A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place

This all began with a search for smoked pork hocks.  Jill expressed a hankering for navy bean soup and I suggested that I would readily whip-up a batch as I was certain I had smoked pork hocks in the larger chest freezer in the basement.  A search for the hocks was frustrating.  They might be there – or they might have been there.  There was no way to know and no amount of digging produced them.  It was clear that with the passage of time the chest freezer had devolved into a disorganized amalgamation of frozen goodness and oddities representing various vintages that had become a modern day collection of ice-age surprises. 

I don’t want you to get the impression that I am a hoarder.  This chest freezer business is to my mind’s eye a mostly out-of-sight-out-of-mind set of circumstances.  I am blameless except the extent-to-which I may have killed and/or butchered some of the frozen stuff therein.  It was clear that this could not stand and I had to bring order out of chaos. Moreover I had to implement a plan to consume this food before it was left to the settlement of my estate. 

Unplugging the freezer I off-loaded its contents.  Venison into one cooler, poultry in another, sausage into still another and odds and ends into a fourth.  Initial plans figured-upon allowing the freezer to thaw overnight and be cleaned the following morning.  Progress was faster and using a Teflon ice scraper the accumulated frost was easily removed and the appliance wiped-down and powered-up within a matter of a few hours.  

 

Repacking it was an orderly and systematized process organized around four boxes.  Bottom box:  a couple of ginormous Piggly Wiggly pork butts (purchased on sale) along with four packages of pork fat from the local butcher.  Someone clearly had sausage-making on his mind and lost track of his ambition.  Added to this box were eight individually shrink-wrapped pheasant breasts.  The box on the bottom is destined for sausage and smoking in retirement. 

The second box is sausage.  Mostly venison brats and a bunch of bow-killed black bear summer sausage found at the very bottom of the freezer.  Included are last year’s venison hot sticks and some homemade sausages bartered from my pal RottieGuy in Wauwatosa. 

Third box (on top) is ground venison along with steaks and chops.  The oldest pack is dated fall of 2015 with the balance from 2017 and last year’s hunt.  Rounding it out were some smaller shrink-wrapped black bear roasts, a package of elk burger, one homemade pheasant pot pie and camp meat – namely venison roasts and whole trimmed back straps destined for Schützenfest and deer camp this year.  And one wild turkey. 

The prize goes to this -

A package of BBQ pork from almost ten years ago.  It’s vacuum-packed and not freezer burned.  Heated-up with some additional sauce it will likely be first-rate on a toasted bun.

And if you are wondering about that navy bean soup - no smoked pork hocks were to be found.  Yet, retrieved from the very bottom of the freezer was a container of homemade navy bean soup.  It was dated February 2016.  It was delicious.