Feathers. Feathers EVERYWHERE!!!!!

Warning! Beware! Food ahead! If you are unaware of where your food comes from, and you might get uncomfortable finding out, please stop reading now. If you continue to read, you will see a cute little chicken become dinner.

 I am going to preface the business part of this post with a little quark I have. I hear a lot of people talk about getting "backyard chickens" or "I'm getting chickens so I can have fresh eggs everyday la la la." Now what most of these people do not think about is that some day, they may actually have to kill one of them. They have gone their entire life without ever seeing an animal killed and the thought of it is not pleasant for them. While chickens are fun to watch. They leave you delicious packages of protein every day. They help control bugs. Chickens have many beneficial traits. However, they are also an animal, that can get sick, hurt, killed, etc. So if you have never seen and animal killed, what are you going to do when the times comes where you have to, to end the suffering of an animal? Are you going to take your $2.99 chicken to the vet to be put to sleep? The only logical choice is for you to do it yourself. So, if you want to get chickens, goats, sheep, alpacas, etc, please find a farm that will let you experience the slaughter process from start to finish. You have to be able to handle the blood, the bone cracking, the feather ripping, reaching your hand into the animal and pulling the guts out, the smell. The smell will get a lot of people. It smells like death I think, but I am used to it as I have harvested numerous deer over the years and I'm good at not breathing through my nose.

 HA Okay, onto business!! We had a chicken get beat up and torn up. She had a lot of feathers ripped from her back, which was bleeding. She had a broken leg, I'm guessing a rooster maybe got at her and since she was small she wasn't able to hold up his weight. Nonetheless, she was not long for this world as the other ladies were attacking her when Becca got home and pulled her out. She was placed into the penalty box so she would not be harassed any more. She needed to be put down because I don't think there was any coming back from this. First since Kal was working our friend DJ was out to do a little hunting so Becca put him to work before he headed out to the woods. First order of business was cleaning the blood from the previous nights deer out of the truck. Fella's, FYI, your ladies do not like to open the tailgate to put in groceries and find blood all over the truck where she wants to put bread. She even called and said some not so lady like things to Kal and when DJ arrived, made sure to repeat them!

He then went on to build the "chicken cone" which we would use to hold the chickens while the deed was done.

After the cone is finished and hung up somewhere, we decided to hang it where all the other animal business happens, the "Quad-pod". Hold the chicken by the legs and place them upside down into the cone. Once you get the chickens head out of the cone you can take a knife and make a cut in the neck. This will allow the heart to continue to pump, removing most of the blood for you. For this part, please make sure you have a sharp knife, you will need to get the knife between the feathers and down to the skin. Quills are very strong, and even a sharp knife can have trouble getting through them.

While you are doing the above part, you will want to have a pot of hot water ready. Temps vary depending on what you read, but we did it at about 165*-170*

When the chicken is about done, it may spasm a little bit. Once the blood has stopped draining you can remove the lady from the cone and dip her in your hot water to loosen the feathers. It took only 20-30 seconds I think. Kind of dunk her in and out, you need the water to get under the feathers and down to the skin. I tested a spot on the leg and when the feathers came right of I figured she was ready.

Start pulling feathers. And pull some more feathers. Then, pull a couple more. Then pull the rest.

The next part you have to get your hand dirty, so to speak. Next you need to remove the guts. Now, we have never been one to eat necks, gizzards, livers, etc. So, Kal was not too careful about saving the organ meats. This was his first one, so it was a bit of a learning experience for Kal. Next ones should be much easier though since he figured out what was connected to where and by what.

Now that those parts are out of the way, get up in there and make sure it's cleaned out LOL

We then took it next door for the neighbor to check over, Thanks Kandi. She thought Kal did a pretty good job. Then we took it home and put it in some cold water. Rinsed it off well and pulled out a lot of pin feathers that were left. After letting it sit in the water and cool for a bit we put it in a bag and into the freezer for later.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to make comments on any of our posts. We can see the number of views go up and get the comments on Facebook but we still feel like it would be super cool to have some comments here!

And since there isn't much to smile about in this post, here's a picture of Kal getting ready to cut up a deer. HA

Canning and other such things.

So we have been doing a little canning over the last few weeks. Two types of meat, and some free apples that turned into delicious applesauce. It's not mushy. No body likes mushy applesauce!

