chicken butcherin' day

(I don't think the pics I've chosen to display are disturbing, especially if you've ever bought a whole chicken at the grocery store, FYI.)

So! The end of the line for the Cornish Rock Cross chickens finally arrived. There was some skepticism within the family as to whether or not we'd go through with the killin.' But at $15 a bag for feed, with these ripe birds going through a bag and a half a week, we were ready.

Jason wanted to do it the most humanely, which after much research he determined was to hold the bird upside down until it fell asleep and then slit the jugular with a very sharp knife so that it'd bleed out. If you don't sever the spinal cord, it supposedly does less flopping and flapping. Well, we never could get a single bird to "fall asleep," and I'm not sure how upside down-er we could've held them. But I'm happy to report that every kill took only a couple of minutes and was done with the utmost of care....with one exception. I'll let Jason tell anybody that story who cares to know. The short of it is that he thought he'd try his hand at breaking one's neck, and it didn't quite work.

He was the executioner and the main eviscerator (skinner and gutter), with me helping as I could get outside between caring for Zor. The thing that struck me the most was how easy it is to skin them, like unwrapping a feathery coat. Also, their little innards are so beautiful and colorful. I did the final cleanup and packaging inside. The whole thing was easier than we'd both anticipated, but more time-consuming. It took us a whole day to cull and process 14 chickens, which seems like a long time! We watched some youtube videos of people processing a bird within a few minutes. But we were inexperienced in the ways of chicken butchering, save a day I participated in 15 years ago. Anyway, are some shots from the event, and I'll summarize our thoughts about the whole experiment at the end.

We culled the chickens at 10 weeks old, and they ended up being 2.5 to 3 pounds apiece, skinned. That, my friends, isn't much. Even if you don't count the setup cost, this is probably NOT the most economical way to eat chicken, even antibiotic- and hormone-free chicken. Of course, cost is only one factor, and in the right season with the right breed, they can forage for bugs, which cuts down significantly on feed costs. The main thing was getting the experience under our belts in case it's ever a necessity. There's definitely a sense of accomplishment in raising a portion of our food and in knowing the chickens had a decent life rather than being squished into cages.

*

However, our feelings were summed up in this 10:00 p.m. conversation:

Jason, shouting wearily from the shower: Man, that was a long day of butchering chickens, huh?

Me, still packaging chickens: Whoo, yeeeah.

[long, long pause for contemplation]

Jason: I don't want to be a chicken farmer.

Easter

At the risk of being a complete heathen, I am not going to talk any about the true meaning of Easter or the sweet time we enjoyed with family and friends that day, but only show Zoralee in the dress Aunt Melody sent her. And her first egg. So sorry.

morning

afternoonevening

johnny jump up

Yeah sure, Zoralee's a little small for it, in that her hands occasionally dangle out of the leg holes, but she loves to be upright so much and she's such a kicker, that we decided to try it out.

It's more of a Johnny-Look-Around and Johnny-Lick-A-Strap

calling all sleep experts

Dear parents or other care-takers of small babies: HELP!! Our daughter is a sleep-hater to the extreme. She fights it like a crazy person, no matter what we do. I am beside myself, and would love some stories from the field. Books are, I dunno, bleaah when it comes to interaction.

Here's the gist of what I've gathered at the theoretical level: the two opposing schools of thought are attachment parenting, which sometimes involves co-sleeping and rocking or nursing your babies to sleep until they're older (how old I do not know), and then the develop-independence-in-your-baby approach, which involves letting the baby cry himself to sleep. Within the independence camp is Tracy Hogg, author of "The Baby Whisperer," who advocates an in-between approach. You never leave the baby by himself to cry for long periods of time, but instead you pick him up out of the crib to comfort him, and when he is calm, lie him back down. When he cries again, you pick him up and hold him just long enough for comfort, then lie him down. Evidently you may have to do this 100 times when you first try, but it decreases significantly each time as he realizes he's not going to win. Has anybody tried this?

We have gotten Z to fall asleep in her wind-up swing for much of her life...until the last few weeks. That, or I would nurse her to sleep. But she is on to those and every other trick in our arsenal. She'll nurse alright, but when I try to wiggle away, she wakes up and is a fouler mood than when I first laid her down. She is driving us a little nuts.

the woods

The last couple weeks have been much warmer, sometimes around 60 degrees. Wow. It has been utterly enlivening. The winters in the Valley here are so long. In some ways they seem as long as the Alaska winters, because of the cloud cover. We went on our first walk of the season into the nearby woods - a walk with only shoes on our feet and not snow-shoes or skis. The ground is baring up so quickly now, and the warmth brings up all manner of scents. We meandered around for an hour or two, with no particular goals in mind. I think this does something different in the psyche than walking a trail or road. There is a time for both, but meandering lets you find all kinds of treasures and sink into the place of the woods.

The big poo at my fingertips and the hair are that of elk. The other poos are from deer, though they are slightly different sizes and shapes than each other.


The next day, my mom babysat Zoralee for Jason and I to ride Harley and Dusty Brown (those are the two horses Jason broke last summer) into the same woods. We went looking for elk and found the group of younger bulls, first by their musty smell, and then by sight through the trees about 80 yards away. They don't spook away when we're on horseback, though they don't stand around to chat. They are magnificent, but we weren't close enough to get good pictures with a point-and-shoot camera.

You can see a bull elk between the trees, above Harley's neck.

(the body is a lighter tan, and the dark head is to the right)

Maybe if you click on the photo, it'll get bigger for you.

recent goings on of Zoralee

time with Papa

sunning and listening to an excerpt from

"Democracy In America" by Alexis de Toqueville

time with mama

sucking nose out shopping for household goods

like a good little Puritan baby

upstairs at Grandpa and Grandma's place

other stuff

great-grandpa's music box

first bonfire - - at the neighbor's

German pancakes

German pancakes were my favorite childhood breakfast, and I've been on a kick with them as of late. They're easy, healthy, and very cool-looking to kids because they come out of the oven all puffy and then start settling down in an unpredictable manner.


Wanna try? Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Put 2 Tablespoons of butter in a cast iron skillet, and put it in the oven to melt the butter. Meanwhile, mix together in a bowl 1/3 cup flour (I use whole wheat) and 1/3 cup milk. Add three eggs and 1/4 teaspoon of salt and mix. Take the skillet from the oven and swirl the butter around so that it coats up the sides a bit. Pour the pancake mixture into the hot skillet and bake for 20 minutes. Super simple!

Top with syrup, jam, or fruit. A sprinkling of powdered sugar makes it unreal! I'd say it serves two adults or four kids. Better make two pans!

the chickens meet the great out of doors

With the recent warmth, last week we set a couple of the Barred Plymouth Rocks onto the yard. They mostly stuck close to whomever was standing nearby, but they did venture around a bit.

Here are the Cornish Cross gathered around the feeding bin. They are creating art, because in the next week, we will supposedly be creating art out of them. Food. But isn't food art quite often?

Tough to say what it'll be like to butcher these guys. I'm sure I'll have some tales. There are only 14 now, because one of the chickens was randomly almost dead yesterday, so he had to be put out of his misery early and won't even have the joy of being eaten. Everybody else seems fine, so we aren't suspecting disease.