Pressing Cider

It's halfway through November already, and getting cold and dreary and decidedly fall/winterish around here.

We had a few hard frosts and it even hailed one day. No snow yet, but it sure is getting cold!

On Saturday, my Great Uncle Gaylord invited us up (he lives next door) to have a cider pressing party and boy was it fun! And COLD! I never knew apple cider could be so cold and delicious!

None of us had really pressed cider before (besides Uncle Gaylord and my Dad) so we all got to learn how.

First, you get some apples.

These are from Gaylord's apple trees. They're "organic" in that they don't have pesticides used on them. :)

From left to right: Ellie, Dad, Ethan, Uncle Gaylord and my youngest brother Scotty

Dad helping Ethan turn the crank on the press

Uncle Gaylord cracking jokes. :)

You put apples into the hopper of the cider press and turn the wheel and it shreds up the apples into a kind of pulpy mess. That falls down into a pressing crate thingy (see how much I know about cider pressing?) and when it's full you slide it over to the press. You put a lid on the pressing crate and then turn the crank to exert pressure onto the crate, which squeezes the cider out into a canning pot.

Tim taking a turn at pressing the cider

Scotty bein' himself. ;)

Then, when the pot is full, you move it over to the straining table and pour it through a strainer. (Or a clean pillowcase, which is what we used.) Squeeze the juice out of the pillowcase and then ladle it into jugs ( a funnel is very helpful at this point!) and Bam! you have apple cider. 

We just leave it raw, we don't pasteurize it or anything, although you have to freeze it if you want it to stay good because it will turn and start fermenting in about 5 days if you don't freeze or can the extra.

What did we do with the leftover smashed apples? Feed it to the cows, of course!
Once the cider was pressed out of the apple bits, we took the pressing crate over and pounded the top out of it, letting the apples fall into a wheelbarrow.

My brother, Brian, pounding out the lid and the apple bits into the wheelbarrow

 Then we dumped the apple bits in the cow field and let the girls have a nice little treat. The kids loved having the cows so close! The cows weren't as excited as the kids. ;)

The cider is SO good! We drank it right as it was dripping out of the pressing crate, into our cups and it was cold and sweet and delicious. 

The weather was frigid too- somewhere in the upper 30's so we had to keep running inside and warming our hands at the woodstove so our fingers wouldn't get so cold they didn't work.  Mine actually got so cold they couldn't bend at one point, so I had to take a break. Squeezing that cider through the pillowcase was a chilly job!

We ended up getting around 12 gallons of  cider, which is more than we expected. We've been enjoying it immensely- warm, cold, putting it in muffins and bread and using it in gravy.  We're saving some for Thanksgiving too, to drink in fancy cups with dinner. :)

I'll be back tomorrow and Saturday with some recipes - it's been a while since I posted any so I'm giving you two- Squash Enchiladas and then Apple Cider Pumpkin Spice muffins!
Have a fabulous Thursday.

A Trip to the Mountains

A few days ago my parents had to go over the mountains to pick some elk meat that my dad had dropped by the processor after getting his elk last month, and the kids and I got to go along. We'd been cooped up in the house for a few days and were starting to go a little stir crazy, so this was the perfect opportunity to get out of the house and have a good time.

On the ferry deck

                                                                                 

                 

The view from the ferry towards Everett

Ellie looking carefully down at the water

The tallest mountains had a dusting of snow on them. :)

We had so much fun!
We picked up the elk meat at Owen's Brother's, then went and visited Teanaway, which is a valley just over the ridge from Cle Elum. It's gorgeous, and I grew up camping there with my family nearly every year.

There are a bunch of ranches with cute farmhouses and pretty barns, gorgeous views of the mountains and  more often than not you will find wild turkeys, deer or elk grazing in the meadows along with horses or cows.


At the campground we got out and explored and it was so much fun to see the kids have fun running around playing where I spent so many fall days riding bikes, climbing trees and swimming in the river.

The fall leaves were just gorgeous!! 

Teanaway River

More pretty yellow leaves

The kids found a bouncy log and had fun playing on it 

We walked across this log to get to the other side of the river.
 The kids thought that was SO cool!
I thought it was a little scary, but still cool. 

This is "The Shoe Tree". For whatever reason, people have been putting shoes on this tree for probably 20 years.
 It's just a big tree at one of the campsites that's become a novelty. :) 

We headed for home as the sun sank behind the hills, looking forward to next spring when it's warm enough to go camping again and to experience the beauty and adventure Teanaway has to offer. :)

Skinning A Deer

Warning: This post contains graphic, kind of gruesome images. 
If you don't want to see raw meat or blood or a deer carcass...don't read this.



