I choose to eat my hens at three years. They are considered “old” by then but a chicken’s life span of five to ten years. Apparently the oldest recorded chicken was fourteen years old. Commercial farms slaughter chickens at six weeks and some free range and organic farms at fourteen weeks.

A three year old hen has some distinct differences in the quality of meat. The skin and meat is tougher and the bird has more fat. These facts lend to a different texture and more distinct flavor. Not knowing what that meant and if there are known recipes for old hens, I called my mom to ask if she recalls what her parents did with older hens. She said, “Do you know what Mexican’s call old hens?” Eager to know our cultural term that refers to a particular stage of chicken developmental, I said “no, what?!” Her answer, “mole.” Nyuck nyuck mom. Though traditionally mole is made with turkey, as chickens are not native to the Americas. But I get the point, stew the bird long and pack the dish with flavor robust enough to stand up to its “henniness.”

Turns out this is a pretty well known fact. There seems to be many recipes for old hens. In fact, it turns out that old hens have grown in popularity and are even in demand, at least according to the New York Times. Apparently, though the meat is not as tender, the flavor of an old hen lends itself to a sweet and tasty stock.

Beeton’s Book of Household Management says an old fowl that is no longer good for even eating, is best for stock. For the old girls that are still tender enough to eat, they need to stew for a few hours. A few dishes that can accommodate the flavor and length of time required include:

Caldo de Gallina Viejo; Mole Negro; Mole Colorado; Mole Pipian; Chicken Adobo; Chicken Mull; Coq Au Vin

There are many recipes for cooking the innards, specifically, the neck, liver, heart, gizzards, testes, ovaries (little yolks inside hen), and the kidney. The heart, liver and gizzards are collectively called the “giblets.” a quick peak in the Oxford English Dictionary revealed that the word “giblets” dates back to 1303 when it was first used in Middle English to describe an unessential appendage in the passage:

“A messe ys ynoghe for pe pe touper gyblot, late hyt be.” okay?

The Joy of Cooking says that gizzards and hearts make a good stew. Traditionally, they are chopped up and used in stuffing for the bird. The liver can be sautéed and also ground for pâté. Backs, necks and feet (really well cleaned) can be used for stock. Chicken feet can also be prepared Dim Sum style.

For free style cooks, Chow.com offers a nice description of flavor affinities for chicken:

Balsamic vinegar, basil, black pepper, carrots, chipotle chiles, cilantro, cinnamon, cumin, garlic, ginger, honey, lemons, mushrooms, mustard, olive oil, olives, onions, red wine, rice wine, rosemary, sage, savory, soy sauce, tarragon, thyme, tomatoes, white wine.

Cooking a rooster tends toward the same recipes. Though, I recently cooked a cockrel with someone that said you could cook the cockrel the same day it was killed. We did this and made adobo. It came out great. So I am back to being confused about whether you need to chill a bird for two days before cooking or not.

I recently read this quote from Anderson’s La Costa Nursery’s monthly tips:

“The best way to garden is to put on a wide brimmed strawhat and some old clothes. And, with a hoe in one hand and a cold drink in the other, tell your husband where to dig.”

Does this actually work? When my husband has joined me outside to dig, within five minutes he is asking if we have any diesel fueled equipment that would be less work and more “efficient.” I’ve actually found is easier to just do the digging myself and keep the passion and enthusiasm for fresh food alive in the household.

Are there women out there that can actually hold a cold drink in one hand while pointing with the other where their husband will spend the next hour or so busting his nalgas*?

Please, tell me how it’s done.

*nalgas = buttocks

“Hi. My name is Esperanza and I have no control over myself when I am around packets of seeds.”…”Hi Esperanza.” I started off looking for Watermelon Radish seeds for the winter garden. They are really tasty and such a beauty to pull out of the ground in the cold months. I didn’t find any and I don’t want to order them (because I’m not supposed to buy more seeds until I use up most of what I have already). Somehow I still ended up with a handful of [cool!] seeds. My only explanation, seeds are magic and clearly their magic has cast a spell on me that causes me to behave so. Yup.

But just imagine, if you will, taking a Thelma Sanders Sweet Potato squash and making a pie! The filling would appear as plain as white custard but no! It would in fact be a sweet pumpkin pie! Or maybe I could have an austere dinner of black garbanzo beans and baked white squash. Well, whatever, I’m going to go plant the purslane right now. My Thanksgiving herb bed is slow growing and has too many gaps between plants.

