Meat Day 2

Bess and I had a fabulous time today at the Dane Outreach 2nd Annual Great Dane Education and Fun Day!! I have plenty to talk about and some pictures and video, but I'm getting pretty tired, so I'm going to save that for tomorrow. Now onto day 2 of the whole fun meat processing process!

First I'll give you some pictures of what the various different parts look like when they're mostly thawed (even after 17 hours of sitting out at room temperature, I still had a whole lot of frozen meat):

Chicken necks

Turkey tails
Chicken backs
Chicken feet
Chicken leg quarter
The first thing that I need to do before I start into the main meat is bag up the K-9 grind. That stuff thaws out the quickest and therefore needs to be attended to first.
After that I need to dig into the beef hearts and find some heart chunks that aren't still frozen. That chunk gets taken into the actual kitchen and cut into much smaller chunks.

Then I finish getting everything set up so that I can just dig in and bag some meat! As you will notice in the picture below, there are some gloves that I have out on the table. I have learned through much trial and error that frozen and semi-frozen meat has a tendency to cut up the hands after a while. And the thought of repeatedly dunking an open wound into raw meat and meat juices isn't all that pleasant. I have found that the kitchen gloves work EXCELLENTLY! I usually only wear one of the gloves on my right hand. I primarily handle the meat with that hand and I use the bare hand for better gripping ability when opening bags and doing other things. It also means less wiping down of all sorts of surfaces when I'm done when I have a "clean" hand and a dirty, gloved hand. Another tip: make sure your nails are trimmed short. You don't want stuff getting caught under there or getting a nail bent the wrong way while you're doing this!
From there I just fill up the red hand basket with the filled bags. Once the basket is full, I take the load over to the freezer and empty it. It makes for a lot less walking back and forth each time I fill a bag.
I was only able to spend about two hours bagging the meat before I was running into all the stuff that was too frozen to pry apart. Thankfully I did manage to make a small dent! And now the freezer will have an easier time staying cold tomorrow since there's actually stuff in it to help maintain the temperature. Here's what the freezer looks like afer a couple of hours of work.

And now I'm off to snuggle with my dogs and pass out!