Deer Burger and Jerky

The other day, as you who read the last post know, I made deer burger and jerky. Originally I had thought to keep the deer leg whole but I just don't have enough room in the freezer. My brother posted a Youtube video on facebook about adding bacon to your ground deer meat to make burger and I have plenty of bacon so decided to do it that way.
I got all the white skin off of it and it ground up really nice and easily. Every now and then I would throw in a hunk of bacon and keep grinding (the bacon had not been sliced yet and I used the fattier ends).
I ended up with 6 very generous pounds of deer burger. I also had a backstrap which I cut in half. The deer meat is all the darker meat on top of the freezer.

The rest I prepared as jerky. I have several jerky kits (Eastman Outdoors) that I bought last year after deer season when they went on sale, plus I had regular jerky mix that came with my jerky maker. One of the jerky kits was for 3 lbs, that was the BBQ one the other pound or so I did with the regular jerky kits from the jerky maker.

These are some of the BBQ jerky before it was dried.

I had to drag out the old brown dehydrator for the regular jerky. These were made before they came with fans so it takes a lot longer to dehydrate anything.

This isn't even all of it. The two darker pieces on top were the only two pieces of the regular jerky that were done when I took this picture. They are all done now though. I have some in a canister and the rest in a Ziplock in the refrigerator.

So this was a few days ago. I love being home! But you all know how fast the days go when you are home. I am trying to get things done that haven't been done for far too long. Went through the bedroom and collected a Salvation Army bag full of junk. Got the shades off the lights and scrubbed them clean, etc. etc. Today I got to town to do a little shopping though we didn't eat much since most of last week was ham eating week. I did however get a deal on a box of smoker chips. They had a box that had 4 different big bags of wood chips- cherry, apple, mesquite and hickory plus it had a DVD and a metal wood chip holder for $9. Can't wait to try the cherry and apple wood!
When I got home I finally got another batch of wine going. This will be more of the Welch's grape wine only this will be a 3 gallon batch.
So that is all that has been going on this week. I am still practicing the violin every day...some day... a few years from now...I'll be good at it :)