Blood, Sweat and Chicken Poop

After a few more hours of hard work this weekend my new border is slowly starting to look like I could start planting in it.  After the initial stage of putting in some edging and letting the chickens have a scratch around and deposit some poop, I've spent this weekend digging up, hoeing and raking the clumpy, root bound soil to a fine crumble.  I'm looking forward to sowing poppies, white allysium and wild flower seeds at Anzac weekend.  Plus a few herbs and winter lettuces.

Before

During - Can't wait till After shot - full of flowers and herbs

I keep changing my mind on what types of flowers I want.  I love cottage garden pinks, whites, blues and purples but love the contrast of blues and yellows - so I've got another flower bed planned for the other side of my garden!  The garden pictured above will be pinks, whites and splashes of red that come with my wild flowers, to admire from the bench under our cherry tree.  The other bed will have vibrant contrasts of oranges, blues and yellows.
In time I'll find what flowers and foliage types I like and mix well.  But in the mean time I'm just going to keep planting, learning and discovering.

 I've also turned my compost pile to find a huge barrow load of the best compost I've ever made - perfect for the huge crop of broad beans I've got planned for winter.

I was excited to find my Grape Hyacinths have come up too - despite the beating that the chicken gave them over summer.  Well, back to the garden, I've got to finish up my raking, plants some carrots, beets and lettuces so we have something to eat in winter.

Curried Pumpkin Soup - with Soda Bread and Spiced Pumpkin Seeds

With Pappa Bear recovering from a nasty virus, and starting to gain an appetite, a big hot soup was in order.  In a little over half an hour we were slurping up sweet and spicy soup and crusty soda bread, perfect for a rainy Autumn afternoon.

Curried Pumpkin Soup

2T Oil
2T Curry Powder
2 Onions, diced
500-700g Pumpkin, 2cm cubes (I used 1/3 or a large Crown Pumpkin)
Salt and Pepper
1-2C Milk

1 Soda Bread - recipe here...

To serve - Spiced pumpkin seeds (see bottom of recipe)

Start off by putting the soda bread in the oven.
In a 4L pot heat oil over a med-low heat.  Add curry powder and onion and cook until onion is soft, about 5 minutes.  If the curry powder starts to catch just add a splash of water to the pan, no need for more oil.  Add pumpkin, dash of salt and pepper and add enough water to just cover, bring to a simmer.  Cover and continue to simmer for 20 minutes or so till pumpkin is tender.  Remove from heat and mash or whiz with wand blender till smooth.  The soup will be a thick puree at this stage so stir in enough milk to thin down to thick creamy soup.

Serve up with hot crusty soda bread, butter and spiced pumpkin seeds.

Spiced Pumpkin Seeds
For extra HEAT put a tablespoon of oil over medium heat, add a teaspoon of chilli flakes and sizzle for half a minute.  Add in handful pumpkin seeds and cook until they pop - serve seeds and oil on the side to sprinkle over hot soup.

Feijoa Jam - Easy Peasy!

After collecting roughly 8 kilos of Fiejoas in 2 days from our monster tree it was time to make jam.  Looking over a few recipes and trying to remember what I made last year, my sister-in-law and I just made it up as we went.  The result was golden, delicious jam - what else could come from fiejoas!  Next time I plan on adding ginger - a favourite combination of mine.

Fiejoas anyone?

Feijoa Jam
Makes 4 medium jars

1kg Feijoas, roughly peeled, ends removed and quartered
3/4C Water
2C White Sugar
1t Citric Acid (or juice of one lemon)

Gently simmer feijoas with water, mashing every now and then, till pulpy.  Stir in sugar and citric acid and boil for 5-10 minutes until at setting point (put a drop on a frozen saucer, sit for a minute and if the surface wrinkles when touched it's done).

Pack into sterilized jars.  Easy!

To sterilize jars put clean jars into at 120C oven for 20 minutes and boil the lids in water for 15.  My lids are getting a bit on the old and warped side so I used cellophane tops - you can get these from the supermarket for about $2.

If you double the recipe, don't quite double the water, start with another half measure and add more if you need to.

Golden and Delicious

Another patch of lawn transforming into garden

After a very relaxed few days with Nana visiting and a boost of energy from doing alot more excercise I got stuck into my flower bed.

