Where Food Comes From

On Saturday we caught and started slaughtering a chicken, but were unable to finish. I did not tie the chickens feet or hold it tight enough while cutting it’s neck. I searched for two hours looking for the hen that was half cut and did not find her until two days later. She is fine and healthy barely more than a scratch on her thanks to a dull knife.
Thursday we decided to try again and were lucky enough to catch our 2nd rooster which we do not need. I’ll give you a basic outline of what we did in our slaughtering and processing of the chicken.

1. Cut both sides of the neck and held the chicken upside down until it had completed draining
2. Scalded the chicken (to make removing the feathers easier) and plucked the feathers, which was the lengthy part of all of this.
3. Removed the head, feet, “guts,” heart, and lungs
4. Cut into parts and grilled
5. Ate as a meal with store bought potatoes and our own homegrown cucumbers
If you want detailed instructions this is where we got our information at
How to Butcher a Chicken

The chicken did not taste like “store bought chicken” because it was not a meat chicken. It was a game rooster. We did not love the taste of it, but enjoyed the whole process and felt good learning and experiencing something new that will be a wonderful life skill.

Having Sol watch the whole process with fascination may have been the best part of all. Sol seeing where food comes from is so awesome and knowing that this will be his life and he will have an appreciation for food, life, and animals excites Sandi and I both. He was in fact eating a pear off of our own pear tree in the backyard as I slaughtered the chicken. What a wonderful picture of what we hope our life will always be like in the future.

'Garden Success and Failure

Here are some pictures of the wonderful bounty we are getting from our slapped together gardens. We have cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, sunflowers, and pears that are ready to be picked and watermelons, catalopes, oakra, banana peppers (courtesy of Hidden Haven), and potatoes all growing that will be good within a week or two. Our pumpkins completely died. I have included a pictures of that as well. We are still very excited and feel ready to continue on with our journey of making our life better.

This last week we decided to make food instead of buying fast food on the road. We made a list for every meal with what we needed to buy and stuck to it! We ate every meal according to the plan. This is a huge step towards a better life for us. Being on the road 12 hrs a day some days it is hard to make yourself not eat fast food, but we not only were able to bring the food from home we enjoyed it and are excited to continue.
As a side note last month we decided no more sodas to start making us healthier and we have not had a soda in over a month. We will be posting a list of items we plan to eliminate from our diet monthly to slowly improve our eating without trying to attack everything at once.

We got our first full months electric bill since we turned off all of the lights and air conditioning and were very excited to see what difference, if any, it made.

Previous months bill $184.00
This months bill $ 40.00
Savings of $144.00

This was not our reasoning for not using a/c or lights, but it sure is incentive to keep it up!
We are planning to slaughter at least one chicken today. We will be posting on this in a few days.
Chris, Sandi, and Sol

Vacation

Our family has taken a few long weekends in a row to relax and have a vacation. So we will be picking our posts back up and have plans to start slaughtering our chickens this week. We will document all of this as we go and will let you know how they taste. Our vacation was great and thanks for waiting around for us.
Chris Sandi and Sol.
P.S. We are so excited to get moving full speed ahead look forward to great things.