This will be a bit of a catch up post. 
I’ve posted a few new pictures of the new laying flock at 3 weeks of age. They are getting quite active now. We’ll give them another week before opening up the other half of the brooder box. For now we’ve been keeping them enclosed to half the box partly to conserve heat because it’s been so cold. They are getting quite a few feathers in, but their little neck and arm pits are still down and you can see down poking out in between their tiny little feathers.
The weather has been unseasonably cold and dry. We dropped down as low as 10 degrees a couple nights, with several being in the 13 -16 degree range. The goats are in their coats and get hot water once a day, and an evening check to break the ice on their water bucket if it’s frozen. The “big girl” chickens have one of the brooder lights hanging in their coop for some extra warmth. They don’t seem too phased by things though. Their hanging fount (waterer) keeps freezing over so I’ve been putting a small feed bucket of hot water on the back patio for them each morning.
One morning I got up to see Sassy scratching around by the greenhouse. It was quite early and I was surprised that Bengt might have let them out that early. I said, ’oh, you let the chickens out already?’ and he looked at me quizzically and said he hadn’t. Well it turned out that he hadn’t counted the chickens when he put them in the night before and Sassy can tend to straggle behind. She had managed to spend the entire night outside of the coop and the low was 16 degrees! We ran out and opened the coop and she happily went inside, had some breakfast, and laid an egg. I suspect I know where she may have found a nice place to spend the evening…
The well pressure switch froze again. This happened during the winter holidays last year when we got about 4 feet of snow. Several other issues compounded the situation leaving us with out drinkable or hot water for a good part of a week. This time we were a bit more versed in the mechanics of all of it and I quickly granted Bengt permission to take the greenhouse heater to put in the well house. The water was flowing again with in 10-15 minutes and the hot water cleared up quickly thereafter. We either need to permanently fix this problem or get in the habit of making some adjustments to the well house for fall and spring. A permanent fix would involve relocating the water heater or the well so I suspect that we’ll just need to get used to it.
Sweet Pea Currant Tomatoes
I had been harvesting currant tomatoes up until as recently as a week ago from a volunteer plant in the greenhouse. It hadn’t really dawned on me that the volunteer was rooted in the ground so as soon as all this dramatically cold and dry weather hit the plant was a goner. It’s probably for the best though. We got the first electric bill with the greenhouse heater running and it was about 3 times normal. Ouch! The tomatoes were a lovely treat but not worth that much. It was certainly nice while it lasted though. I’m going to try growing some tomatoes intentionally in the greenhouse eventually.
So I suspect Sassy spent the night in the space under the now, well heated, well house.
To add to our winter “fun” our septic pump blew up this weekend. There’s been some challenges with the system (read: a lot of hacks), but it finally gave up. We don’t know how much the very cold weather contributed to it, but we are on limited water use until a new pump arrives today or tomorrow. We are sucking it up (and digging in to our credit cards) and having all of the known issues with the system addressed. It’s really unfortunate and the timing couldn’t be much worse, but the septic serviceman made a strong point that resonated well with Bengt: If a septic system is maintained properly, over it’s life it will STILL be cheaper than the municipal sewer in these parts. Hopefully this will be it for a few years for us.
We’ve been cooking over our wood stove more and more this winter as I try to get the hang of it or get the courage. It’s not a cook stove by any means, but it’s not too bad. I made my first attempt at biscuits last week and they turned out okay. It just makes more sense to use the heat for the house for other functions as well.
That’s a better segue, than from our septic woes… I also thought I’d share a recipe I just typed up for a friend. It’s a staple for us for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that it’s fast, tasty, and highlights high quality eggs!
(From “How to Cook Everything”)
Spaghetti alla Carbonara
Time: 30 minutes
Makes about 4 servings
1 TBSP olive oil
4 ounces minched bacon, preferably slab bacon, or pancetta
2 eggs
1 cup fresh grated parmsan cheese, plus more
1 pound spaghetti, linguine, or other long pasta
Salt and freshly ground black peper to taste
- Combine the olive oil and bacon in a medium skillet over medium
heat. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the bacon is crisp.
- Meanwhile, bring a large pot of water to a boil. Warm a large bowl
in the oven, or by filling it with very hot water.
