two or 28 chickens in every pot

Ah, nothing like chicken slaughtering time to start off the weekend! We had 39 of the 40 chickens we purchased from Callahans.. chickens that we should never have purchased. The woman who would normally sell us chickens was having surgery and this new person innocently asked if we wanted white, red or black Cornish Crosses this time. We chose red. What the heck.. If it's the same quality as the white ones (bred at Texas A&M, I think), then great! Bring them on.

Except that these red hens (crossed with something like an aurecana, certainly not pure anything or cornish crossed with anything else..) are lively, they are sentient creatures, unlike the white ones that basically eat, shit, piss, sleep and eat some more. The white ones that we normally get are barely able to move and are bred to be eaten. The red ones, however, are tough, chewy and not very tasty at all. So we've wasted a whole year's crop, chicken that we love to smoke. This breed will be okay with stews and anything else that tenderizes them beyond recognition, but it's disappointing to not smoke our own chickens this coming year.

This is the second time Callahan's has done us wrong, though. The first time was when they sold us barred rock chickens that were actually half leghorn.. the eggs are white, not brown. The only difference in how the birds look is that a white spot appears on the chicken's ear, marking them from our regular, plump barred rocks. Lesson learned. No more Callahans for this. They get their stock from Ideal Poultry in Texas.

Anyway, so we've put off actually doing the deed to these birds until this past weekend. The biggest saving grace, I'd say, is the new Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker that Mike made from plans he found online. He's pretty handy that way.. coming up with contraptions that make things easier for us. The chicken plucker takes about twenty seconds to de-feather two chickens. This has always been the rudest part of trying to get the processing right for us. Now it's a breeze.

So I caught the red hens and roosters from the chicken coop area... uh, the roosters I caught first because they've begun to crow (something no decent white cornish cross would do.. ever) and if you've ever heard 11 roosters in the morning, even on a farm, you'd feel like doing harm to them, particularly if you're trying to sleep past 5:30 in the morning. On Sunday, the rest of the red hens, after we'd done most of them, disappeared, hiding in the woods behind the barn. I was using a fishing net to capture them two at a time, but some of them flew over the wire that is on top of the fence that surrounds the outside chicken coop, which is a huge space for the amount of birds we have. One of the birds died and we think it had a heart attack. Maybe it saw what we were doing to its mates in the back yard. Hmmm..

It took two days to finish off the birds. I caught them, wrung their necks (Mike helped with the ringing part). Then we let them hang and bleed for a little while. Not much blood in a chicken. Then Mike eviscerated them, removing the bowels, the anus and the lungs (with the gizzards, the fat, etc.) To me, he had the hard part. I was trying to help by chopping off the heads and cutting off the bony calves and feet, along with the necks... The feet and necks were placed in one container of ice so that I could make stock with them... which I did, both days. We wound up with 18 quarts of really thick, wonderful chicken stock.

Then, after letting the chickens rest for a day or so, I took them out of the ice chests and vacuum-sucked them with a Foodsaver device. On Sunday morning, the Foodsaver device worked and then just STOPPED. Luckily Mike was able to fix it and now it runs much better. Usually, appliances that go south just stay south and we have to buy new ones. Not this time.

I collected the gizzards and the livers and, on Sunday, the fat from the chickens and bagged them all separately. The gizzards will be ground up and given to the dogs and cats, the livers made into a pate' and the fat will be used for something tasty down the road.

Oh, yes... and Mike smoked a shoulder roast on Sunday, as well. It was a busy weekend and I'm sore and tired.

The geese are doing great.. and now have their own sleepy-time area in the yard. We put them into this overnight, so that the raccoons and possums don't get them, then let them out to eat grass in the mornings. We are still feeding them chick feed pellets, but they seem to roam around and get what they need from the area. Trying to keep them out of the stock tank for the goats is another matter, however.