Where's the beef?

I'll tell you where the beef is. Right here. And I don't think I'll be eating any for a while anyway.

Let's just say that our Sunday was not a day of rest. Our affair with the beef in our freezer began on Saturday afternoon, right before we were leaving for the Thu's house to, of all things, barbecue some burgers. At about 2:15 p.m., Luke comes up the stairs and says, "I have some bad news. Really bad news." I'm thinking, this can't be good.

"The deep freeze went out. Everything's thawed out. Everything. I'm not sure we can save anything." The breaker blew.

Oh man. NOT good news considering my parents (thanks mom and dad, by the way) had recently given us one-fourth (not quite, because we didn't take it all with us, thank goodness) of a cow. Basically, pounds and pounds of different cuts of beef - steaks, roasts, ground beef, cutlets, ribs, etc. I run down the stairs and open the freezer, and yes, everything was thawed. I have no idea when I looked in the freezer last. Might have been five days ago, but who's counting now? We immediately call my mom, and Rachel informs me that between 40 and 140 degrees, meat starts to grow bacteria. So, if anything is above 40 or 45 degrees, we had to throw it out. Yuk.

I run to Wal-Mart to get a better meat thermometer, and I start stabbing, for lack of a better term, each piece of meat to see what it's internal temperature was. A lot of the stuff on top was a goner. But, we did save about 3/4 of the ground beef, a lot of roasts, some ribs, cutlets, and a couple of steaks. It wasn't a total loss.

The worst parts of all of this: Cleaning the freezer out and COOKING ALL OF THE BEEF.

You would think that we had a dead, decaying body in the freezer if you would have seen all of the "blood" from the meat in the bottom. We we're ELBOW DEEP in it. We dumped it out and cleaned it all vigorously on Saturday night after we got home. Whew, that part was done.

Yesterday, Luke and I spent ALL DAY and most of the night cooking every last bit of the meat so we could refreeze it cooked and use it later. We're not talking about a few pounds of meat and a couple of steaks, ladies and gentlemen. We're talking THIRTY POUNDS of ground beef, FOUR roasts ... I could go on. I made a vat of spaghetti sauce, we browned a ton of beef with onions and garlic, Luke made a million of some pretty awesome meatballs (thanks Eli), Luke grilled the ribs, and I cooked all of the roasts in the oven. At 11 p.m. last night, all of the greasy cleaning was done. We cooked for eight hours straight with a slight pause to eat what else, spaghetti. Our house smelled (and still sorta smells) like a Burger King. After all of that, I'm not sure when we will eat beef again. But when we want to by goodness, it'll be ready!