An ax doesn’t work on frozen chicken

If a farmer who raises chickens for a large processing company (in this case, Tyson) offers to sell you chickens at what are obviously a good deal, my advice is to ask how they’ll be packaged. We have a really nice neighbor who does, in fact, raise chickens. And we did get some frozen chickens. I shall refer to them from now on as The Body. They came in one large lump. Large. Completely frozen together.

The Body got man-handled into one of our chest freezers, after which I would occasionally mumble that we “needed to bust up that lump” so that I could start cooking it, which would cause us to have room in the freezer for upcoming meat (see So, there’s this pig….). 

An ax will work if you want shredded chicken, but if you’re looking to have actual chicken then something else must be done. For us, it was taking The Body, laying the bag on towels on the basement floor (by the freezer – that thing weighs a LOT) and letting it thaw. You would think that it would thaw pretty well, but after about 12 hours there were maybe two wings thawed, some of the edges were very well-chilled, and the rest was still frozen solid.

I have found that at that stage the best thing that works is a chisel and nice little handheld maul hammer. (At that point I had Julia Child’s voice in my head – it made the whole thing that much more surreal.)  You can wedge that chisel in between the various individual chickens and whack away until sections start popping off. As of now, we have 7 chickens thawing in one of the fridges. The Body has been successfully split into two sections, and as they are still frozen they went back into the chest freezer from whence they came. Once I get the first 7 cooked and canned (remember, we need the freezer space for someone, er…thing else) then it’s on to thawing, cooking and canning the sections.

Canned chicken is quite good! Makes great soup, chicken and dumplings, chicken enchiladas – you name it. It’s great as the stuff is cooked before it’s canned so hauling it out and using it is easy. Getting it to the canning stage, well….I’m not sure we’re going to go with bulk chicken again.

Canned chicken is quite good! Makes great soup, chicken and dumplings, chicken enchiladas – you name it. It’s great as the stuff is cooked while it’s canned so hauling it out and using it is easy. Getting it to the canning stage, well….I’m not sure I'd vote to go with bulk chicken again.

He’s a Wanderer…

Normally I like to post a pic of the latest topic. Not this time. Smelling the little unwelcome thing is enough – I am not going out to take a flash shot of him as he strolls by the house after dusk, so that he can get all scared and spray the crap out of the yard. Or me.

You really can smell skunks as they walk by. And they are territorial. We discovered shortly after we moved in that we were in the territory of a male skunk. While trying to figure out the best way to get rid of him, we noticed that he’d stopped coming by. Then he was found in the hay barn, squished by a large round bale that had shifted. Fortunately it was the time of year that the smell from the shock had dissipated, and he had turned into a freeze-dried skunk. Much easier to deal with.

Now that he’s gone, we are in the territory of the next little unwelcome thing that has replaced him. And let me tell ya, having the house shut up sometimes doesn’t do the trick, even in the dead of Winter. If he gets close enough his perfume can find whatever little nook or cranny through which fresh air makes it into the house, and then it’s just time to do battle with candles. The latest guy’s trick is to start digging where the soil is the least resistant – around the foundation of the house. What a pain!

So, there’s this pig…

It turns out that a friend of ours knows a nice Amish guy who raises pigs. So rather than raising a pig ourselves, we decided it would be a much better idea to get one from him, and just pick it up and drop it off at the butcher. I am so very glad we did that rather than getting all sorts of stuff set up to raise one pig. And then actually having to raise the pig. The picking up was pretty easy – that sucker just hopped up into the trailer and off we went, which was great as he weighed about 280 pounds. 

The fun started when we dropped him off at the butcher’s place. They have a nifty little chute and stall setup where you can unload critters, and they let you drop off critters outside of their normal working hours, no pressure there... This was one of those times where it’s really handy that Sis not only knows how to handle animals, but can back a semi-trailer into a tin can. I am really good at letting her back trailers. After getting the trailer to the chute, she got the door opened and went in to get the pig out. It took a sharp smack on his nose (after about 10 minutes of pushing, and being pushed, around the trailer), resulting in him squealing like, well….anyway he complained a lot about that indignity, then he trotted off the trailer.

This little video is the soon to be BBQ complaining to the pig in the pen next to him after he was unloaded. The noises he’s making here are nothing compared to the massive amounts of very loud squealing he was doing in the trailer. Honest – if I had not been holding a panel of wood to keep him from jumping off the trailer and running off into the great unknown (about all I was qualified to do) I would have shot a video of him insisting on staying in the trailer and screaming loud enough to make you think he’d got something valuable pinched in a door. (That, and I was really too busy laughing at him to be able to get a good shot.) 

 

One of the most enjoyable things about having farm animals are the noises they make. One of these days I’ll try to get some good video of a screaming goat…

Stroll to the barn

Spring and summer birdsong is great here. We thought about getting some guinea hens to hang out in the garden and eat bugs, but they would scream so much you wouldn't be able to hear the other birds.

And that thing about goats?

Yeah, we still have goats at the new place. In fact, we have a few more today than yesterday. And yesterday we had a few more than the day before. Funny thing about goats - when you put boys with girls for a few weeks, then in a few months you get babies!  Here are two from a yesterday. Their mommy? Oddly enough, her name is Zipline. No kidding.....

 More pics of the babies as soon as I can get out there.

Amanda - this update's for you

Having been so remiss in letting the blog lapse, I have found that there is a lot to catch up on. Not the least is the fact that we are at a new farm. For various reasons we have moved further south. And while I was thrilled that it put us in a different gardening zone, I’ve discovered that it really hasn’t meant that it’s any warmer in the winter. In fact, the weather is more bizarre than I had ever thought it could be. Yesterday’s storm, which threatened an inch of ice and eight inches of snow, was a disappointment to the forecasters but not to us.

I had plenty of experience with the affect a large body of water has on the weather (having lived on Lake Shore Drive for a while) but completely misjudged how much the Ohio River would affect the weather. Time and again since we’ve moved here I’ve watched the weather radar, waiting for a massively-looming thunderstorm to hit us with wind, torrential rain, damaging hail, possible tornadoes and odd looking women on bicycles – only to see it fizz out to a regular rain storm.

We did, however, get nailed this winter with a truly spectacular ice storm. Not one of those namby pamby things that melts the next day. Nope, this ice stuck around for many days, making life beautiful, but otherwise extremely inconvenient for anyone outdoors. Luckily for me I’m not included in that population this time of year.  Why? Well, that’s for the next post. For now, I’ll just leave you with what I was able to see out of my back door for about a week this winter. Proving there can be beauty in inconvenience.