One of Whitey's Chicks On July 30th
This one is definitely a rooster, as are two others out of the batch of seven. That means any day now we'll be hearing Cock-a-doodle-doo! which will signal, Joe recently informed me, that it's Chicken Dinner Night! His motto regarding the keeping of chickens on the farm is simple: If you can't lay, you can't stay.
Fortunately for me he's also willing to do the dirty work, though he does shortcut the butchering job by skinning the chickens instead of dealing with all that feather-plucking business--something I've certainly never had a desire to experience firsthand. That means all I have to do is decide how I want to fix them.
Eating animals I've raised myself took a little getting used to, as I grew up in the northern California suburbs where all our meat came in neatly wrapped packages from the supermarket. But when I moved to a farm I realized that if I was going to eat meat (and I was), that I would much rather eat a lamb or a steer or a chicken that I knew had had a happy, healthy, natural, stress-free life than one that had led a miserable existence in some far-off factory farm. And believe me, these are happy chickens.
We may be eating roosters, but they'll be gourmet stuffed birds. Chopped up bits of raw venison and scraps of grilled steak, yogurt cheese and homemade bread, leftover potatoes and coleslaw, all sorts of freshly picked greens from the garden, piles of juicy tomatoes, even peanut butter crackers and a blueberry crumble bar somehow forgotten in the fridge--they've had it all. Not to mention plenty of Whitey's favorite purple cabbage.
Sometimes it seems like these little foodies eat better than I do. But watching Whitey raise her first batch of chicks at the should-technically-be-dead age of seven and a half (we obviously must be doing something right) has been well worth the trouble of hand delivering several hundred gourmet meals to her and her feathery brood.
But I do wish they'd all turned out to be layers.
More Chick Pics:
6/17/07: Whitey & Her Baby Chicks
6/19/07: Caution Foodie Forming
8/2/07: Inspection Time
8/3/07: Baby's First Perch
8/4/07: Baby's First Dustbath
8/5/07: Mother As Landing Pad
8/9/07: Showin' Some Style
© 2007 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where Farmgirl Susan shares photos & stories of her crazy country life on 240 remote Missouri acres.
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Victoria D.