Our second time killing & butchering a chicken

Posted by louisa on Monday 19 December 2011 in chickens | 10 comments

(WARNING: I’ve included a couple of in-progress pictures towards the end of this post and I’ve been very careful to pick ones that look little different to a bird you’d find at the supermarket. However, if you’re very sensitive, you might want to skip this article.)

We killed and dressed/butchered a chicken for the first time in 18+ months on Saturday – the first time since we had chickens of our own.

It wasn’t one of ours – our friend John B hatched some Silver Wyandotte eggs last year and they all turned out to be boys so they didn’t fit in well in his egg-laying matriarchy. They were becoming bullies so had to go. He brought one of the big fluffy boys to our house for us as his daughters have a bit of an embargo on him doing it at his house.

We killed our first chickens under his tutelage in April 2010 – just before we got our own girls. Again, they were some boys whose only crime was being boys – oh and forcibly having their way with John’s girl chickens, that was their crime too. We had already accepted that we had to be willing to kill chickens before we could keep them ourselves – for example, what if one was injured and needed putting out of its misery? or, as happened in this most recent case, if hatched eggs turned out to be boys. But as I mentioned in my blog back then, there was also the bigger picture to consider: if we only bought point-of-lay girls, then someone else was having to deal with the equal number of point of lay boys that were being born. (This great article by Throwback at Trapper Creek puts it better than I can.)

How we got 14 meals from our Swillington Farm chicken

Posted by louisa on Thursday 14 July 2011 in cooking, eating, frugal | 7 comments

We got our first Swillington Farm meat box delivery at the end of June and are determined to do it justice. I’m keeping a lengthy record of what we did with every bit of it – but as we’ve not got through much of it so far, I thought I’d mention this separately – what we did with the chicken.

As part of our “medium” box, we get “1x large organic chicken” each month. By “large”, they mean large – it was considerably bigger than any I’ve seen for sale at supermarkets. According to the Swillington Farm’s website, the birds start indoors but then “spend the next 2 months free range on organic pasture” and “aged at least 3 months before they reach your plate [producing] larger, better tasting chickens than the average supermarket bird” (supermarket chickens are typically 6-9 weeks in age when they’re killed – ie, 1.5-just over 2 months old). Butchered, our Swillington chicken weighed 2.6kg (5lb 12oz), and they included the liver & neck in a little baggie.

How we used it

• 2 portions: Chicken legs (each weighed close to 370g!) roasted with a light garlic, lemon, ground coriander & black pepper marinade. Cooked with roasted new potatoes, and served with purple sprouting broccoli.
• 2 portions: Chicken wings and some meaty bits from the carcass roasted with the same marinade, with leftover roasted potatoes and garlicky broad beans & salad from the garden.
• 4 portions: Chicken & sweetcorn noodle soup made from stock/meat from the carcass/neck.
• 3 portions: Chicken jalfrezi, made with one chicken breast and our eggs.
• 3 portions: Chicken & pepper jalfrezi, made from the other breast and our eggs.

And the cats had the skin & liver cooked up and blended into a “pate” – which they *loved*.

We have … generous appetites so the portions were still quite large – both in the amount of chicken in each portion and the size of the portion. I thought there was enough meat in all the meals – all the meals felt sufficiently chicken-y for me – but John said he’d have liked a better chicken-to-other ratio in the first jalfrezi.

Update – Jan 2013: We’ve had Swillington Farm meat boxes most months since I wrote this post and we’ve always had equally generous chickens – including some even bigger ones at times! 14 meals from a bird is the rule in this house, not the exception – and 16 meals isn’t uncommon. I’ve written a little update here.

What are your favourite ways to get the most out of chickens?

Homemade dog treats: drying offal in a dehydrator

Posted by louisa on Thursday 15 July 2010 in frugal | 1 comment

In the supermarket a couple of months ago, John noticed that the dog treats we were buying our old springer spaniel Lily cost £11 a kilogram. The prepackaged lumps of cereals, additives and mechanically recovered meat were more expensive gram for gram than cheese, steak or a nice roast. That didn’t seem quite right to us.

We swapped to using cheese for a while – mostly because it kept longer than meat – but Lily wasn’t that keen so we decided to try making some homemade dog treats by dehydrating some meat instead: it would last longer than cheese and wouldn’t need refrigeration.