For as long as I can remember, my Dad has been a hunter. He hunts elk and deer every year and is truly respectful of God's creation and a lover of the outdoors. When I was a kid, we'd all go camping in the mountains for two weeks and my Mom and us kids and my cousins and Aunt would stay in camp during the day while my Dad and Uncle would go across the river and over the ridge up into the wilderness; hunting for the canny, elusive elk. It was awesome.
I remember waking up early in the morning while it was still dark and peeking out of the tent and seeing Dad huddled near the campfire, the smell of woodsmoke and coffee in the air while sparks flew up into the blackness of the sky and the sound of caps from the muzzleloader rifles snapped in the stillness.
I wrapped up in a blanket and sat in a chair near the fire, my breath making a cloud in the frigid frosty morning. I sipped a cup of cocoa to warm up and listened to hunting stories, anticipating the afternoon when Dad would come back to camp with an elk in the back of his truck. Sometimes he did, sometimes he came home empty handed but the experience far outweighed the fact of whether or not he got any meat.

It's so cool to hand down these memories to my kids, and to see them experience the same things I did that I consider to be almost lost in our current culture of fast food, factory farming and immediate gratification.

My Dad already got an elk this year, up in the mountains about 4 hours from here and its at the processor right now.
He was at work a few days ago out in the woods here on the island and saw some deer up on a hill, and took the opportunity to shoot a nice little doe. During hunting season, what better job could you have than logging in the woods and getting to bring your gun to work so that when you see a deer all you have to do is shoot it? Pretty cool.

Anyway, he shot it and gutted the doe in the woods and brought her home for us.
I've grown up helping skin deer, and it was awesome for Tim and the kids to be able to experience and learn how to skin a deer since Tim wants to hunt next year.

These aren't exactly instructions on how to skin a deer, because I didn't do the whole thing by myself and am afraid I'd forget something vital to tell you. So this is what I remember about how we skinned this little doe. If you need instructions on how to skin a deer, you can check out Sofya's great post at The Girl's Guide to Guns and Butter- she has way more experience than I do, and there's instructions on how to butcher a deer on there as well. Our deer is still hanging outside, aging and drying out for a few more days before we butcher it.

When she first saw the deer, Ellie said, "Let's eat it for dinner tonight!"  :)

The first thing you do when you go to skin a deer is to take the legs off. Make sure you're using a very sharp knife. You start at the knee, and find the cartilage around it and cut, being careful not to cut the bone or the hair of the deer. This dulls the knife really fast. Also be careful not to cut your fingers.

Once you've cut around the outside, bend the knee and cut the rest of the cartilage. Then snap the knee off.

Tim's first time skinning a deer. He did awesome!

The kids had fun playing with the deer legs. :)

Next, cut slits through the hide along the front legs of the deer to the chest,
 so that when you get to that point the skin comes off easier.
Hang the deer by its neck and start skinning from the neck down.
Pull the hide gently away, and cut at the thin white fat between the skin and the meat and the hide just peels away easily. Be careful not to cut too close to the hide, or you'll cut a hole in it, or too much into the meat. Just go slowly and take your time. There's no hurry.

Once you get to this point, you can usually pull the hide down and it will just peel off by itself. Grab the edges of the hide and just pull gently, trimming with the knife if needed. Pull it down to the tail, and cut off the tail.

Then, continue pulling the hide down, using your knife if needed to help it along, until the hide comes off the legs. If you want to save the hide to tan it you can, or you can just bury it deep in a hole with the head and legs so the coyotes don't get it.

Now to the kind of gruesome part.
If you shot the deer with a gun and not a bow, you'll more than likely have some bloodshot meat. This is where the bullet went in and came out. You need to cut out all of that icky, bloody meat so the blood doesn't seep down into the meat and ruin it.

Once it's all cut out, cut down the breastbone with either a hacksaw or a knife, depending on how big your deer is and how sharp your hunting knives are. Since this was a young doe, Dad just used his knife.

Then you can go ahead and turn the deer upside down to finish drying out- thread a rope between it's tendons on the back legs and tie them up.

 Then untie the head and let it hang down towards the ground.  This is what the rope looks like threaded through the tendons.

Lastly, cut off the head. Start with a knife and go around the neck until you get to the spine, then use a hacksaw to get through the bone.

The kids thought the head was really cool, especially since they got to touch the deer's eye and pet its fur.

And that, my friends, is how you skin a deer.

We hung the deer inside one of our shipping containers we use for storing tools (kinda like a garage) and we'll leave it there for a week to age, if it stays cold enough.
We'll be butchering the meat ourselves here in a few days, and I'll try to do a post on that too.
I hope I didn't gross anyone out too much! It's really a fun process, and you appreciate the food more when you know where it comes from and how much work it takes to get it to the edible point. I'm thankful I grew up doing this, and thankful that my kids will grow up knowing how to skin a deer and make it into food for their future families too. :)