Did Someone Ask Where the Beef Is?

I got your beef, lady, right there in the back of the truck.

Behold, the neatly packaged edible portions of half a cow. That's a shitload of meat, y'all. The MiL's brother raises all-natural, pasture-fed, happy (until, you know, that whole slaughtering thing), healthy beef cattle nearby, the kind that you would pay a premium to buy at the farmers market and couldn't even find at the supermarket. Every two years or so we split one of these cows with another family, thereby ensuring our red meat supply for, oh, EVER.

Unless you're a butcher, I highly doubt you have ever seen so many steaks in one place. Really, probably two boxes of that is all different kinds of steaks. Then there's a prime rib and all the other nice cuts you'd normally have to sell an organ to afford. Plus a fair amount of ground beef and cheaper cuts. We'll get some funky cuts you probably won't see at your local Safeway (Boston roast? Anyone?). And then there's the organ meats (liver, heart, kidneys) that I will personally not cook but the MiL is brave enough to deal with, the oxtails, the soup bones, the suet for the birds in the winter. As I said, that's a shitload of meat.

We have a very large chest freezer in our workshop, but since it is currently half full of the entire pig we bought for slaughter last fall (yes, yes, we are very carnivorous, moving on), we didn't have room enough for all these boxes o' beef. We had to borrow some freezer space from the MiL's sister.

I would invite you all over for a barbecue, except I don't actually KNOW all of you, and many of you live in other states, and, well, mostly because A. doesn't want to share any of his steaks. You'll have to take this up with him.