Baa

.....But before the lamb tale, the moment you've all been waiting for. A picture of me in my chef's uniform. Hilarious.

Ah the lamb. Friday morning we arrived to 8 lamb carcasses all naked and ready to be taken apart for our butchery seminar. Wicked. We heard they would have heads and eyeballs and were disappointed to discover that only the chef would have the luxury of shaving down the skull to scoop out the brains...but no biggie.

So we all stood around and watched while the chef broke down the carcass, we took notes and then split into groups. You can see our whole class (21 of us) in this picture. Three people per lamb and one to the chef.

I would say the highlight of the day (besides wearing metal aprons to keep us from slicing our sides/hips open. Chef said it is the most common butchery injury as well as being fatal because "how do you put a tourniquet on that? You'll be dead in 15 minutes" he says. Which seemed long enough for EMTs to arrive to me, but I'm no doctor and back to the highlight of the day) was when we were going to split the back legs apart and Allison and I stood each with one leg in hand, pointing straight up, when the chef walked by and burst out laughing at the sight. It was pornographic to say the least and damn hilarious, though it turned into a horror movie pretty fast when I whacked down and split those legs apart with a cleaver the size of my thigh. (See photo to the right for accurate portrayal of said cleaver.)

I switched to my smaller standard cleaver to split the rack apart in the next photo. I finally learned the trick to hitting the same spot every time you

give a whack with your cleaver. Keep your arm in one place and just whack/click with your wrist.

It keeps you on target, but it hurts your forearm a bit until you can build up your Popeye muscles.

It's much easier to embrace the animal and understand what you're eating when you have a chance to see it go from whole to pieces like this. It's fascinating to learn the step by step process of taking an animal apart into its various cuts. Using the saw on bones was a new, but we got the hang of it.

Here's one last shot of me, deboning the leg like a pro. If there's one thing I can do like a champ, it's deboning all manner of critter. Champ. (PS - they made us wear those stupid gloves on our non-knife hands in case we slipped with the cleaver...)

I would also like to say the eight lambs is a LOT of meat. The archaic old vacuum packer wasn't up for the job of sealing in the wooly goodness of all those lambs...you should have seen the stack of parts waiting to be packed and frozen. It could have fed a small nation. Instead, it will feed students and staff as practicals with lamb occur. Ah the circle of life...