Host 3: The Work

Hi all. Life has been good. I’ve gone on 3 hikes in the past 4 days, totaling about 18 miles and a bunch of elevation gain. As soon as I move all the photos I took from our camera to our iPad I’ll try to get a picture filled post of my hiking adventures.

Unfortunately, Tawnie hasn’t been able to join me on any hikes yet because she’s been catching up on homework, or, like today, she is trying to fight off a migraine that has kind of taken her down today. Luckily, she was good enough to make it to the weekly market in town today. Simon bought us breakfast at a nice little cafe/bakery. Then this afternoon we were tasked with making ourselves invisible because a prospective buyer is visiting the house and our hosts don’t want anyone to know they need extra help to keep the place looking the way it is. I’m unsure why we can’t just pretend we’re vacationing, but whatever.

Anyways, I’d like to use this post to discuss the work we do here. I typically do outdoor work. The first few days I moved a bunch of wood that Simon cut. I stacked it and cleaned up his mess because it’s right where guests are suppose to park when they stay. I’ve also cleaned and filled their old school fire heated hot tub, cleaned out all 7 chicken coops, shoveled the dirt from mole hills away so they could mow, and I’ve been taking all the dishes back and forth between our apartment and their house because their dishwasher doesn’t work, so we’re doing all the dishes. My favorite job has been taking care of the chickens. Every morning I let them out of their coops and feed them. At lunch I give them all a little more food, then at night they all go into their coops and I shut them up so predators can’t get them. Tawnie has mostly been working inside. She has cleaned a couple of the guest apartments, and helped me with the wood stacking and the chickens. 

The most interesting thing we’ve done so far is observe how to butcher a chicken. Suzanne has 5 cockerels (well, 4 now) that she raises for the meat. She keeps them separated from the other chickens, and one of them was being aggressive with the others, so he got picked to butcher first. Stop reading if you don’t want to hear about butchering a chicken. Here’s how it went down:

First thing in the morning she grabbed the aggressive one and put it in a box in the garage to get it to calm down after being picked up. After about 30 minutes the chicken thinks it’s night because it’s in a dark box, so it calms down. Then she picks it up again in the dark and puts a towel around it so it’s wings can’t flap. Then she has a little guillotine type thing attached to the wall, but instead of cutting the head off, it simply breaks the neck - causing death. The chicken shakes rapidly for a minute or two, as the central nervous system goes all wild. Eventually that stops, then we string it upside down by its legs and cut its head off so that it drains all the blood. After about 30 minutes we brought down a big pot of almost boiling water. We submerged the chicken for 30 seconds then tied it back up. The water makes plucking all the feathers much easier. So then the feathers are plucked, the wing tips are cut off, and the legs are cut off.

After the legs are cut off it obviously isn’t hanging anymore. Now it’s time to take the guts out. I don’t want to get too into it, but basically you make a cut near the head and a cut near the butt and clean out the insides, keeping the liver and heart and maybe something else I’m forgetting. The most interesting part of this gross step was the gizard. You cut the gizard open and it’s full of the food that the chicken has been eating, but all ground up. You wash all the food away, then we kept the gizard to make a gravy I think.

Once it’s all cleaned up, we put it in a dish, covered it with Saran Wrap, and put it in the fridge for 3 days before transferring to the freezer. The whole process took about 2 hours but only because Suzanne was showing us everything and telling us about all the organs she yanked out. She wants to butcher all the cockerels by the end of November, so I’m pretty sure while we’re here we’ll do at least one or two more. It isn’t necessarily something I want to help out with, but if she asks me to then I will, and it’s something I would totally be able to do if they were my own chickens I had raised, but some of these chickens are staying frozen until Xmas dinner. I don’t want to butcher and clean a chicken I don’t even get to eat! Otherwise it wasn’t traumatic - not going vegetarian or anything, but I think it’s important to understand how food gets on our plate. But I’m also not kidding myself - the majority of the meat I eat probably isn’t butchered nearly as humanely as this chicken. I’m going to stop before I dive into the morality of eating meat.

Sorry if that was gross or jarring! Just letting y’all know what we’ve been up to. We miss you all a ton, and are excited to see you when we return.