Country Girl

Well, y’all, I’m bushed.

My whole life I’ve been a city girl, but now I think I’m finally getting my stripes as a full-fledged country girl!

And let me tell you – it is exhausting!

The last five days I’ve been doing things I never, ever, in a million years, would have imagined I would do, and worked harder than I ever have.

To start with, Thursday was procurement day for us. In the SAD (Standard American Diet) world, this would be called “grocery shopping”. In our world, it’s a little different.

It began with a trip to the health food co-op, where I picked up potatos. You remember how I buy those, right? In 50 pound bags?

Then it was off for blueberries. My mom called and asked for the name of the place I’d found that had organic blueberries. In all the frantic-ness of June, I’d completely forgotten to go pick blueberries!

By the time I called that day, they were already done for the season.

So were all the other blueberry farms I called, except for one. And I couldn’t get a person on the phone to ask if they were organic or not, just a recorded message saying they still had berries.

In the end I decided to just drive over and ask in person.

The lovely teenager working the sales booth on the farm was sweet, but didn’t know the answer. He did have some different phone numbers for me to try, though.

I called those, but wasn’t able to get any answers. Just voice mail.

It was crunch time, y’all. I HAD to hit the road to make our next appointment, and this farm was going to be done selling blueberries THAT DAY. 

So I decided to buy blueberries. Whether they turned out to be organic or not, they’d be okay for Jed and Darrel to eat, at least.

Some quick calculations and I figured 10 gallons would give us enough to last me and Zac a whole year if they turned out to be a safe food.

And if they’re not a safe food, well, we won’t have to buy blueberries for a really long time!

The boys really wanted to help the young man measure out our blueberries, and he was very sweet and indulgent of them.

We left the blueberry farm and headed off to one of my new sources of goat milk. She’s a very nice lady, and her home has a horse, goats, a big dog, kitty cats, kids, a trampoline, and lots of toys to play with!

Why, yes! My boys DID cry when we had to leave…how did you guess?

When I arrived home that day, this was what my “procurement day” looked like:

I’m just sayin’…that’s not your typical grocery shopping expedition! 50 pounds of potatos, 10 gallons of blueberries, and an ice chest with 2 gallons of raw goat milk.

July 4th found me and Darrel frantically freezing blueberries as fast as we could. The boys considered the bags of blueberries on the floor a ‘really nifty cool squishy pad’ to walk on, you see. We probably lost half a gallon to little boy foot steps before we got them all put away!

Saturday was going to be the day Darrel tilled up a new bed for the tomatos (that are almost not worth putting in the ground at this point in the season), but my parents told us over our cookout the night before that they’d decided to go ahead and butcher their chickens the next day and needed our help.

So we trekked over to my parents house to help instead.

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(If you’re a vegan, vegetarian, or especially squeamish, you should just stop reading RIGHT NOW. Pictures of the chicken butchering are coming up and I don’t want to upset anyone who would be bothered by that. Consider yourself warned!)

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I’ve never participated in killing a chicken before, so I didn’t know what to expect. My parents hadn’t ever done this as adults, either, and their memory of doing it as kids was a little hazy!

So they’d done research, and their awesome neighbor offered to come over and help. She used to be a chicken inspector for the USDA before she retired, so when it comes to chickens, she knows what she’s talking about!

They had a really cool set up arranged.

First, the chickens were tied upside down to a tree branch. Then they cut the heads off. The chickens would flap around (hence the saying “running around like a chicken with your head cut off”) but would eventually still, and then everyone would wait a bit until the blood drained out.

Then they’d untie the chickens and take them over to a turkey fryer that had been set up with boiling water.

A 10-15 second dunk in the boiling water, and then over to another tree branch where they were tied up and plucked.

Once the chickens were plucked, they were passed over to my Mom at the table, where she removed the feet and guts.

Mom kept the gullets and livers, but didn’t want to eat any other parts of the inside, so those went into a bucket for their neighbor lady’s pigs.

Then the chickens went in to an ice-filled ice chest until the chest was filled, at which time they drove it down to the house and put the chickens in the fridge.

