Life in Southeast Alaska

Rod Brought Home a Moose!

Rod went hunting this weekend for his cow moose and was successful!  He left Friday afternoon with Nick and Don from work and got back yesterday.  I was thinking they would call off the hunt because the weather was really bad Friday morning, but by noon the wind had let up and it stopped raining.  Saturday we had no rain and the sun was actually out for awhile.  It rained on Sunday, but not really hard until after they got back.  They stayed at Nick's cabin up north of here at Berner's Bay.  Sounds like they had a good time - Rod said it was the trip of a lifetime!

I got to see them lift the moose out of the boat with the forklift and they skinned and cut the meat into more manageable pieces.  Rod and I decided to butcher the meat ourselves, so here starts the fun part.  We have a video on how to butcher a deer - but, wow, a moose is SOOOO much BIGGERRRR.  But I guess the cuts are all the same.  Look at how big it is in this picture - Rod is on the left and he is 6 foot tall.

I have taken vacation from work this week, so I will be busy during the day working on getting the meat cut and packaged.  Rod took off early today and we brought home just the loin section - the backstrap and tenderloin.  We spent a couple hours cleaning up the cuts, deciding what is steak, roast, stew, burger.  The nice thing about cutting your own meat is that you decide how much of each cut you want.  Rod wants steaks, I want plenty of burger.  The piece we brought home weighed 48 pounds with bones - we ended up with about 20 pounds of trimmed meat.  Here is what we got to add to the freezer today:

I think we are well on our way to supermarket independence for our meat this year.  I bought some Coho salmon Friday from a local fisherman to fill up the freezer.  We already ran out of smoked salmon we did last month, so we will have to do another batch.  I cleaned out the freezer, organized and took inventory.  Isn't it such a good feeling to have a full freezer?

Dinner tonight was backstrap steaks, steelhead fingers with tartar sauce and garlic alfredo - YUM!!!

Untitled Comment

10:10 PM, Monday, September 25, 2006 .. Posted by Darcy

Wow! We're just hoping to get a deer this year! Although we've lived in Montana for 3 years already, we have yet to do any REAL hunting. My husband keeps talking about cutting up all the meat ourselves but we have no idea what you would make out of the different parts. Looks like you guys have some experience :). That moose is looking mighty big. Any pictures of it right after the hunt before it was skinned? I think they are such amazing looking animals.

Hi Darcy

7:40 AM, Tuesday, September 26, 2006 .. Posted by mdonohue

This is only the second time butchering the animal ourselves, so we are asking others lots of questions as we go along. He did take pictures right after it was killed, but they are on the "regular" camera - we have to wait to get those developed!
It's that time of year for hunting. You have big deer down there - Rod is from southeast Idaho. Good Luck!