Warning: this post is not suited for vegetarians, vegans or people who think meat grows vacuum packed in the grocery stores.

I come from the deep woods in the Finnish coutryside, and living off the land is a way of life I grew up living for the first 19 years of my life. We grew veggies and dad hunted for moose meat, and even though we bought a lot of food from the store too, the main meat I knew was wild game. Moose meat is the best and probably also the healthiest meat out there.

For the past several years my dad hasn’t been hunting as actively or hasn’t been taking any meat when ever he has been involved, and I’ve begged him to get back to moose hunting so I can have premium meat. Your child is hungry! Finally my wish came through this season and dad bough in with a half a meat share, it’s not free you know. I was so pleased to hear that, until...

I think I got more than I bargained for, some 30 kilograms of moose meat as a surprise to be dealt with in the evening. Yay... Dad didn’t do it on purpose though, he didn’t know someone else had made an executive decition to put previous weekend’s prey into pieces late yesterday evening, so there was no warning.

My mom dodged a major bullet with this one because she is away for three days and I’m the only one here dealing with this carnage. She left the car for me last night, so I could head into the countryside to feed the boys for a few days, but I got way more food related work than I thought I would have.

So this afternoon as I got homehome, there was about 30 kilos of raw moose meat waiting for me. Not the prettiest sight like you can see, especially when you know how much work it is. The big pieces like stirloin and tenderloin are easypeacy, just clean up a little, cut smaller if needed and bag it up. It’s the scrap meat that is a bitch to deal with. I ended up making about 6 kilos of ground meat which took such a long time. I don’t have butcher training so I was sending pics for one of my hunter friends to ask about certain pieces of how I should label them.

Now it’s quarter past midnight and I just got everything cleaned, cut, ground, packaged, labeled, put away to freezers and cleaned up all the mess. Took me 7 hours in total, I’m so done!

Now I’m heating up my room because it’s only 16 degrees inside, so I’ll be up tending to the fire for a couple hours, with a glass of wine and some snacks.

Countryside living is hard, but also rewarding. I will have premium meat all winter long!