The Aftermath of the Afterbirth

Remember this post about the stuff in the jar that wasn't beef jerky?

Well, after storing the dried up placenta bits in the fridge, the pill capsules finally arrived in the mail and Alisha commenced with the encapsulation last night. It took a few tries with a few different food processors, but eventually that placenta turned to dust as it was wont to do.

I didn't get to watch the entire process of getting all of that placenta powder into the pills, but I did have the pleasure of witnessing the first attempt at processing it, and kids? Don't try this at home. Just have Alisha do it for you. So, before, it had been reported that cooking placenta smells like liver. Dried placenta? Smells like mushrooms. Just. Like. Mushrooms.

So, I guess the first of Alisha's placenta encapsulations has been a success, and now she is going to offer to do it for friends and friends of friends, and maybe even think about renting a place where she can have a real business doing this, because apparently this is a thing people like to do. Yeah.

So. That's all I have to say about that. 

And if you are wondering what the background to these pictures is? Those are my D&D papers from the game I was playing last night, and the sweet boat that Dan made for last night's encounter. Oops, I did it again. Ship. The sweet SHIP he made. 

Luckily, I have a few more D&D pictures to share with you tomorrow, the day I will offically have kicken NaBloPoMo's ass.

That's Not Beef Jerky

 

If you saw this in someone's refrigerator, you might think it's a mason jar filled with beef jerky. Or maybe some dried mushrooms, because it looks like either of those things, in my opinion. 

But you would be wrong to think that.

That, my friends, is a human placenta, dried and ready for encapsulation.

Why am I holding a jar of someone's dried up placenta, you may ask? Because my best friend is a little bit nutty. By which I mean, a little bit crunchy. She's decided to get into the business of encapsulating placentas for consumption. You might want to go to that link for some less biased information, but really, the jist of it is, eating your placenta after birth (after birth, get it? HAR DE HAR HAR) has many health benefits for the mother. When Alisha found out she was pregnant for the second time this past month, she started looking in to doing this for herself, but wanted to practice before her own birth so she knew how the process worked. 

Long story short, she was able to aquire a friend of a friend's placenta. When I heard of this, I balked. "YOU HAVE SOMEONE'S PLACENTA IN YOUR FREEZER?" I asked her, but by that point it was actually thawing out in her fridge. I walked to the fridge and pulled it open and gingerly picked up the BIOHAZARD bag that was sitting next to her egg carton and had myself a little chuckle as the umbilical cord slid to the bottom of the bag. This girl's placenta was WAAAAAY smaller than mine.

The encapsulating process starts with cooking. Apparently you cut off the cord, wrap the placenta in the amniotic sac, and steam it. Then, you slow cook it in the oven for a number of hours until you get what you see in the jars up there - dried out placenta jerky. In a day or two, once her empty pill capsules come in the mail, she'll throw that placenta in her food processor and grind it to dust to be put into pills and finally given back to its original... grower. 

Yeah.

I knew right off the bat that I was declining her dinner invitation for this past Sunday when she was cooking the thing. First of all, there was no way in hell I'd be eating anything with meat in it that day, lest she decide to play a little trick on me. But then there was the matter of the smell.

"I bet it will smell like liver!" I told her, knowing full well from personal experience that a placenta is just a big old bag of blood. And what do you know? I was right. Cooking placenta DOES SMELL JUST LIKE LIVER. 

Too bad you can't add any onions to round out the awesome. 

So yeah. Once again NaBloPoMo is a win for the day, because I haven't gotten anywhere close to sleep even though it's two in the morning. I've been too busy, you know, with this here placenta that doesn't belong to me. 

Good times, good times.