Fat

Just a small amount of the fat that will be divided up among the families to take home and render for cooking, snacking etc.

Meat!

This will be chopped up, used for lunch, mixed up and turned into sausages and head cheese.

More finished product — Tlacenka

Also known as “head cheese”, but actally contains meat from better parts of the animal. Awesome stuff, but my arms and fingers are burned to s&@t from having boiling broth and meat chunks dropped on me while holding these casings during the filling process.

Just some of the final product

The waste

Hard to find.

The chickens are enjoying some of the scraps

It’s quite odd in some respect. I’ve read about and seen film of the factory farming of pig and cattle. I believe myself to be somewhat informed of some of the obscene eating habits of those – I would consider – poor animals, but I’ve never seen, up close and personal, the actual deliberate consumption by a chicken of another animal species. These chickens are eating pigs innards. We’ve also fed them rabbit and sheep innards. They just dive into it, with as much zest as they would the straw, the rotten apples and pears or the turkey shit laying around the yard. Interesting.

The first batch goes out

Now they get cooked. See the nice little wood toothpicks on the ends?

Sausage Ingredients

Yes, that is the blood we drained and kept mixing (to prevent coagulation, and some mixed with some breadcrumbs I think and others might have some sort of grain mixed in there) back at the beginning, along with chopped meat from a variety of body parts mixed with nothing other than a few herbs & spices.

Stitching Up the Casings

Remember those wooden sticks I was shaving to a point in the morning? Now they’re being used to close one end of intestine before we fill them, then to close the other end.

This is what is called “ladies” work.

Lunch is almost ready

Brains mixed with scrambled egg as an open-face sandwich. Yum, Yum. One might even think one were eating egg and mushroom, no?