Advice on slaughterday? (Good recipes for offal, etc)

[gaja]

I'm buying some sheep and lamb meat from a local farmer who slaughters at home, and DD and I will get to take part. I have slaughtered a few times before when I was younger, but am looking forward to updating the skills. Using as much as possible from the animal is both a frugal and ethical choice for me. So this is a call out for good recipes, ideas, and tips for how to make good dishes from more of the animal.

We have prepared some buckets and bottles to bring home some of the offal today, and will go back on monday to cut the meat. So far the plan is:
-Blood for waffles/pancakes
-Liver for paté, and maybe lightly fried for supper tonight
-Heart for some sort of stew with cream sauce
-Kidneys - not sure how to cook these? Maybe try a steak and kidney pie? My grandmother used to cook them until they felt like rubber, in a sort of sweet'n'sour brown sauce. I would like to avoid that, if possible.

I'm not fond of lungs, although DD2 did like haggis when she tried it this summer. Still, I think we are skipping those. The same goes for the head - I have never tried skinning and cleaning heads before. But maybe we should take some of the intestinal fat for general cooking? Some of the traditional dishes I grew up with call for fermented intestinal fat, but I think it is too warm to make that safely where we live now.

For the meat, I prefer larger cuts with bones, like leg with shank and sirloin, saddle, shoulder, etc. Rolled lamb flanks are a favorite christmas dish.

[Imma]

I don't really have a lot of advice, but I just wanted to say that I think this is a really good thing to do and also a good lesson for your DD. I have never butchered large animals (we had cows, but we sent them away to be butchered) but we used to butcher our own chickens all the time. I haven't done it in years now.

What I do know about kidneys and liver is that if you don't like the taste of them, you can chop them up and mix them with ground meat. No one in my family was fond of offal, so this is how it was hidden. That's just a last resort option to make sure nothing goes to waste.

[ketchup]

If you have dogs or know someone with dogs, they will go crazy over any organs or bones you don't want.  Ours do  love lamb lung in particular, and I happily pay $2/lb for it.  They'd probably like head, we've given them pig head before.

[gaja]

The blood waffles turned out very nice, especially when covered in brown sugar:
1 liter blood
1/2 liter half/half cream and milk
6 dl rye flour
2-3 table spoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1/2 teaspoon cardemum
a pinch of cinnamon

I'm not so sure about the liver paté - we kind of messed up the meat grinding machine, so I think we ended up with a bit too much onion and cream, and too little liver. It is in the oven now, so we'll know for sure in 30 minutes.

The heart and kidneys are soaking in water now, and I also put the tongue in some salt water. Never tried cooking tongue before, that should be fun.

No dog in the house, but the cat got the cutoffs from the liver, and was very happy for that. We are going back tomorrow to help out with the old ewe, maybe we should take some of the lungs then.