A lamb to slaughter

Chops, our oldest lamb was taken to slaughter last week and we picked him up from the butchers yesterday. He looked a good weight going off to slaughter, but exceeded our expectations on return. As a general rule of thumb, the walking weight of the lamb should be around 40kg for an on the hook weight of 40lb, (can't beat a bit of mixing units of measure). Not having an agricultural weighing scale, we guesstimated him to be around the 40 Kilo range. We were pleasantly surprised to find he weighed 46lb-21Kg (dead weight).

The idea was to convert the whole carcass into chops as we eat quite a lot of them, hence his name. However the shoulders proved a bit of a head ache to work out how to chop them so they ended up boned and rolled into roasting joints. A trip to our butcher for a lesson or two might be good before the next two come back.

          
In a relatively short space of time (2 hours) the whole carcass can be cut up, bagged and thrown into the freezer. The hardest part is trying to decide which bit to eat for dinner that night. We settled on the best bit, cutlets and were not disappointed. Considering we had a lack of grass and had to feed the lambs finisher nuts, he tasted pretty good. Better than from the supermarket!!
Our last two lambs Shoulders and Shanks are eating up the last of the finishing nuts and then they to will be on a one way trip. Not sure how Jes will react as Shanks is her favourite and he use to suckle on the end of Jes' ear when he was younger. She didn't seem to have too much of a problem when she was chomping on Chop's shoulder bone last night. 

Cheers,
Diz and Stell