First off, BACON!
This was an experiment with a friend of ours that had gotten some precooked ready to eat bacon. By some, we'll just go with a whole metric ton. By gotten, it worked out to be $.65 a package.

Now, we know what you are thinking, "Precooked, ready to eat bacon?" Yes, exactly. Turns out, this is not actually blasphemous to real bacon. It was pretty tasty and not slimy like we had expected. We packed our pressure canner, into the truck and headed off to the "city" to our friends house, where the bacony goodness began.

The packages had I think 12 oz or bacon in them separated by sheets of wax paper. Made the jar packing job much easier since we didn't have to mess with cutting paper and layering bacon on them. We pulled the bacon out of the packages and stacked them into a pan. We decided that 5 sheets of bacon was the magic number that would roll into the shape of a quart size jar. We rolled them up and stuffed them into the jar, then added another 5 sheets rolled up and stuffed on top. For the mathematically challenged, that is 10 sheets of bacon, with 4 pieces per sheet, so 40 pieces of bacon per jar. In total we canned 14 quarts of bacon, it was one of the most delicious smelling experiments we have done. In case you are wondering, they are only upside down because we were playing with the grease.

We also came home with a tire to make a tire swing for the kids. Plus a "quiet" pellet gun for Kal to take hunting to encourage squirrels to be quiet, for good.

The bacon was canned 1 week ago today, so we had to test it out. We decided that if it would keep for a week, it would keep for a month or longer. Lilly has been counting down the days until B-Day (Bacon-Day) where Lilly and the rest of the Kalina family would storm the beaches of Porkandy and deliver a crushing blow to the ranks of the Piggy Army. Kal actually had to tell Lilly. "If you say bacon and cheese quesadilla's one more time, you get a peanut butter sandwich while we all eat the bacon." She complied.

Step 1: Grab jar of bacon and open it with Lilly at your heels.

Step 2: Chop it into pieces, with Lilly hovering.

Step 3: Add it onto a tortilla with some cheese and spices with Lilly drooling close by.

Step 4: Throw on griddle with some butter and smack Lilly's hand with a flipper thingy.

Step 5: Make them disappear.
(Insert picture of empty plates here)



Second off, APPLESAUCE!
We were given a mess of apples so we had to turn them into delicious "not mushy" applesauce. Pretty standard stuff here really. Peel apple. Chop apples. Place in pot, add a bit of water, some sugar, and a few cinnamon sticks and cook them down. During this process of cooking down the apples, you can pass the time by having a discussion with your teenage daughter about boys. FUN!!! This diversion, was not much of a diversion at all.

Step 1: Peel and feed them to woodland creatures that you are trying to put in your freezer, more on that later.

Step 3: Yes I know I skipped one, but you get the idea. Cook them down for hours while talking about purity and that boys should treat girls as princesses of The King. It doesn't make the apples cook down any quicker.

Step 4: Fill jars with delicious applesauce, not mushy.
Step 5: Water bath time. Run a nice hot bath in a canner. Put on some relaxing jazz music, grab a glass of your favorite brew, and just kick back and relax. Or, just put the jars in boiling water for about 20 minutes.

Third off, VENISON!
So Friday morning Kal got his first deer of the year. Wootity woot woot! (so says Becca)

He was a good size buck that earned us quite a bit of meat. Tonight we underwent the chore of turning legs, rib cage, assorted other hunks of flesh into delicious MEAT! We turned the back strap and tenderloin into steaks. Thirty six steaks went into the freezer, 9 went into the pan for supper and 6 were carved off yesterday for lunch during the mid day hunting break. Gabe was waiting all evening, not patiently at all, to run the grinder and "burgerize" the meat into hamburger. Being that with this deer we wanted to try our hand at canning some we only put up 8.5lbs of hamburger, guess Kal better get some more! We canned 8 quarts and 8 pints of cubed meat as well. Also have three full packages of ribs, for Sadie's birthday meal.

It's pretty simple. I'm not going to get into the full process right now of how to turn a deer into dinner, but I can later if ya'll want. Pretty much just cut the meat into chunks and stuff into a jar. We used quart jars so we added a tsp of canning salt on top of the meat and put a lid on it and pressure can for 90 minutes at 15 lbs of pressure.. You can add some onion flakes too, that Grandpa doesn't know are in there. LOL

A little before and after action for ya. The bubbles are only there because they were just out of the canner and it was still boiling.

