Hello! Its Andria and I've got exciting news!

Just over a week ago, I married the love of my life and biggest supporter - Derrick Rimmer. So far everything is great! We've returned to quite quickly to our normal lives, as I am preparing for harvest with my full time job and staying busy with our website . We're hoping/planning to go on a bit of a honeymoon this winter. 

Photo by Anthony Houle Photography

Over our five years of dating, I've introduced Derrick to many aspects of my life some of which include; basketball, running, vegetables and most of all, farm life. He became one of my biggest fans, had joined me on a few runs and has learned to cook with vegetables. As for farm life, he's been adapting to the hard work of chores and building fences, he's constantly learning how to move cattle, he's taken to riding horses in a stride and has discovered his passion for meat.

His passion for meat has delivered me some absolutely fantastic meals. Its taken us to some new restaurants to try out charcuterie, rodizo and of course, steakhouses. We've visited multiple butcher shops in and around Edmonton, trying new jerky's and sausages, watching bacon get sliced ultra-thick, buying lamb roasts and bison steaks. It's been awesome visiting all these places for the past year. Now Derrick has fallen in love with meat and is taking the next step.

This September, he is attending NAIT's meat cutting class! He's super excited to see what he'll learn. I'm super excited to taste the meats he'll cut and make! We've already been experimenting a bit with making sausage with the sausage stuffer he got for Christmas. The sausage can only get better from here! Right?

Derrick's hiding his smile; making sausages does make him happy.

To share our love of meat (and more specifically, beef) with everyone, my parents provided the roast beef for our wedding meal. Aaaaaaand one of Derrick's first requests for our wedding is that we have a whole roast pig! Which turned out to be one of the tastiest meats I've eaten in a while. 

The idea stemmed a little from another wedding, that was luau themed and a bit from Jessica raising pigs last summer. After we decided we definitely wanted a whole roast pig, we 'convinced' Jessica to raise more pigs this summer. I think she was going to raise them no matter what, we just helped her out by giving her a definite sale!

Derrick's been a great help to me with any Facebook posts or blogs I've written for Triple Lyoness Farm. He reads and edits almost every one before they get published. There was one that I published without him and I missed a spelling error. Oops! He's continuing to help my family and I out his weekend for our Open Farm Days. We all hope to see you there! 

Next time Derrick and I may be sharing some of his meat cutting knowledge. Let us know what you would like to learn about in the comments!

Definitions:

Charcuterie: a collection of cured, cold meats

Rodizio: a Brazilian style steakhouse. Customers pay a fixed price and samples of food are continuously brought to the customers until they signal they are full.