I had the incredible honor of spending the weekend with friends and family in Vermont on my mother’s farm, slaughtering, dressing and cooking lambs that one of my oldest friends is raising.  The breed is a heritage breed, originally brought over from north Africa, then crossed with other breeds as a meat lamb.  We slaughtered four 9 month old lambs early on Saturday morning, strung them up from my mom’s tractor to hang and then butchered and prepared one of the lambs for a huge autumn feast, the other three were loaded into the car and brought back to New York.  We’ll be serving them this week at both Boquerias.  It’s been a long time since I was that close to the whole process of meat as food, from live animal to delicious dish.

I’m very familiar with butchering an animal that’s been skinned and dressed, but actually killing, bleeding, skinning, gutting AND THEN butchering it was a pretty powerful experience.  The flesh was warm, hot even, and behaved so differently under the knife than cold flesh that has already gone into rigor mortis.  And the innards!  The incredible system that nature puts in place! The caulfat (glorious, beautiful, lacey- we later used to wrap the tenderloins and the legs), the kidneys, the intestine, the heart (still slowly beating in my hand.)  So remarkably different from vac-packed bags of frozen lamb parts, chopped up in a country thousands of miles away and fed-exed around the world.  Pretty amazing to eat the animal just a few feet away from where it was killed.