The first part of the angel we cut is the front shoulders. The shoulder should be pulled away from the torso of the angel to expose the pass through cut zone. Cutting with your knife’s blade parallel to the rib cage, you will pass through the shoulder joint. If having a difficult time finding where to cut, pull the front leg away from the torso and aim your knife strokes for the hinge area.
Before cutting off the back straps, you can shave off any excess fat that has built up in the area. After fat removal, we need to find the knobby part of the hip bone. We will cut just under this bone and to the back bone on both sides. After cutting this initial cross section of the back strap, we will now run our knife down and along the back bone. This cut will run all the way through the neck. We can now return to the initial cuts we made and start peeling and freeing the back strap with our knife. Take your time and try not to leave any of this valuable meat on the back bone. Once you have the back strap down to the front shoulders, you can cut them off.
The neck of the angel can have quite a bit of meat that is very good for grinding. Pull the meat from the back strap incision and skin the meat off the neck bone. You will work this meat from the top of the neck to the angel’s wind pipe.
If you desire, you can now carve out any meat left on the front half of the angel. This can be anything from meat along the rib cage (brisket) to rib cage meat itself. Any of this boned out meat will be excellent for ground meat use.
Once done with the front half of the angel, we can now saw the backbone leaving us with the hind quarters.
Starting from the knee of the hindquarter, work your knife parallel with the leg bone until you reach the hip. Now turn your knife 90 degrees and finish the cut.
We leave the hind quarters attached to the pelvic bone during this final butchering stage. Starting on the rear of the leg and just below (upward on the animals leg) the achilles tendon, cut in and to the bone. Now work this cut around the knee and continue to cut so all the meat will be freed from the leg bones and the pelvic bone. This will leave you with a large hunk of roast meat which will be made up of around 3 muscle groups: rump roast, bottom round, and the eye of round. You can pretty much separate these muscle groups by hand with minimal knife work.
Now is time to remove meat from the front shoulders. The shoulder bone has a unique upside down T shape to it so make the following cuts to bone it out. Once the T shaped shoulder bone has been cleaned, we can salvage what meat remains for grinding.
Boil the bat stock with lemon grass, galangal, kaffir leaves, and vegetables until it simmers. Diced the bat meat without the bones and put it in until it cooks. Season with salt, sugar, and white pepper. And squash lime on top of it to brighten its flavor, yum yum!
I love Greek Mythology! Does anyone else like the story of orpheus