- Beat the eggs and Parmesan together in teh warm bowl. Salt the
boiling water and cook the pasta until it is tender but firm. when it
is done, drain it and toss it immediately with the egg-cheese mixture;
add the bacon and any fat remaining in the skillet. Add lots of
pepper; taste and add salt and more pepper if necessary. Serve
immediately, passing more grated Parmesan at the table.
[What follows is a relatively unfiltered description of our experiences slaughtering 14 Jumbo Cornish Cross hens that we'd raised with the intent of humanely raising and slaughtering chickens for meat. My descriptions of "the act" itself do not provide any detail beyond what is required to convey the actions we took. The accompanying images are really no more graphic than you'd see at a neighborhood butcher's shop with a few exceptions: Americans aren't accustomed to seeing their food with the head and feet still attached.
As with the images from the First Slaughter post, consider that this is a very humane version of what occurs with the prep of the meat you eat. I encourage you to read on and contemplate the choices you make with your food.]
A dull ache in every vertebrae of my back, my calves are burning, and I can’t move my neck. We’re standing over the cutting board, on opposite sides of the kitchen counter pulling off crispy bits of skin, white and dark meat, and shoveling it into our mouths. Just a bit of butter, salt and pepper at 350 in the convection oven and it tastes like this? This is amazing. Ouch, my neck.
"Fresh" chicken roasted for 30 minutes at 350F with butter, salt, and pepper.
An hour before, we were in the front yard off the edge of the driveway gutting this same bird. There’s no way I thought I’d bring myself to eat it today. Following the visceral, bloody, and somewhat disturbing experience, I was left with passable knowledge of chicken anatomy and a freezer full of vacuum sealed whole birds, halves, quarters, parts, and offal. Over the course of two days we slaughtered 14 Jumbo Cornish Cross chickens. Some parts of the process are pretty nasty and I was pretty sure I’d spoiled my appetite for poultry for the foreseeable future. But here I was… eating the chicken I’d just killed… and it was easily one of the tastiest things I’d eaten in a long time.
Having slaughtered a rooster, last year, we changed our approach. We learned a lot in the slaughter of Bucket. I quite simply hacked off his head with a big sharp chefs’ knife coming down on a stump. The results were pretty messy, as the involuntary flapping made it tough to hang onto him. The scalding water was too hot and had actually started to cook the meat. We devised a plan, learning from experiences and a fair amount of reading. We were ready.
Slaughter day. We woke up early and started the prep. Big Rubbermaid tubs, a folding table (our kitchen from Burning Man), a large propane burner and 30 quart stock pot, ice, some really sharp knives, cutting boards, Latex gloves, 5 gallon buckets, 1 gallon Ziploc bags, and some trash bags. After working through some kinks (cone too big, angle of cutting boards wrong, broken thermometer, water too hot, water too cold, need some chairs, better knife needed for this or the other, ran out of propane on this tank, need another bucket, etc.), the next two days followed the same pattern, one or two birds at a time.
Killing Cone
I built a small cone out of some galvanized roof flashing and a couple small bolts. The cone was affixed to the tree, with a 5-gallon bucket hanging below it. At first catching one bird at a time was easy, there were 14 of them and they were, I think I mentioned this once or twice, lazy and fat. I entered their little pasture, walked up and grabbed one. Walking back, I’d put it upside down through the cone, holding the feet, wait for the bird to calm down (the cone seemed to have this effect on them), and with the sharpest knife we own, cut through the jugular vein on the side of the neck. The blood would run down into the bucket suspended below, and half a minute later, the bird would pass out. This method is similar to the slaughter outlined in the Koran in preparation of “halal” meats.
While there is very little literature on humane slaughter of fowl, I endeavor to end the lives of any animals I kill in the most humane way possible. I’ve had a few muted debates with friends about the concept of “humane slaughter” and, while I agree the phrase is material enough for several comedy routines, it captures what I’m trying to do. Why raise an animal in a humane way, only to end its life in fear? Dr. Temple Grandin is an expert on humane slaughter of livestock and, while most of her work is geared toward large mammals, I found much of her writing useful. She’s published some simple guidelines, many of which seem like common sense (keep herd animals together as long as possible, don’t let them witness the slaughter of another, etc.), but are useful when considering what we’re doing and why. The method we chose for slaughter is condoned, by her, for most animals. She’s a really interesting person and I highly recommend looking her up, even if you’re only marginally interested in slaughter; she’s written books on autism and has a very unique first-person perspective on the topic.