Yesterday was the last day of summer. The harvest brought in pears, a couple of apples and a load of figs. All excellent ingredients for a last day of summer tart. After a phone call to my encyclopedic pastry chef sister, I was able to pull off a decent pastry cream and nutty tart crust. Thanks Amanda!

Its been a good summer and now is time to cozy up for the cool approach of fall, one of my favorite seasons. It is also time for making preserves for the winter and planting a winter garden!

The last of our summer berries went to jam. Now is also the time to make notes on the summer’s crops. My tomatoes eeked out this year. This was farmer’s error. I over used the bed they are in and did not give back to it the proper nourishment. This was a small scale representation of the soil depletion that happens to farmland after monocropping. The patch will have to be dedicated to nitrogenous cover crops over the winter. Everything else seems to be growing well. The pumpkin patch is taking over the yard (in a good way). There is still a month of warm to cool weather left before it starts getting too crisp in the evenings. This means, several cool season crops can be planted now for a edible winter garden. All manner of leafy greens will grow, like lettuce but especially cruciferous greens (collards, kales, cabbages). Roots like carrots, parsnips, turnips, radishes, rutabagas and beets can be planted. Many bean varieties will grow now as well. Broccoli, spinach, chard can be planted too. It is best to get these winter crops in the ground before October. Happy autumnal equinox!

It was really really hard to stay inside reading and writing for my thesis when 1) it was beautiful outside 2) the turkeys keep getting into my pumpkin patch and 3) I had a helper to assist me to stop the turkeys (thanks Dezirae!). So, weak as I am, I found myself outside building a scarecrow or “scare turkey” to be exact. I wanted to know if they actually work. Well…plus it was really fun. So Ms. Dezirae helped me figure out how to fashion a lovely scarecrow using an old peasant dress I found (in my basement oddly). One of the best parts are the steel washers we sewed to the bottom of the dress. They chime prettily in the wind.

It was fun. It came out quite nice. But alas, I do not think it will scare the turkeys away from that patch for long. Though there were initial and hopeful odd sounds followed by backing away. For those of us out there that have planted a seed and nurtured the delicate seedlings to maturity, each day tending, watching, no, adoring their growth, we know that when an animal shatters our dream of harvest, a war has been waged. I know this personally to be true. It was also apparent when I went looking for online discussions on scarecrows and their effectiveness. Someone asked, “has anyone here tried a random sequence of different scarecrow types, set up at randomized intervals of, say, 5 to 15 days? Or know of such an experiment?” Sigh, isn’t there any easier way than keeping a stack of scarecrows on hand and rotating them every few days? At that rate, you may as well stand out there with a broom and shoosh the birds away.

Another person found that placing old garden hose cut to about 2 to 3 feet in a snaky position each day, kept crows permanently out of the young corn. Impressive. I have no idea if my turkeys have a snake fearing instinct. Maybe if I used 12″diameter sump pump hose it’d be more believable. I am happy to try the garden hose out though. At the very least, I can place some on my seed table to keep little bandit brown birds from continuously trashing my seed boxes. It was important with the hose approach to move the hose position each day. Apparently, birds know a decoy when they see one…

I have an urban farm for the relationship to the soil, connection to life cycles and richer understanding of food it creates. After my initial broccoli confusion, I was committed to dig deep to learn how to grow, raise, and prepare my own food. I chose to have a flock of chickens for the memories of my grandfather’s flock as well as for fresh eggs, nitrogen rich manure for compost, and meat. To that end, this post is about the process of preparing my hens for dinner. Growing up in cities for most of my life, I had next to zero knowledge of how to do this. Instead of helping my gramps as a teenager, I was being “cool” with my friends and walking around complaining about having nothing to do. As adult this left me with having to do research information on best methods for killing a chicken, how to pluck and how to eviscerate. I will eventually get around to posting on the different methods out there, pros and cons. For now, I will describe my chosen methods.

My friend Omar came over for moral support and to lend a helping hand. The first thing I did was out a pot of water to boil for plucking, then wash and sterilize the surface on which we’d be working. I then spent a good amount of time sharpening my knives so all cuts would be fast and sure. I keep three knives on hand, a chef knife, a boning knife and a paring knife. We next arranged a wheelbarrow with straw under a traffic cone that had been drilled to the side of the sink. The traffic cone had been cut so the hole was ~4″ in diameter.

