We’ve been eating a lot of lazy food lately. Whether that’s because I keep forgetting to get meat out of the freezer, or because of a distinct lack of energy on my part, I’m not sure.
See, the end of winter gets to me, badly. It’s cold still, nothing is growing properly, my garden looks desolate due to not planting a proper winter crop and meals? really? I’ve got to cook them for the family? dammit.
Lazy meals are, for me, things I can throw together in half an hour or less, with no preparation.
Tomato pasta.
Tuna Mornay.
Rice and vegetables.
Cheesy pasta.
All the things I never bother to photograph because really, who wants to see it?
And the meals are a little bit comfort food-y too, boiled potatoes with cheese and garlic butter, plain risotto (although the last risotto I made went cold, because Isaac broke his arm while I was stirring it. Sigh) and pasta with butter and cheese.
Not the healthiest meals exactly, but I console myself with making everything from scratch, so at least it seems healthier.
I’m craving freshly picked greens and stirfry with chicken and garden veg. Craving fresh tomato salsa, made with my own tomatoes. Dreaming of peas and beans and chinese cabbage and butter.
Warning, this post talks about things that some readers may find distasteful. Please don’t read it if you can’t get your head around animals being slaughtered for food.
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There is a feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you kill an animal. It’s that sinking feeling as you hit a wallaby in your car, that drop when you have to kill something for it’s own good.
These are the things I thought about as I held a flapping dead chook in my hand this afternoon.
3 hours previously:
Walking to collect the eggs, I entered the shed with the laying boxes and spooked one of my hens – she wasn’t laying, but she bolted when she saw me.
Another hen was laying at the time, curled up in her nesting box as I went down the row, collecting duck eggs and a chook egg.
Only…
Is that a peck hole? In my egg shell? Fuck.
It was, a suspicious peck in an egg – done recently as there was no dirt or grit around the entrance. As recently as me walking into the chook shed.
Fuck it.
Some chooks, they eat eggs. Something happens and they discover what is inside an egg and they start pecking all the eggs to pieces. If left, they’ll teach the other hens how to eat eggs and it will end up terribly. No eggs = no baby chickens = no reason for keeping chooks.
There is only one cure for an egg eating hen, and that is a quick death.
A few days ago, I’d found a duck egg broken in the bottom of the nest. I thought it odd at the time, knowing how tough the shells on my eggs are and I wasn’t sure a duck standing on the egg would have broken it.
I didn’t clean it up at the time, planning to come back and clean the straw and broken mess out of the bottom of the nest when I got a chance. So this morning when I found the pecked egg, I remembered the broken duck egg and went over to clean the nest.
Only to find the entire egg was gone, shell and all.
An egg eater, for sure. A possum or rat, well, they would have taken eggs from the other nests as well and made a right mess.
At this point, I was fairly sure that the chook I’d seen disappear when I walked into the chook shed was my culprit. She didn’t make an alarm call of ‘I was laying and PREDATOR’ or act like the other hens, quietly clucking at me in distaste when I bothered them.
AND she was standing leaning into the nest with the pecked egg.
So, we did what you do with an egg eater.
We caught her and killed her, humanely and fast. One chop and she went from upside down and relaxed in my hand, to dead. It was fast and it was painless for her, over in less than a moment. Slightly more traumatic for me, as my stomach dropped and I felt the feelings that come with slaughtering something.
But this is how it works when you’re making an effort to live more sustainably and only wanting to eat happy, ethical chickens. No one likes killing, (no one normal anyway), but it’s a fact of life.
Once she stopped flapping the death flaps and relaxed, we strung her up by a leg and did what you do – skinning, gutting, cleaning. It took a little while, as it was the first chook I’d done myself. I watched plenty of times as a child, but the actual act of doing, well, slow and steady and all that. There are things I’d never asked my father, like ‘how do you get the lungs out?’ and ‘how do you make sure you’ve got all the unborn eggs and kidneys out?’ but no matter, I worked it out myself. Me and my sharp knife and Nathan chatting to me while I worked. It was okay once I started, less like killing and more like processing meat. No different to gutting and filleting fish – a regular part of my growing up.
And then I brought the meat inside and chopped it into pieces for soup – which is bubbling nicely at the moment.
Tonight when we eat, I will silently thank the chook for living a good life and enabling me to eat ethical meat my way and I will know that this chook, she had the best life possible before she died and that her death wasn’t traumatic, for anyone other than Nat and I. Amy walked outside just after we’d chopped the hen’s head off and we talked about it.
