26 Chickens

Look at us, proudly posing with our heap of home grown, home butchered chickens!  I think I have an inkling of what those grizzly photos of trophy hunters standing over a wild beast they felled while on safari are about now.  I wanted a photo that would capture that "we did it!" feeling we were having at the end of the day.  

And it was difficult, messy, and challenging to my psyche, but it was also fun to learn to do, and fun to do with each other on a beautiful day in a beautiful setting.  And all that food!  We killed and butchered twenty-six roosters.  Of course, we also provided life to those same roosters, by caring for them and making sure they had comfortable lives.  Raising animals for meat has given me convoluted thoughts about the food web, and my animal-ness.  Growing asparagus brings those some thoughts to mind too, but those seem like baby thoughts compared to growing chickens.   You would think that because I've been a meat eater my whole life, being an omnivore would be old news to me, but somehow I've spent most of my life not really thinking about the chicken I eat.  Not any more.  Chicken sandwiches once had faces.  And knowing that my chicken sandwich had a happy face makes me like it better.   

Joe raised the chickens on his family farm.  My contribution was primarily capital and butchering labor, but I also got to visit them and take their pictures on occasion.  Because our work offices are across the hall from each other, we frequently had conversations about their progress during office days.  This has been a fun project.   Since the chickens were fed a fairly expensive organic feed, we calculated that each chicken, including the hens which we kept for layers, cost us ten dollars.  A butchered organic chicken from the local co-op is normally fourteen to seventeen dollars.  So, we actually saved a little money by doing it ourselves, plus we have healthy food. 

The photo above shows the mobile chicken coop that Joe built to house the roosters on grass.  Normally, the coop would be moved daily so the chickens can get fresh grass, but in this photo the door has been opened and a fence was placed around the coop so the roosters could have more space.  The hens, and one lucky rooster, were in their own mobile coop. 

Even though these rooster were mostly jerks to each other, and I won't even mention what they did to the poor hens before they were separated, just know that twenty six roosters and fourteen hens is not a good ratio for hens to get any peace - no means no!, I didn't like the idea of them watching us while we murdered their friends, so I made sure to cover the captured roosters in the cage with a table cloth so they wouldn't watch.  The guys laughed at me at first, but then I think we all agreed, it's better not to have a chicken audience when you're up to your elbows in feathers. 

Capturing the chickens that were corralled in the coop was pretty simple, Joe just picked them up one by one and we put them in a cage on a little red wagon so we could pull it to the work station.  The chickens that managed to escape the fence made for more exciting chicken wrangling.  

We used the same upside down road cone technique as our last butchering, which was our practice round for this day.  The cones were attached to a fence post and had buckets under them to catch the blood.  Chickens are calm when you hold them upside down, so the killing cone works very well.  We also avoided having any of those traumatic stories of headless chickens running across the yard that everyone likes to talk about.  They are immobilized by the cone once they are in. 

We used the turkey fryer burner that we heat our home brewed beer with to heat water to dunk the headless bodies in, which loosens the feathers.  Before we ever dreamed of butchering our own chickens, we once made a beer called Chicken Killer Barley Wine.  How true. 

Joe and Brandon were the primary feather pluckers.  They said the feathers were coming off easy, and they could pluck the chickens as fast as Jamie and I could gut them. 

I know that this is going to sound weird, but because it was a sort of chilly day, and gutting and washing all the chickens kept my hands wet and cold, when I would stick my hand in the plucked chicken's guts to pull them out I would think "ah, it so nice and warm".  Yeah, I'm gross. 

I'm grosser than you thought, because not only did I keep the livers, necks, hearts, and gizzards, I also kept the chicken feet.  Yep, the photo above is a bunch of chicken feet on the rocks.  It just needs a little wedge of lime, for presentation purposes, right?

I'm using the chicken feet to make stock.  The photo above is of the first batch, which I cooked for over twenty-four hours in the crock pot.  A friend of mine suggested it, and I did some reading about it on the inter-web, and lots of folks were bragging about how great the stock is.  I've also been told that people in China like to eat chicken feet, and I'm pretty sure I've seen pickled chicken feet for sale.  I was finally convinced to try it and not waste any of the usable parts of our chickens, but let me tell you, removing the claws from the feet was the one thing about this project that nearly sent me into an "I can't do this".  But, it's amazing what you can get used to, because since I had fifty-two feet to declaw, which means popping off the whole first knuckle, after the first dozen I wasn't paying it any more attention that if I was peeling potatoes while I sang along with the radio.  Who knows what I'm capable of.  Sort of scary isn't it?