The Meat Tragedy

Recently, a teacher friend, Josh, got his first moose and gave us a slab of ribs and back to cut up. Leah and I spent about 4 hours one afternoon cutting and packaging moose meat. Stocked with moose roast for the winter, we felt we were pretty set, and were just waiting on our SPAN food order to come in.

Howie and Josh work on dividing the moose.

It's Yup'ik tradition that when a boy gets his first moose, he doesn't eat any of it, but instead distributes it to the community as a way of thanking the animal for giving its life so that we poor hairless and defenseless little humans may survive in the winter conditions. It also shows that he knows the honorable way to handle a hunt, and is growing into a man who can help provide for his people. Josh gave the grand majority of Mortimer here to the community as well.

To the left: The moose ribs before the packaging session. Our refrigerator-freezer does not have the space for such a cut, so I brushed up on my dissecting skills to make it more manageable.











We cleaned them to the best of our ability. I don't have a shot of the amount of meat we took off of there, but it was a good 25 pounds or so. To give you an idea of the size of these things, if I laid my elbow next to the spine there, the ribs would be longer than my whole forearm, hand included.









Imagine my dismay when, during lunch one day, I went into our back room and noticed a funny smell. I opened the freezer door, noticing with a nagging feeling that the door was pretty easy to open. Normally, I about have to throw my shoulder out in order to open the thing. As the door opened, a wave of freshly thawed fish and blood odor smacked me in the face. I looked down and apparently the packaging job we did on the moose meat wasn't so stellar, because there was a nice little pool of moose blood laying in the bottom of the freezer. A king salmon, gutted and gifted to us by our principal, was nicely thawed and luckily laying on top, away from the blood pool.

The saddest part? The $20 gallon of ice cream was completely melted. Leah and I took it as a sign that maybe we should limit the sweets. Bummer. That's one of our only vices here!

My lunch period quickly dwindling, I had no idea what to do. I checked the temperature setting, which was fine, and felt for blowing air. Hmm. I felt cold air blowing, but not cold enough air. I checked in with Josh's wife Shelly, who stays at home with her three boys, and she looked into it for me while I was at school. Three hours later, she told me that cold air was blowing but everything was still completely melted, even with the temperature cranked as low as it could go.

Well, luckily our SPAN food order hadn't come in yet. Otherwise, that would be close to $700 melted down the drain. Or, more correctly, it did come in that day but due to our situation, it's living in the school's freezer for now.

Thanks to my parents and grandparents, I know not to waste anything, so I started about 3 moose roasts and cooked the fish Monday night. We held a huge teacher dinner to attempt to use up all that food. Some of the meat was still frozen, and some had been prepackaged, so since some of it was still cool, I waited until this weekend to cook it all up into soups, other roasts, and casseroles. The upside to the (near) meat tragedy is that I now have all sorts of meals precooked and frozen to last at least until Thanksgiving. Woo-hoo!

As for the freezer, it's working for now, but I'm hesitant to put our whole food order in there until the maintenance guy has time to look at it. Interestingly, the water main break occurred just days after the year warranty walk-through of our buildings, and the freezer fiasco took place just about a week later. Something fishy is certainly going on. Hopefully no more issues arise as we approach winter.

Speaking of winter, no snow yet! I'll let ya know when the snow finally sticks.

Happy Sunday!