For the past 5 months a long pile of bricks has been sitting along the edge of my vege garden fence.  For a couple of those months some bricks were also laid down as a border for the path/edging that will enclose my flower garden.  A few weeks ago I got around to spraying the grass to begin the transformation.  And finally today, after just an hour of moving, digging and ramming bricks into place I have 3.5m of my edging in, nearly halfway done.  I'm not laying the bricks down with concrete or sand - I'm not sure if the garden will stay that size - it's 'non-committal' edging, that I can move, or remove as needed.

Before - bricks that need moving and an edge ready to be set into the ground

After: 3.5m of bricks laid into the ground and chickens turning the soil for me

A handful of my chickens are now happily scratching around in the freshly disturbed soil.  I'm going to make a cup of tea and sit on my bench to watch them help finish the job for me.

Lemon Chicken

Lemony Henny Penny!  Reasonably quick and super yummy dinner - not the best healthy option but I wanted to try a super fast and hot cooking method with our home kill chicken, to see if it was still tender like the slow roasted rooster.

Lemon Chicken
Serves 6


For the Chicken
Boneless, Skinless Chicken Pieces from 1 chicken
1 Free Range Egg
1t Soy Sauce
Pinch Salt
1T Water
1/2 C Flour

For the Sauce
Zest of 1 Lemon
Juice of 2 Lemons
1 1/2C Water
2T Grated Root Ginger
2T Cornflour
1-3T Sugar (sweeten to taste)


Oil for shallow frying (we use Canola)

Spring Onion, thinly sliced to serve
 
Pound chicken pieces between 2 sheets of baking paper to 5mm thick.  Whisk egg, soy sauce, salt and water together.  Coat chicken evenly in flour, egg mixture then flour again, set aside in a single layer while you prepare sauce (the secret to a crispy coating is to let it go gooey by sitting it for 10 minutes or so).
To make the sauce mix everything together and bring to boil, stirring continuously till thickened.  Cover and set aside.
Heat 1cm of oil in a fry pan over medium heat.  The oil is ready when a wooden spoon handle inserted into the oil makes bubbles (sounds weird but you'll see what I mean - I think it's the moisture in the wood being turned into steam).  Gently lay chicken in the pan, 2 pieces at a time. Cook for about 2 minutes on each side.  Drain on a kitchen towel.  Top up oil as needed.
Slice chicken into bites sized pieces and serve drizzled with sauce and sprinkled with spring onion.  We had ours with sticky white and brown rice and vege (our garden has slowed down so frozen peas and corn where our only option with a green grocer visit well over due).

We were super chuffed that our home kill chicken can withstand such a fast and hot cooking method and still be tender and moist.  Looking forward to new recipes with our other birds over the cooler months before we up our meat bird breeding numbers for next year.

The end of growing season - How we kill a bird

With the mornings getting colder and growing season coming to an end it came time to cull our meat birds.  Over Spring and Summer the birds put on muscle and a good amount of fat reasonably fast - but in the cold winter months they stay skiny and weedy from spending their energy trying to keep warm.  With the help of Poppa and Uncle Bears we killed, plucked and gutted 5 birds in about an hour at the weekend - we're getting very effient.  If you don't want to know how to kill a bird don't read the italic below:

