Holy Cow!

Well, it is finally here.  Zippy decided he wanted to buy a cow.  At first, I thought he meant as a pet to put in the backyard and I thought it was a crazy idea. Then I thought he wanted to share a cow...you know, like get a whole cow and share the meat with 3 other families.  Well, it turned out that he wanted to buy a WHOLE cow and have it butchered and store all +/- 500 lbs of meat at our house.  Hmmm...where would we put this +/-500 lbs of meat?  It turns out, we needed to buy a BIG deep freezer.  Luckily, we decided to go with the one we got instead of the slightly smaller one because it barely fit in the freezer!  Luckily, it came all vacuum packed because I looked at borrowing a friends food saver to do it and she said it took her about 20 minutes to do steaks from Costco.  We would be looking at hours and hours of vacuum sealing if we had to do this as we have over 60 steaks...and that is not including the roasts, stew meat, hamburger, corned beef, and who knows what else.  In the long run, it will actually save us money as we spend about what we would spend on hamburger on all sorts of different cuts and steaks.  But the up front cost is ridiculous!!  I am just hoping our power doesn't go out at our house for any length of time or we will be inviting everyone we know over for a BIG BBQ!!

So far this is what the cow has cost us:
Cow:  $1,050
Butcher:  $350
Deep Freezer:  $400
So far the total:  $1800  (so based on est. 500 lbs, we have paid $3.60/lb)

Don't forget though that Zippy needed to drive to  Placerville to pick up the cow and transport it in 6 coolers back to our house.  I think it took 45 minutes for him to unload it all, too, with Reint's help.  I am going to stop complaining now though because we had the first steaks for dinner Saturday night and they were seriously some of the best ever.  Of course, Zippy thought we all needed a whole steak ourselves...his was 1.6 pounds.  Needless to say, he was full for the next 3 days....

Zippy has named the cow, Durham, and the owner of the ranch was nice enough to send us a picture of Durham before he came to live with us.  He is a polled hereford cow...and he is delicious!  You should come meet him....