Dinner served

We had pork chops for dinner tonight.  Most of the time pork chops are nothing really that special.  But tonight the pork chops we had for dinner are from the very pigs that we raised and recently butchered.

Dinner almost ready!

It was delicious!  They are pretty decent sized...a little tougher than the store-bought pork chops I'm accustom to but a lot less bright pink because there's no preservatives in my pork chops tonight!  And no added hormones or what not.  The meat itself taste really good and hubby noticed our pork chops soaked in flavors better than the store-bought ones as well.  We were very pleased with our dinner tonight!

This is one delicious meal!  I wish the mashed potatoes
I made tonight were home grown but they weren't.  Someday...

Raising your own pigs for meat might not be "cheap" but it's worth it.  If you go to the store and buy the "all-natural" or no hormone pork meat you will probably be paying double of what we paid for our pork meat.  For us this time it came up to be about $5/lb.  That takes into account of the expenses for acquiring the pigs, expenses on feed, and the cost of butchering the pigs.  If you were to butcher your own pigs you can probably cut your cost down by about half.  But we prefer not to do the butchering ourselves unless we have to.  

But in the future our cost would probably go down some because we would be breeding our pigs.  We would keep one or two piglets then sell the rest so that way we can offset some of our expenses.  At least for now that's the plan.

So to top off dinner we went outside to pick dewberries and had dewberries for dessert.  Oh I so wish we had vanilla ice cream to go with them though!  For those who don't know what dewberries are they are kind of like blackberries but they grow very wild around this area during this time of year.  They are a little more tart and sour than blackberries but nonetheless, very tasty.  My kids love 'em!  Right now we have them all over our property.

These are dewberries