There is nothing enjoyable about processing chickens, and while the YouTube video of the woman with the baby on her back digging intestines out of a chicken carcass looks easy enough; it is not. The husband and I have done this deed before but unlike bike riding and ice skating there is no muscle memory to bring it all back. I am pretty sure your brain locks the memory in a special dark place so you don't have to relive the farting sound that vibrates through you as you shove your hand into the chicken's warm gut and pull out all of its organs, or the sight of a headless chicken running around the yard. Yes, you will remember it as you try to go to sleep that night, but the memory fades with time and tequila.
The husband was in charge of the killing and plucking with our brand new handy dandy electric chicken plucker. There is some humorous Deliverancesque video footage of our hillbilly operation, but I opted to not post it here. You're welcome. This picture should tell you everything you need to know:
You may ask yourself, as I did over and over again as I stood at the counter for 7 hours with my arm thrust inside 18 chickens "Why not just be a vegetarian?" I reminded myself on Sunday morning after a night racked with dreams of broken gizzards, that we moved up here to try to grow our own food, and when you decide to locate in a place that offers a rocky clay soil and a four month growing season, you would probably starve to death if left to a plant only diet. So we eat animals. We eat every last bit of those animals because we know what it takes to keep them and nurture them until they are ready to put in the freezer. We know how much work it is to ward off predators and how difficult it is to butcher them when the time comes.
When I go to a grocery store now, I see the faces of the people who grow that food and I am in awe. It ain't easy folks, but when you put a roast or a salad on your table that you grew in your backyard, nothing tastes better or is more gratifying.
