Eating Our First Chicken

September 10, 2008 - Round two for today. Our move isn't the only thing going on these days. There's quite a bit of other stuff for me to share with you today too.

You know by my title that we ate one of our chickens. No, we did not just decided we wanted to taste our little feathery friends. Two days ago one of our chickens was found lying in the yard with a hole in its side - clearly injured. At the time, we didn't know what had gotten to it, but since it was suffering, Joe killed it. A few hours later, a fox was seen wandering through our yard. Pretty strange for the town of Red Hook and there was suspicion that it could possibly have been rabid.

Needless to say, we couldn't let a good chicken go to waste. The fox hadn't eaten any of it - it seemed to have been scared away by something. So Joe plucked the chicken, gutted it, and last night we ate it for dinner (after confirming that it's okay to eat a chicken that was bitten by a possibly rabid fox). I am SO mad that I didn't think to take pictures before this stage because Joe did an excellent job cleaning it - but here he is diggin in to one of our little babies -

This was my first time eating something that I have raised from a baby and it's an interesting thing. On one hand, it was the most satisfying thing in the world. On the other hand, you do tend to picture the living, breathing, clucking thing as you're chewing it, which can be slightly awkward. As for the taste - it tasted like chicken alright, but there were some differences. The legs were extremely chewy - these birds run around A LOT compared to your typical broiler from the grocery store. So she had some serious muscle going on in the legs. But the breast was delicious - juicy, tender, really good. Here's a picture of the bird - a little late, since we had already sliced a bunch off her, but just to give you an idea.

The other thing that was cool about it is that since this was a laying hen, she had a bunch of unformed eggs inside of her. I had seen these before at the farmers market where they sell them in bags. But I never imagined how many there would be. There were big ones, but then there were tons of tiny little ones. They just look like little egg yolks. And yeah, they're tasty too.

Anyhow, the other big thing keeping me from regular blog posting is food preservation. Tomatoes never quit apparently. We've got them coming out our ears and I'm totally sick of them. It wouldn't be so bad if it were all big tomatoes, but it's the cherry tomatoes that we're really loaded down with. I can't do much with them, so all I've come up with is to wash them, cut them in half, squash them down with a masher, and boil them down a bit. Then freeze. I did try this out as a sauce one night and it was pretty tasty, even with the seeds. I have about 10 of these in the freezer at this point. By the end of the season we should never have to buy tomato sauce again.

Because I've also been canning the big ones. With these I do the real deal - peal, seed, dice, boil, and can. Here's a couple jars boiling in the water. And since I'm on the kick I've been going a bit crazy with peaches too. The first time I did peaches I made honey spiced peaches - delicious for a winter dessert. The second time around I just canned them plain, although I used a honey/sugar combo for the syrup. I just tend to think that honey is a little healthier for us. Here are the spiced peaches -I just got finished with another food preservation day today. First, since we had the chicken the other night, I boiled the carcass to produce about 17 cups of chicken stock, which is now in the freezer in various sized containers. Then I blanched and froze 6 cups of sweet corn. And finally, I made 3 batches of pesto from our very own basil. The freezer is already starting to fill up, and I'm just getting good at this stuff! I feel like a squirrel, stocking up for winter and I love it!

Fortunately for me, since I'm running out of hours in the day, some things will keep all on their own. Here is our squash harvest curing in the sun, which should now keep for months if we put it down in the cellar -

We harvested our first eggplant the other day as well. There are only two more out there now - it wasn't a great eggplant year for us apparently. It may not have been hot enough. Or the soil wasn't good. Who knows. I'll be spending the winter figuring out what went wrong this year, why it went wrong, and what to do differently next year. But here's what we DID get and it was super delicious -
The zucchini plants got some sort of disease and/or pest and so we sort of decided to abandon them. We picked everything and then Joe let the chickens in there to have at whatever was in there and dig up the soil. Here's them doing their thing -

Turns out they did a pretty nice job cleaning things up. We're even starting to get some new little zucchini forming!

All in all, we're still eating a lot from our garden. We still have tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, broccoli, cabbage, basil, swiss chard, collard greens, beets, ground cherries, carrots, green beans, and lettuce. We need to plant more lettuce so that we can put cold frames up around it and eat it all winter. The gardening never ends!!!