Learning Where Our Food Comes From

For the last 10 years or so my husband, my kids and I eat our Thanksgiving dinner just us. We used to meet with extended family for dessert but because we have certain eating habits that we don't expect other families to conform to, (no pork, no Teflon, and avoiding GMO's as much as possible) so we eat our Thanksgiving meal just us. Since it's just the six of us, we roast a whole chicken instead of the traditional Turkey. It would take all of us eating an incredibly unhealthy amount of Turkey to be able to eat all that meat before it went bad, so we choose to go with a chicken instead. This year instead of buying an organic chicken from the store, we decided to kill two birds with one stone (pun intended). Currently, we have two roosters which is all we need, but a few days ago, we had four. Four roosters in a flock of 30 something birds is wayyyy to many. This year we decided we would butcher the two....less visually appealing... roosters and roast them for Thanksgiving dinner. 

The plan was for my me to chop their heads off with a hatchet and then my four kids would help pluck them and I would clean them out. Plans changed, as they often do, and my husband had to be the one to do the killing. I don't mind butchering a dead bird, but I have a really hard time being the one doing the killing. Thankfully my husband was able to fill the role of the executer while I stood nearby, and my kids stood even farther back. While it's never easy to watch an animal die, we do believe it's important for our children to understand where their food comes from. 

I was surprised when my oldest son and daughter disappeared when it came time to pluck the birds. I thought for sure they wanted to be involved in the butchering process, but it turns out they didn't. In their words it was just "too gross." My 3rd child, however, couldn't have been more interested in the anatomy of the chicken and all that goes into butchering them. He was a tremendous help and plucked feathers for forever and even cut open the rooster's internal organs to see what everything looked like on the inside. Not only did the process turn out to be good for the flock (minimizing our rooster count), good for us (our Thanksgiving dinner), a great life skills experience (learning where our food comes from) but it also turned into a science lesson as well! 

Eventually my two older children came back, and they were assigned the duty of plucking the second rooster which my oldest son did somewhat reluctantly but with the help of his younger brother, they got the job done. 

After two days of sitting in a saltwater brine, this is the end result. Two chickens baked to perfection in a cast iron pan. Their meat was flavorful end surprisingly tender; nothing compared to the last rooster we butchered and didn't brine first. I DO NOT recommend skipping the brine process. Unless you are looking for your meat to be as rubbery as an elastic waist band!