13 October 2009

Some Lessons You Just Have to Learn the Hard Way

As most of you know, my hubby and I are homeschooling our two little girlies. We also homeschooled our two grown children way back in the day.

In addition to scholastic knowledge, we have also striven to teach our children life skills like managing money, making wise purchases, how to care for a home and how to cook. Unfortunately, it appears that some of these lessons didn't "take", if you know what I mean. This is because adult children stubbornly insist on learning things the hard way.

Take Funsocksgirl, for instance. She managed to learn to do a bit of baking, but most of the rest of our cooking lessons seemed to...............well, here. See for yourself.

Here's a slightly edited portion of an email she just sent me:

My brother-in-law and wife gave us some of the venison from their freezer (he got two deer last year) so on a day i can't remember in the not-so-distant past i decided to make some of it up and we had dad over for dinner (mom is in colorado with her sister). i learned some new things about meat which grossed me out and shocked me greatly. for instance, thawed venison is bloody. oh my gosh, i almost threw up...it was gross, sitting there in its own bloody pool and i hadn't even unwrapped or touched it yet. with plastic baggies on my hands i freed it from the paper it was wrapped in, only gagging twice as i threw the dripping bloody paper in a bag. then i had to cut it up some, which i did carefully while looking in another direction. the cuts were sloppy, but i still have all my fingers. i would just like to say again how gross and unnecessary all that blood was. how dare it bleed so profusely! it had been dead and frozen for a long time, which in my mind meant that all of the blood should have magically disappeared.

then i used the broiler. first off i didn't know we had a broiler and i surely didn't know what it was. secondly it took me a while to figure out which pan we had was actually a 'broiler pan'. (that betty crocker cookbook is sooo handy at explaining things) so finally i slabbed some gross chunks of raw venison on the broiler pan and broiled away. this led to another shocking discovery: meat shrinks when you cook it. what?! i've somehow missed that completely during other cooking ventures and was quite disappointed. i mean, i thought i had enough meat in the first place, but now it was all shrunk down and looked like not nearly enough...but it was. we chowed on mr. deer with lemon/green onion/parsely/pepper butter like betty crocker told me to make and it was surprisingly (for me) quite tasty and not a disaster.


It was her first big meat adventure and I'm so proud of her for pulling it off with edible results. Sometimes the school of life really pays off! :-D

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very funny yet a little disgusting. I love it!

Lauri said...

What do they normally eat? Are they vegetarians? Very funny.

I don't understand people who can't cook. I just feel like if you eat you know what tastes good together so make it.

Dawn said...

That just cracks me up - and is something like Kristen would definitely do!

Karen said...

Oh. Bloody meat. gak! She is a very brave gal. There is no way I'd even try something like that.

Recently, Killer's son, Li'l Red, brought home a fish someone had given him from the river. I was trying to tell him how to clean it, but couldn't because, well, I was too busy gagging.

Hm, WV= leraptag. sounds sort of like a French critter.