoker that I have only used a few times, and my wife and I have been talking about getting a new meat grinder and sausage stuffer so we can make quality sausage at home instead of the store crap that has more salt than we like, as well as other preservatives we don't need.

I had pretty good luck in the past making sausage, adjusting recipes to our own taste and I even wrote them down, but the grinder we used developed a crack in the housing and was impossible to clean. So, sausage-making kind of slipped into past. But now, we have a local locker plant that processes locally grown beef and pork for a lot less than store prices and is so much better.

We currently have a quarter of beef, cuts from front and back, in the freezer. After all the costs were figured in, we paid about $3.25 a pound for everything. So why not purchase some pork and start making our own sausage again from farm-fresh meats?

It's time to purchase a new grinder and sausage stuffer, dig out the old recipes, and get some quality sausage again. I may even dig the smoker out of storage and try my hand at some craft jerky, too.

A proud member of "WdC SuperPower Reviewers Group" 

"Reading soothes the soul, writing sets it free." T.J.