Last year I shared a little bit about the deer harvesting process and my thoughts on it. This year, the kids are actually old enough to notice and comment on the deer hanging in the garage. We’ve just explained that daddy hunts for deer so we have food to eat, simple as that. I’m not sure if they’ll want to hunt when they’re older but we’d at least like to teach them respect for the animal in life as well as in death.

The one night Ben asked if he could go outside and help Andy in the garage. He’s the “soft” one, always loving on the kitties and saying how cute and fuzzy other animals are. So I was really surprised when he asked but we figured, hey why not?

Ben being silly when I asked what he thought. Honestly I don’t really think he cared too much about the deer and just liked hanging out with his dad. He told me he liked sitting on the lawn mower and that’s about all I got out of him.

Admittedly, deer legs on my kitchen table are not my favorite part of the process. Andy does do a really nice job of cleaning up the meat, getting rid of fat and trimming off the silver skin (thin layer covering all the muscles). If you were to take your deer someplace else to get processed they definitely don’t do as thorough work. Deer processing places also just lump your meat together with everything else they received that day when making ground venison too, so you’re not even getting back “your” deer.

Some of the meat will get cut up into steaks and chunks for grilling. The rest gets ground up for sausages, burgers, and plain old ground venison that we’ll used for everything from tacos to hamburger helper. In all honesty we do prefer the taste of beef over venison, but the venison is SO healthy for you and it’s “free” if you process it yourself (minus the cost of the hunting license). The deer lived a good life outside, not eating junk and not getting injected with anything. Venison is also incredibly lean and high in iron. Actually it’s so lean that you need to add a little oil to the pan when working with it since there’s so little fat.

The backstraps are the best cut! We marinate them for up to 24 hours and then Andy grills them up, sooooo good!