Thursday, August 9, 2007

up to my armpits in beef

hubby came running upstairs this afternoon, interrupting his concrete staining project in the basement to shout, "the power was out and we lost everything in the deep freeze".
we are in the middle of remodeling our basement, transforming it into a two-bedroom apartment and more importantly, the new home of our offices which have made their home in my home since we were married!! it has been a slow project, nestled in between other jobs, chipping away during the evenings and weekends. in previous remodeling projects (we have moved 3 times in our four years of marriage) i have been able to work alongside my hubby. but this time i feel so out of the loop, unable to help with my full-time zoom job. the past couple months have been mostly skilled labor (electrical, plumbing, finish carpentry..), so our carpenters step in for a day or more when they can. now it is crunch time. hubby's business partner moves her offices into the new space this saturday. last week we sheet-rocked, mudded and taped. this week we finished the trim, and tonight hubby is staining the concrete (a super cool bronze-patina acid wash). then we paint and whew!! so some time in all that the deep freezer must have been unplugged.
we aren't sure when, or how many days it has spent defrosting, but i nearly cried imagining a box full of blood and meat. we get a quarter of a cow every year (thankfully it is in dec so we are more than half-way thru our meat) and i was picturing the rest of the year's supply of beef in the garbage, along with our friend's who we are storing until they finish their home remodel. at least it was something i could deal with instead of adding one more thing to his list.
armed with an armful of rags, a garbage bag and anticipating the worst i headed downstairs. amazingly the interior temp was pretty cool and some of the meat was actually still semi-frozen. not knowing how long the thawed meat had been sitting there i decided we should probably just cook it up and have beef for the next few days.
coincidentally, i have been craving meatloaf so that's what we did tonight (fantastic recipe from one of my favorite cookbooks, American Classics (from the publishers of Cook's Illustrated) .
now i am browning up the remaining 5 pounds of ground beef, freezing them for tacos, chili, and good old midwestern hot dishes. tomorrow i'll cook up the 3 roasts and a couple misc cuts (the labeling is illegible) and freeze them for soups, stews and maybe make some bbq meat.
in the end we didn't loose anything, but certainly didn't intend to spend all day today surrounded by meat.
what would you do with all this meat?

1 comment:

a. borealis said...

Oh my goodness!! I wouldn't know what to do with it! It seriously sounds like you have everything under control, though, thankfully. WOW.

I'm so glad you didn't have to throw it out, what a shame that would have been.