Well, that covers this post for the night. Later Kal will be doing a write up on his "bear crack" that he attempted to lure a black bear in with.

Rascally Rabbits

BEWARE: If you are unaware of where meat comes from, there are photos in this blog post. Yes, there is blood. You have been warned.

We have sat around several times discussing that we should really be more intentional about making posts to this blog we created and for whatever reason "life" gets in the way. Tonight we decided that we will be doing mass postings of all our latest adventures.

Rabbits!

The rabbits are GONE! I guess gone isn't the appropriate word. Parts of them are still in the freezer. We came to the decision to go ahead an slaughter the rabbits because of the plans we have this winter. Our plan was to "start over" after January. After you read the entire story, you will see why that was the plan!

The first rabbit was chosen because of her attitude. She really was a mean little something. Kal took her out of the cage after donning his mechanics gloves. She had a reputation of being a bit bitey and aggressively violent. After exiting the cage, Lincoln thought it would be the perfect opportunity to have a bite, of her. She wasn't pleased. We are not sure if you are aware, but rabbits scream. Like little girls with a terrifying squeal. It was not pleasant. With that, she was even meaner than normal so Kal decided to just get it over with and break her neck. He was tugging and pulling. He "thought" he did the job! That was until the rabbit was hung up on our "resourceful quad-pod". He cut her throat and that is when the flailing began. We anticipated the blood drain so we had a pail in place. Too bad blood doesn't stream straight down when the poor rabbit isn't actually dead and is flopping around dying a messy death. Lesson learned. Do not attempt to snap the neck of rabbit without professional viewing in person. YouTube made it look simple! It was not. Becca watched a YouTube video as well about the broomstick method. We decided to give it a go. We found a small (but long) metal pipe. Kal picked the second rabbit. He came out of his cage fairly nicely. He was held upside down until he calmed. This is because all the blood was rushing to his head. Once calm, he was laid on the ground with his front feet and head in front of the pipe. Becca and Sadie stepped, gently, on the pipe and Kal gave a good pull and the neck was snapped and the rabbit was dead. SIMPLE! This rabbit was then hung on the "resourceful quad-pod" and throat cut, skinned and put in a pot. The third rabbit went just as well as the second rabbit. Below are the photos of this adventure.

Here are the rabbits from when we first got them.

Rabbit number one hanging from the "resourceful quad-pod"

Cut the throat to drain all the blood.

Realizing that the rabbit wasn't dead and it flopping around, getting blood everywhere, Kal was holding it until it finished dying and bleeding out.

Starting to skin, cut around a leg, not too deep as you do not want to cut the tendons, and pull the skin down.

Continuing to pull. Dislocating the tail is needed in order to remove the skin.

After the skin is pulled all the way down to the neck, the front legs need to be pulled to the foot. Once at the foot, the tissue around the foot is cut and the foot is broken off.

After the feet are removed, the head is then removed.

The process of removing the front feet is then repeated on the back feet. Making sure to have someone to hold or your rabbit will be hitting the ground.

And there you have it, a fully skinned rabbit, ready for a pot!

This is the "bucket o bits" or "gut bucket"! This is a must, you don't want that stuff hanging out in your grass! Don't worry if you spill some, your dog will eat it. You have a dog right???

This rabbit is number two and truly dead before starting. Sadie was a little concerned that it would start flopping. It did not. We learned!

This is the broomstick method. Use this. You don't need the pipe, you can use a broomstick!

Three rabbits in a pot!

Chopping them up into pieces for cooking.

Kal giving a little kiss. Really it was to make Lincoln jealous. He really wanted to eat that. He did! He was such a happy dog!

That is basically it. I made a really yummy bacon and sour cream sauce (That will be yummy to repeat on some other kind of meat later) and we ate a rabbit that night.

Lilly LOVED it, Kal said it was okay, Sadie said it wasn't terrible but it wasn't good, Gabriel cried he hated it so much and Becca threw up in the trash can. So 2.5 of us really never want to eat rabbit again. We no longer have a rabbit hutch. The very next day, we traded the rabbit hutch for a bow and 12 arrows for Kal. It was a great trade.