Niagara Falls

November 17, 2021

Buffalo, New York

Niagara Falls State Park

176 feet tall and 681,750 gallons per second - enough water to fill and Olympic swimming pool every second! Niagara Falls is a group of three waterfalls at the southern end of Niagara Gorge, spanning the border between the province of Ontario in Canada and the state of New York. The largest of the three is Horseshoe Falls, which straddles the international border of the two countries. Formed by the Niagara River, which drains Lake Erie into Lake Ontario, the combined falls have the highest flow rate of any waterfall in North America.  Niagara Falls was formed when glaciers receded at the end of the the last ice age, and water from the newly formed Great Lakes carved a path over and through the Niagara Escarpment en route to the Atlantic Ocean.

Deer Processing 101

 November 11, 2021

Birmingham, Alabama

After watching every episode of the Netflix series "Meat Eater," I decided to begin processing my own deer meat. I bought a meat grinder from the local Bass Pro shop, high grade beef fat from the local butcher and started watching YouTube videos from prominent game processors. For my first deer, I soaked the backstrap in ice water for two days and then used the butterfly cutting technique to make nice fillet style steaks. I carefully worked my way through the front shoulders and rear hams and ground the venison into a 50/50 burger. I've made a chili and am Italian meat sauce with the burger and it couldn't taste any better! The meat had very little "game" flavor and, I think, this is mostly due to the ice bath and care used to remove all unwanted connective tissue fatty meat.