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.