I'm with Deb. I'd pass!

I like liver, but only the way my mom fixed it.

I have tried and tried but I just cannot eat it.

I like it but don't want to eat it too often.

I always thought that would be the best time to try these oddities (to me), but when faced with a bucket of guts I just couldn't get up the gumption for it. Who knows maybe I would have loved tongue, or heart, or kidneys, or whatever else was in that mess. Too late now, our beef butchering days are done.

I think they would have looked much more appetizing if someone had already cooked them for you.

I used to eat a German lunch meat made from some type of processed beef tongue. It was delicious.

I don't see anything wrong with heart. Have have turkey hearts so why not beef?

Beef tongue is good smoked and served cold on a sandwich with mustard. A cold beer is good to go along with it. LOL

I can't eat tongue hot, gotta be cold.

Anna, that sounds great to me.

My mom used to boil the tongue and slice it up for sandwiches. One of my brothers like it, but the rest of us were so-so about it. Liver I loved as a child, but have no enthusiasm for now. We have the butcher dispose of the organs. I got liver for my mother for awhile, but when I went down to put something in the freezer and discovered several years worth, I quit getting it.

Doing some natural dyeing for the workshop in September. Goldenrod yellow is amazing, as is elderberry. Next up, spinach leaf green.

My mom made beef liver when I was a child growing up. No bad. These days it is difficult to find the common beef liver, most of the stores carry just the chicken liver. Now while I fry up beef liver and serve it with potatoes I like to fry up the chicken liver and just eat on it as a snack. So I do like liver.

The dyeing sounds interesting: tell us more!

My neighbor had the mobile slaughter guys at his place before daylight this morning. I could see lights, people moving around, and something on the ground. Those guys who do on the farm, field butchering are very fast and efficient. They are booked weeks in advance in the fall. The place my neighbor deals with does not do any game animals anymore because they often arrived in such bad shape. Some of those city hunters didn't know they need to clean the animal, then didn't get it to him in a timely manner, and he finally decided he had enough domestic animals to keep his coolers full of clean meat.

I remember eating corned tongue when I was a kid. It was good. Grandma cooked it with cabbage, onions and carrots the same way she cooked corned beef. Occasionally I have seen beef tongue in the supermarket.

Being a city girl myself I find these stories and glimpses into farm life very interesting. And so great that you do have those butchering services available. We don't have them but we don't have any farm animals around here.

Your grandma sounds like she really knew how to cook!

Rita, New York State laws preclude, for the most part, on farm butchering. There are a few, but less and less all the time. If we do it ourselves and have the meat for home use, they don't say anything, but if you want an animal to sell, it has to be done in an approved slaughter house with both NYS and USDA inspectors. We did butcher some in the past, but there's a really good slaughter house not far from us. They kill the animal, hang it for 5-10 days, depending on your preference (less for us), cut it, wrap it and freeze it. We bring home boxes of lovely packaged, frozen meat. Generally, we butcher about every year and a half and share with our daughters and our mothers. Six or seven hundred pounds of beef goes a loooong ways.

The dyeing is going quite well, after a slow start. I'm doing silk scarves that we will pound leaves onto at the workshop. So far, I have a pale tan from the beet leaves and root in softened water, light butterscotch from red rose petals in softened water, and the colors I mentioned above. It sounds scary if you read some of the websites, but the article that Sharon wrote on a website not to be named is far easier and far superior to some of the gobbledy gook that others would put you through.

Kathleen, I didn't know about that NYS law but then it is not something that we need to worry about locally here. It has been a very long time since Nassau County on Long Island has had any farm land left. I guess I see why as the law wants to make sure that the meat is safe for eating. And really the idea of butchering and cutting up a cow seems to be a daunting job unless one has the facilities. I think butchering a goat or lamb might be more doable.

I am an animal lover but I am a meat eater and have no problem with the idea of animals for food. I know I could kill my own chickens if I had too. And small food animals. Not that I have the knowledge, but I have no problems with the idea of eating food that I raised. Unfortunately they don't even let us raise chickens here.

But if I had a farmnette I would have chickens, turkey, rabbit and probably goats and I would raise some for food.

I've often wondered about how farmers deal with deer that eat crops. Is it always open season on pests, or is making venison out of season considered poaching or otherwise illegal?

Does it vary by state or county?

I don't think I've ever lived anywhere that permitted discharging a firearm anywhere other than on a licensed range, but I have heard "booms in the night", and not just in bad parts of the Bronx.

Here, if there is a big deer problem, the state will set up a special season or give out unlimited doe permits to farmers. Up along Lake Erie where the grape farms are there have been several such. Take a deer out of season, it's poaching. Jack light to get a deer (hunting at night with a spotlight) even in season, it's poaching. Fines can go up $4000 with jail time to 3 years.

Wish they would permit hunting of deer by baiting and out of season for farmers and landowners,. The deer are out of control.

Years ago (decades ago) the deer population in Connecticut was exploding. Starvation, disease and automobile collisions were 'way up.

They had to argue at great length whether or not to lengthen the hunting season, I think because too many voters loved Bambi and didn't understand or approve of hunting. I never heard any good answer to "So, would you rather they starved to death every winter?"

In CT, I don't know if the hunting season had much effect on the deer population. In the woods, the average deer was LOTS smarter than the average city-boy hunter.

My assumption is that, in most of the state, the population just boomed until it crashed.

(CT farming regions may have had different regulations, I don't know.)