I got this recipe from Van Rensburgs Foods.
Fry two large onions in a knob of butter until brown. Remove from pot.
Brown springbok skenkels (shin) in batches. Add onions back in. Add boiling water to cover meat halfway.
Simmer for an hour, add 10ml salt, 60ml Worcestershire sauce, 10 peppercorns, 10 cloves.
Simmer for half an hour, add four cubed potatoes, four carrots sliced into 1cm chunks, 75gr currants, 75gr sultanas.
Simmer for half an hour, add a few shakes chutney.
When the carrots and potatoes are done, serve (with rice works well).
Gore alert: Don’t click on “more” if you’re a sensitive viewer who believes that meat grows in polystyrene containers in the shops.
Went hunting in Richmond last weekend, with my Marlin 30-30 levergun. It’s not the most accurate rifle, I can get 2″ groups at 100m on a good day at the range, field conditions are always worse, so I wanted to keep the shots close.
Bokkie #1 came walking halfway between the boundary wire and where I was sitting — I was tracking it with the binoculars until it disappeared behind a bush, when it came out from behind the bush I was tracking it through the telescopic sight :-)
<- Click to embiggen, look for white patch, that’s about 45m, low neck shot, buck went straight down.
Now I had been told that there would be fellows on horses who would field dress the animals. Didn’t happen. Had to do the job myself, learned that one can wash one’s hands using Energade.
It’s a ram. The ewes also have horns, but they’re thinner around the base. You can also tell by the size of the neck.
This was at about 10 the morning, the rest of the day the buck were either too far away or bundling in a herd, and I didn’t get another chance where I felt comfortable shooting.
The next morning. Ice on the windscreen. The car thermometer read 1.5 degrees C.
We hunted on a different farm. I was parked off behind a mountain, with a 30km wind blowing from my left and the temperature around 5 degrees C. It was a nicely sunny day though. Hiding behind a bush, the buck came past me twice at no further than 15m, and once at about 100m — but they were trotting and I didn’t feel comfortable taking a shot. Around 4 o’clock a small herd came over the mountain and one ram stopped away from the herd, about 85m from me (paced it out later). I shot it through the front shoulder, through the heart, through the other shoulder — breaking both front legs — and it still ran 50m to come to rest about 50m from me. It would have bled out from the heart shot but I put it down with a 190 grain cast bullet from the 357 revolver.
Ram #2. Photograph taken back at the farm, because again there was nobody in sight to help dress the buck or to take a photograph (at least I had water this time). This one is quite a bit bigger than the first one, if you look at the horns, but the first ram was quite a bit fatter. They weighed 27 and 29kg field dressed.
Back home, my buddy Thomas “helped” me process the meat (“helped” = he did the work while I watched). Took about four hours yesterday morning, and then I spent yesterday afternoon and this morning boiling the meat off the bones. And making the abovementioned pot. And getting the first batch of biltong in the biltong maker.
It’s amazing how little waste there is. We only threw away half a 2L ice cream container of fatty bits and glands and sinews and blood-shot meat.
Batch #1 in the biltong maker which was a Christmas gift from the in-laws. And the knife’s from KKNK.