We Butchered Our First Chicken.....

We Butchered Our First Chicken.....

Sorry for the back-to-back post, but I had to share with you something crazy that happened to us over the weekend. Saturday evening, Mom and I went to put the chickens up, and Red the rooster was making an awful noise (meet Red the Rooster). When we got closer to the coop, we saw a hawk on top of one of the bantam chickens eating her:( She was only recently dead, and the hawk had only really eaten the neck meat, so mom and I decided to do something crazy. We decided to try and clean the chicken to eat. 

If you have a weak stomach and don't want to see pictures of the process, just skip over this post. We will see you next time! If you are slightly curious, scroll on. 

Mom and I set up the propane stove and a little table in the screened in porch. 

Here you can see just how little the hawk had eaten. Just a bit off the neck and the top of the back where you won't get much meat off anyway. 

We grabbed a pot large enough to fit the hen in and heated the water to scalding. You swirl the chicken for about 30-45 seconds in the hot water, then do a short submersion in ice water. After that, the feathers come off pretty easy. Though it did take us a bit of time because she was so tiny, and it was hard to get a good grip on some of her feathers.

After the de-feathering comes the gross parts. First, you break the feet and cut them off at the joint. Next, you cut around the neck and pull out the crop, then cut around the tail to create a cavity in the bottom of the chicken. This part is like stuffing a chicken but in reverse. You have to stick your fingers in and pull out all the innards. Here's me making a disgusted face while trying not to think about what I was doing (mom had a video pulled up on youtube for us to follow to make sure we didn't contaminate our meat by cutting something we shouldn't). 

Once all the organs are out, it wasn't so bad for me to look at, but I couldn't watch them coming out of the chicken. Gross! Mom watched the entire time, and Sam watched us some of the time from inside the house through the door to the porch. 

But after that, you have a clean chicken ready to be eaten. We stuck the chicken in a ziplock bag to be eaten the next night (we had already put a store-bought chicken in the oven, and it was cooking away). Fun fact, the chicken only weighed 12oz at this point. The bantams are definitely more for eggs than for meat. 

The hen was a little older than is ideal for eating, so the dark meat was a little chewy, but the white meat was normal and tasty. Though we were still a little grossed out at the whole thing, we did eat the chicken for dinner, and we have opened up conversations on whether we want to try doing this sort of thing on a more regular basis to provide our family with fresh chicken. (Now if only we can train a hawk to kill the chickens for us!)