After the bird fell unconscious, I’d tighten my grip on its feet. “Death throws” are involuntary muscle spasms that cause the bird to flail about (the source of the phrase “like a chicken with its head cut off”) for 15-20 seconds. The cone contained the wings and held them against the body, which made this easier. The bird was dead, now.
Battle Stations for scalding, plucking,
We’d laid out our workspace in such a way as to let us progress with each of the bird through “stations,” each with a separate purpose. While I have the strong urge to define the process with a flow chart, swim lane diagrams, input and output charts, and SLAs, it’s pretty simple:
- Dead chicken goes into 140° Fahrenheit water and sits for 30 seconds. This loosens the feathers for plucking.
- Hot wet smelly chicken (smells like a wet feather pillow covered in chicken poop) goes into Rubbermaid tub filled with ice water. This keeps the chicken from cooking and helps to loosen the feathers. We occasionally had 3 or 4 floating around in the ice bath, gruesome looking.
- Kat pulls wet cold chicken out of cold water tub and starts plucking into a second Rubbermaid tub. This is much harder than it seems like it should be and Kat is much better at it than I.
- When the majority of the feathers were off, the chicken would be moved to the first of two cutting boards. Pinfeathers and as much stubble as can be pulled off is; wingtips are a particular bitch.
- On the same cutting board, I’d cut off the head (sharp knife, lots of pressure) and the feet. I got good at taking off the feet, at the knees, using a sharp knife I’d pop the tendons and separate the cartilage.
- Feet get the ‘skin’ and ‘toenails’ pulled off. The feet are a great reminder of the animals’ prehistoric roots… more reptilian than bird.
- Feet go into a bag for stock.
- Bird moves to second cutting board. At this point, it looks almost like the chicken you would buy in a store.
- Gutting the bird takes a little bit of time, though I got much faster by the end of the second day. In short, I start at the top, free the “top organs” and then do the other end.
- The trachea and esophagus can be pretty easily freed from the spinal column with hands. On day one, we didn’t feed the birds, and the crop was small and easily freed. The “crop” is a small sack that contains all the food the chicken has recently eaten. Think of it as a squirrel’s cheek pouch, it allows the chicken to take in more than the digestive system can handle. Day two, we fed them and the crop was huge and messy. Did I mention that these chickens really ate a lot?
- I would hang the legs of the bird off the table, over a 5 gallon bucket, cut a circle (or modified square, usually) around the “vent” (aka. butt), grab around the vent and pull. Put bluntly, this is nasty. I was basically pulling the entire digestive system of a chicken out, through its butt. It smells pretty strongly. I can’t describe the smell, other than to say it smells like chicken guts.
- There’s a lot of cleanup on the bird that occurs at this point, too. I pack the livers, gizzards, and hearts into an “offal” bag. I hope to make some pate or a Misc. Farm terrine; I tried each of these fried, that weekend, and couldn’t stomach it. The smell was… too familiar. Discarding the rest, including lots of little bits that took time to get out (lungs, for instance).
- What’s left is exactly what you’d get if you bought a whole chicken at the store. The only notable difference is that the neck has a little extra skin left on it. We either froze them like this or broke it down further to breasts, thighs, wings, etc.
All the pictures from the slaughter day are posted to flickr with annotation for each step.
This is just beautiful. I don’t know how to describe it. There are images involved, you have to take a look:
Thanksgiving. Since the beginning, Americans have connected the BOUNTY of the Land and the Goodness of Life to DEMOCRACY. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison – farmers ALL – envisioned an agrarian society. We have since evolved into a VERY different kind of society.
Back to the Land
After a heart wrenching first few days we have lost no more baby chicks, and everyone appears to be thriving just fine. This set of birds was a “brown egg layer” mix so we don’t know the breeds of most of them. If you’ve got some guesses, let me know! I can identify the Barred Plymouth Rocks and Black Sex-Links, and I think there are two Silver Laced Wynadottes, but that’s about it. None of them have feathered feet so I’m certain we have no Brahmas. This brings our current chick count to 23, and here’s to hoping it stays that way!
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