If you're wondering how we kill our birds, here goes:  To process our birds we quickly and quietly take one out of sight of the other birds, they are then hung upside down where for some reason they go limp and very relaxed. With a hand closed over their head they are lowered into a dust bin with a clean liner.  With a razor sharp knife, a lot of pressure and a swift cut the head is removed, starting at the back of the neck (boney side) all the way through to the front (arteries and wind pipe).  After killing quite a few birds this is the quickest method we have found, the neck is broken and nerves severed instantly.  Hold the bird in the bin while it flaps around for about a minute then slide neck first into a flax bush (or hang over a bucket).  They need to bleed out for 15-30 minutes.  After bleeding they are plunged into nearly boiling water for about 8 seconds, until the breast feathers are pulled very easily from the carcass.  Hang the bird over a bucket and get plucking, pulling the large wing and tail feathers out one a time so the skin is not torn.  Have a hose or bucket of clean water near by to get feathers off your hands every now and then to make the job easier.  Rinse the bird with the hose and get ready to get a bit smelly.  Remove the feet and then you want to remove the gizzard (the food sack at the bottom of the neck).  Do this by removing the skin up to 2cm from the base of the neck.  Next feel which side the gizzard is sitting and gently work the skin away from down the neck and over the top of the gizzard.  Then work your finger around the bottom of the gizzard.  Once separated gently pull the gizzard up out of the bird until you can see the tube that feeds the stomach, cut gizzard away from the bird.  Pull wind pipe out of the neck too, you don't need to cut this, just give it a good tug.  Next pinch the skin over the stomach of the bird (vertically) then with a sharp knife cut along the natural seam in the skin to 1cm above the vent - you may need to do this a few times to get the depth of the cut right - to get through the abdomen lining, but not so far that you cut the innards.  Continue this cut to the tip of the bone on each side the the vent (the Pubis) making sure you don't cut the intestines.  You you can now reach inside the bird and pull out the innards.  After practice I have learnt to slip my fingers under the liver and then pull, the liver comes out cleanly and intact this way, so it can be easily cut it away (I'm keeping mine to make pate).  Reach back in and make sure everything is removed, you will probably have to scrape the lungs away from the rib cage, they never come away first time.  With everything removed you can cut the rest of the way around the vent and you're done.  Give the bird one final rinse inside and out. Double bag and rest in the fridge for 2 days before cooking or freezing.

Our meat birds were 18 weeks old with full long legs, meaty breasts and thin to medium layer of fat.  Well, mostly, the one hen out of the bunch was considerably fatter compared to the others.  I guess it was because she was due to start developing her very hard working reproductive system to make eggs everyday and had built up extra fat stores to help her through the transformation.

After resting in the fridge for 2 days the four roosters were packed away in the freezer for winter meals, the hen was skinned and butchered into 6 large pieces (2 breast, 2 thigh and 2 leg fillets) and 2 lions.  I will post our lemon chicken recipe soon.

Roasted Rooster

Our first rooster was somewhat of a success - slow cooked coconut curry.  It tasted amazing and fell of the bone, but it still had a slight stringiness to it which was a bit disappointing and left Pappa Bear unconvinced of all our efforts to raise our own chickens for the table.  I was determined to make the next rooster a success, and boy was it!

After finding out the stringiness is due to cooking our bird while in early stages of Rigor Mortis I read up on resting and hanging birds after slaughter.  For home-kill chickens it's recommended you hang the carcass for 1 to 4 days in a cool place (cool being 10-12 Celsius).  Yeah right!  Like I'm going to find somewhere that cool in February.  With hanging our rooster out of the question I investigated other ways of resting a chicken after slaughter.  Another method I found was resting the chicken in the fridge for 48 hours, easy enough, so we gave it a try.

After killing, plucking and dressing our noisiest crowing rooster I tucked it into plastic tray, wrapped it in a plastic bag and let it sit on the top shelve in our fridge for 2 days.  On the first day the muscles still felt a little on the stiff side, but by day 2 the rooster was soft and floppy like you find it at the supermarket.  Apples and lemon on hand from the garden I went in search of herbs that matched the scent of the fruit.  Tarragon and sage came back inside with me.  After 2 hours of slow roasting (supermarket chicken may only take an hour and a half) the rooster turned out beautifully and we all gave a big sigh of relief - home kill rooster is a wonderfully tender and tasty meal and has been worth the effort.  One more success as we learn to live the Good Life.

The leg bone looks massive, and it is - this is what chicken looks like when it's not
killed as a baby (5-7 weeks) like they are commercially.

Slow Roasted Rooster

1 Rooster (or free range chicken)
1 Apple, washed
1 Lemon, washed
1T Butter
Tarragon and Sage, a few sprigs of each
Salt

1/2 C White Wine
1T Butter

Heat over to 150C.  Cut apple and lemon into wedges, removed seeds and stuff into cavity.  Chop up herbs and mix with the butter, push and massage butter under the breast skin.  Sprinkle a little salt over the bird and tuck into an oven bag (or covered roasting dish).  Bake for 1.5-2 hours till juices run clear and meat is falling off the bone.

Put chicken aside, cover and rest while you make the sauce.  Strain roasting juices into a pan and add the wine and butter.  Bring to a simmer and reduce by half.  We had a ours with left over cucumber mango salsa and creamy mash.