Goat Stew

Last Friday morning, while Steven was out in the garden, we got a call from a neighbor that said the goats were out, on the road, and one of them had been hit by a passing truck.

Steven hurried out there to find his mamma doe (although all her kids are mostly grown now) had been recently killed by a vehicle, so he immediately brought her up to the house (after getting the rest of them back in), field dressed her, skinned her out, and began butchering up the meat for the freezer.

On the one hand, she was one we had strongly consider butchering anyway for a number of reasons (bad temperament, hoof problems, udder problems) but also she had been our best bearer of kids. This incident, however, made up our minds for us. We just didn't plan to butcher on one of the hottest days of the year. I'm proud of Steven for spending his entire day on this project, especially when he found all my kitchen knives as lacking in sharpness, and ended up butchering the entire carcass with his pocket knife.

Put some of the goat meat in the slow cooker on Sunday night, and we've been enjoying goat stew all week -- joined in the pot by our wonderful garden offerings of potatoes, onions, garlic, sage, tomatoes, squash and whatever else we can find to throw into the pot.

I still have much of the meat in the fridge to grind up into burgers. Plus we gave some of it to my other two kids when they were home visiting for the weekend, and they reported enjoying it much when they fixed it up at their place.

In other news, we have two new ducklings (I will post photos later) and our 11 chicks are doing quite well. We are badly in need of a rain, so keep us in your prayers for that. It has rained all around us this week, but it isn't falling on our area of the county. The garden is struggling to do its best regardless. We had our hottest day of the past 3 years, at 107, this past Monday, but now it has cooled down some, and we're hopefully the rain clouds will come by our place tonight.