That this is where meat comes from. We don’t get meat from the supermarket, meat comes from animals and our job is to give animals a happy life and ethical humane death.
Note the yellow fat? Proper free range healthy chooks have yellow fat and skin. Supermarket chooks have generally been bleached to make them more ‘attractive’. Personally, I’ll take bright yellow over covered in bleach any day.
This is once I’d broken it down and was browning in olive oil.
Recipe for chicken and potato soup:
Take your chicken, make sure it’s free range and break it down into it’s various elements. Take off the breasts, chop the legs down close to the carcass and remove them from the body. Brown everything in olive oil, including the carcass.
When everything is well browned, add 5 roughly chopped onions and a leek. Let them colour a little. Don’t burn anything!
Deglaze the pot with some white wine if you’re organised, or if you’re me, deglaze with warm water.
Cover the chicken pieces with water and bring to a simmer.
Add 4 large potatoes, chopped.
Cook until the meat falls from the bones and the potato falls apart.
In honour of my birthday, which is today (Happy birthday me!) I present to you, the menu of foods that I WISH I was eating today. Most of these foods are things I can’t eat due to being pregnant, but some of them are simply too expensive for our budgets.
Sushi. As in, sushi made by a sushi chef, so that I (Or Mum) haven’t had to go to the trouble of making it. Sushi with raw fish, or smoked fish or cooked fish. Really, any kind of sushi. Mmmm, sushi…
Soft cheeses. Completely against the rules when you are pregnant, but OH so good. Brie is probably my favourite, but at this point in time I would kill for some nice blue cheese as well, with all it’s bacteria and blue sharpness. Mmmm, cheese…
Smoked ham, sliced off the bone and served cold. Preferably with ripe cherry tomatoes, bread and butter pickles (Which I desperately want to make, but never have gotten around to it), pickled onions, a nice sharp matured cheddar and fresh crusty bread. Oh, so good.
Cold smoked salmon. By itself. Maybe with some crusty bread and butter, but mostly by itself.
Marinated octopus. Now this isn’t really something I’m not allowed, nor is it something too expensive. It’s simply something that I CANNOT get, due to not being able to convince Dad that I need him to catch me some fresh octopus. Okay, it might be because he doesn’t actually have anywhere he can go to catch fresh octopus, but come on! I would LOVE some octopus that Mum has marinated.
The same with squid, only I prefer my fresh squid quickly barbecued (preferably by someone else). Again, Dad has been decidedly slack in catching me any squid.
What’s that? I could buy some squid? No, not really. Most of all the squid available for sale (that I could afford) has been farmed in either Vietnam or Thailand. My grandfather has seen these farms with his very own eyes and told us not to buy anything farmed outside of Australia. Considering he used to be a Fisherman himself, I am inclined to trust him and not buy seafood from foreign waters.
Crab. Real crab is expensive. ‘Nuff said.
Aioli. Mmmmm, I adore aioli. However, real aioli is made from a raw egg yolk, crushed garlic, Dijon mustard, lemon juice and olive oil. The raw egg yolk makes it unsuitable for pregnant women.
Oh and yes, I can (and have) made aioli from scratch by hand. I can also make caesar salad dressing and mayonnaise. If anyone is interested, I will post the recipes here for you? I am pretty sure I can convert the recipes I learned by heart into something a little smaller. (The recipes I was using consisted of 30+ egg yolks at a time. Luckily I had a Kitchen Aid mixer to make them. Professional kitchen and all that jazz).
Crayfish. Although, I hear we are meant to be calling it Southern Rock Lobster now. Heh. I love crayfish cooked and then cooled, portioned out and then served on biscuits with cheese and aioli. Yum. Doing too much to crayfish ruins it in my opinion.
And last, but in no way least cheesecake.
Chilled cheesecake though, not baked. I find baked cheesecake much too heavy.
Nan has an amazing recipe for Lemon cheesecake and Mum makes the best version of it. Although, Nan’s Turkish Delight Cheesecake is probably about the best cheesecake I have ever eaten. Mmmmm. Considering I didn’t sort out actually doing anything for my birthday, I doubt I will be getting cheesecake this year.
So there, that is what I wish I was eating today.
In reality, Nathan is working, it’s off pay week and I haven’t really been near a butcher or a supermarket properly, so I doubt we will be doing anything special at all. And as yet, we don’t have any great plans for Saturday either. Ah well.