The boys really enjoyed pretending to drive the lawn mower with the trailer of ice chests!

All told, they butchered 25 chickens on Saturday.

After the job was finished, the neighbor left with her pig food and we went in to the house to cut the chickens up for freezing.

Mom and Dad were really nice and gave us 12 of the 25 chickens to take with us; it’s the perfect “next protein” to trial on Zac since it will be over 24 months since his last exposure to chicken. 

For Mom and Dad, they wanted all evidence of the feathers removed. These were black feathered chickens, you see, and the place where the feathers grow out of the skin has small little bits of black remaining once they’ve been plucked.

The neighbor informed us that it is safe to eat; in fact, she said, we all eat it if we eat store bought chickens! It’s just the store-bought chickens are all white feathered, so you don’t see it or notice it when you buy the birds.

My parents know it’s safe to eat, but it just sort of bothers them to see bits of black on their chickens. I can’t say I blame them, but after we pulled all those tiny little bits of feather out of two birds, I told my dad he needed to grow white chickens from now on!

For me and Darrel, we didn’t care. I typically boil whole chickens and shred the meat for use in other dishes, anyway, and the skin just falls right off when you do that. Which means no little black feather problems for us!

So I did the bare minimum to our chickens; just cut off the wings and leg quarters so the whole chicken would more compactly fit into a bag for freezing. (Did I mention my freezers are getting scary-full?)

Mom and Dad went all out on theirs; they made baggies of legs, thighs, breasts, and so forth for specific chicken parts, and kept the rest for stock.

That’s another beautiful part of just boiling the whole chicken and shredding the meat: you make stock at the same time! Fewer steps in the kitchen! But Mom and Dad like to fry and bake their chicken, so it makes sense for them to package theirs differently.

When we got back from chicken killing, Darrel and I went to work trying to finish the cauliflower. 

It took until the next morning, but we finally got the last of this years cauliflower cleaned and cut up! There’s one last dehydrator full running right now, but then…we are DONE with cauliflower!

Until next year. 

Oy vey.

All told we now have 139.5 pounds of cauliflower either frozen or dehydrated.

Every night while this insane amount of work was going on, I remembered to scoop the cream off the milk we got from our second source of goat milk. 

This lady has Nigerian Dwarf goats, and they are known for their high butterfat content.

I didn’t know what that meant, until the second night we had the milk when I opened a lid and saw thick, rich cream across the top!

Well, ladies and gents, that right there means BUTTER. 

(Oh, God, I’m drooling. I haven’t had butter in almost two years…)

So I’m collecting the cream off the Nigerian Dwarf milk for butter, and then we’ll drink the skimmed milk. We’re just drinking the other milk, which comes from LaMancha Goats.

Preserving, butchering, and butter making…this is all a big change for a gal who was raised in a city! 

Not quite the same skill set as driving in rush hour or taking the subway, doncha know?

For the boys part, they loved every minute of this weekend! They both caught slight summer colds, Jed more so than Zac, but that hasn’t slowed them down one bit!

I’ll admit to a little concern when we went to my parents house on Saturday. I wondered if maybe watching the chickens being killed would be upsetting to the boys in some way. 

Eventually, common sense won out. We don’t eat like “typical” Americans. We eat real food, from real food sources. When we finally trial a fish, odds are it will be a fish we caught and cleaned ourselves. Jed has already gone to deliver and pick up cows from the butcher. Now that it’s time to trial chicken, they need to understand where our food comes from and respect the animals that provide it for us and the effort put forth to obtain it.

It’s part of living close to the land and being a part of the food supply. They have to get used to it at some point; better to make it something they are just used to from the beginning, rather than an adjustment later on.

We restarted the apricot trial on Zac Saturday morning, and so far, it’s going beautifully! We’re going to push it a bit, and if he stays perfect throughout today, we will start a cucumber trial tomorrow.

I finally have my first cucumbers ready to pick! If apricots are safe, and cucumbers are safe, Zac will have EIGHT safe foods! Woo-hoo!

And we can both munch on some yummy, fresh-from-the-garden cucumbers for another couple of months. Yay!

How was your 4th of July weekend?