Idesh-winter's stock

Traditional English winter consists of humming boilers, grey skies, wet slush not snow, pre sale sales that tickle your compulsiveness, xmas number one races, buy one get one free offers at Boots for boxed presents, lots of cheap red wine and queueing at the ticket machines to top up my oyster card in the blistering cold.
I bring up this topic because recently I've been hvaing meals with red meat, which came from my winter's idesh. I didn't think much of it until stopped and I realised how bizarre this is. Whilst christmas and winter in England pan out as I mentioned above, Mongolian winter is a little bit more primal. Herders and famillies who live in the countryside ofcourse eat teir own animal whilst city folk like I buy them from the supermarket or meat market. Or at least that's what I thought until a couple of years ago when I started to understand the concept of idesh. I had heard in passing that word and vaguely understood that it involved a lot of meat for the winter. But only recently, as in a few months back, have I fully understood that all Mongolians, city folk or country men, kill an animal in preparation for winter and stock it up until spring time. I may sound a bit dim because I have a feeling farmers and people with land and animals anywhere in the world has similar plans for their winter. People in Mongolia who has no land or animals usually have relatives and relatives of relatives who live in the coutnryside so they 'book' their idesh. "One cow for Mr and Mrs Jones, delivered preferably before December will be jolly good." This I cannot imagine being said back in England. However, just realising this and taking it in AND partaking in it was not what I had ever planned.
But planned or not, it happened. The hubby and I discussed the possibility of taking idesh this winter only after I suggested we could buy a couple of cows...you know, as an investment... He liked the idea, because now I realise this was so obvious and the investment would naturally turn into idesh (silly me), and we decided to buy one cow because they don't come cheap as I expected. Plus with the dzud last winter animals are expensive now and the meat sold for city folk this winter will fall short of demand and thus hike up the prices.
So I'm thinking that we're investing in our winter, eating our own cheap, delicious and safe beef. Which is pretty much what has started to happen. But in no way was I prepared for the realities of preparing your idesh.
It was a shame I didn't get really involved in the preperation (wasn't that keen to drive out of the city where hubby's mum lives just to see a cow meeting its end) but afterwards....there was A LOT OF meat. Apparently it was a big cow. I was keen to keep it for a whole year so there may be a chance of 'expansion' in our one-cow herd, but hubby said we're eating this cow this winter.
Ofcourse, just the two of us cannot eat the whole thing...well we could, if we were on the Atkins' diet but that's not good for your kidneys. Anyway, we had this huge plastic sheet on the kitchen floor of my mother-in-law-to-be, cutting, carving, shuffling around these huge pieces of thigh, ribs, back, stomach area.... and the funniest thing was discussing which part to give to whom. A big piece is reserved for my parents (my parents I think are an exception to the whole 'booking our idesh' thing) which we have carved into smaller pieces and will be transporting them on our regular visits to both parents' homes; then some ribs and a bit of nice fleshy meat for my friend who is pregnant and thus need lots of protien and yummy beef broth this winter. We then carved some pieces for ourselves after lots of removal of excess fat (I imagining that this is what plastic surgery might look like) because the hubby cannot eat fat to save his life. And the rest were carved some more and then all wrapped up and stacked in the 'outside freezer'-pretty much a shack with no insulation to keep foodstuffs and broken radios. Hubby's mum already had plans to share an idesh with her relatives close by, hubby's sisters also planned to share a wee litle young cow, and etc etc. But they all helped with the preparation of our idesh-skinning, gutting, cleanning...processes that I have seen done before many times at my grandparents' home during new years and Naadam (although i think they were sheep not cows) but never dared do it myself-never know what to trhow out and what to keep. Perhaps next winter.