I next gathered the chosen hen, a three year old hen whose egg laying had tapered off. I placed her in the come head first so that she could not flap around.

I held the hens head carefully but firmly to the side and made a quick and deep incision to the jugular vein. The image of avian anatomy has the vein marked lower on the neck but the vein runs all the way up the head. The most accessible spot is beneath the lower jaw. After the hen was bled and died (a very brief period), we removed her from the cone and dunked her in the pot of scalding water that had been prepared before hand.

Omar did the plucking which went really fast and did not require too much pulling but rather a rubbing motion took the feathers right out. A last dip in the scalding water helped remove tougher wing feathers.

We then had to remove the head and feet.

I have not found an “easy” way to remove the head. It seems to just take force to get through the neck bones. As for the feet, I bend the foot in the opposite direction of it’s natural bend and the leg cartilege frees itself. Once that is done, I can take my boning knife and cut around the leg cartilege, freeing the foot.

The next step is to open a flap of skin around the neck and gently follow the trachea and esophagus down to the crop which can be hard to spot. The crop is like a sack that lays closely against the birds breast. It is recommended that the bird not eat for a 24 hour period in order to minimize the contents of its digestive system. In the photo included I circled the crop in red. Once the crop is located this portion (crop, trachea, esophagus) is removed. The neck also needs to be removed. I cut the neck at the base. Apparently one can pull it out but even Omar “Strong As An Ox” could not remove the neck this way.

We then flipped the bird over and removed it’s uropygial gland located at the base of the spine.

It does not take much to cut the gland off. The next part of evisceration is the second hardest for me. The first being actually killing the hen. To remove the remaining innards of the chicken, you have to delicately slice around the cloaca. It is important to note here that there is a good chance that feces will come out of the cloaca, and yuck dirty. I had a squeeze bottle of diluted hydrochloric acid (HCl) off to the side in case. Should it have occurred, the best thing to do to avoid contamination is STOP. Wash off the bird. Set the bird off to the side while you clean your station completely and spray with the HCl. There are alternatives to bleach for cleaning a surface. A researcher, Susan Sumner, Professor and Department Head of Food Science and Technology at Virginia Tech, studied the effect of using common vinegar and then spraying hydrogen peroxide as a disinfectant on a surface, and even straight on food, kills virtually all Salmonella, Shigella, or E. coli bacteria on heavily contaminated food. Yet each ingredient on its own in small amounts is nontoxic. My recommendation is use HCl on the surface and the other combo on the bird for extra measure, if need be.

After cutting around the cloaca, we laid it to the side. Then widened the hole AROUND the intestines leading to the cloaca. It is extremely important to not puncture the intestines. Once the hole was wider, I gently insert my bare hand keeping it along the breast bone and away from delicate organs as much as possible.

Once my hand was in there, I could feel for the opening I’d made by removing the neck. I scooped around the organs (which are encased in a membrane sac) and carefully scoop everything out. Most everything came out at once except for ovaries and lungs.

Though everything is “out” it is actually still attached by the large intestine to the cloaca. I had to take my sharp knife and cut the remaining skin around the cloaca and then the innards were removed. To remove the ovaries and lungs, I had to pry them lose with my fingers. The lungs are a bit tricky because they are so flat and protected against the “ribs” coming off of the spine.

We then rinsed the chicken, weighted it (3.0 lbs and 3.5 lbs for each), and placed the carcass in a pot or container with lid filled with water and ice and placed this in the fridge. I have been told by multiple sources that chickens require being chilled for two days before cooking to ensure they are not rubbery. I would imagine this is even more so with older chickens. Also, note, older chickens not only make perfectly good eats, they have grown in popularity according to the New York Times article: Old Chickens Never Die, They Just Bubble Away.

Each bird took about 40 minutes, not including time to clean in between birds. We placed the remains in a paper bag with the straw and feathers in the wheelbarrow. In Alameda County, the composting program accepts food scraps, including meat and bones, so I put it in my green bin.

There are some blogs and listservs that may be helpful for those considering eating the chickens from their own flock. I found the blog, How To Butcher a Chicken the most helpful. I have also looked to both Dom Birds and Organic Chicken yahoo listservs for all manner of chicken related questions.

Recipes to follow.