A homestead update and butchering chickens

Our yardie home for the summer needs some amplification on this blog.  It has been a joy to live here, with it's rhythms of quiet alternating with endlessly interesting (to me at least) stories to tell.

Anyone who comes to visit our lower level duplex will be asked a question by Timothy and Matthew: "Walk around the house.....Can you find our bedroom!!??!!"  And then Matthew will blurt out the answer (to Timothy's annoyance, who wants the guesser to have to, um, guess).

I'll do it Matthew's style.  It's behind this bookshelf:

Bedroom door closed.

It's called the Magic Bookcase Room, and yes, this bookcase is the door to their bedroom.

Bedroom door opened.

Adding to the magic is the set of books on the bookshelf.  It's a full set of the Chronicles of Narnia.  They are leather bound, with archival paper and gilded edges.

I am not a book collector, but this is a nice set...selling on ebay for something like $600.  So we've been reading through that this summer and Timothy is just eating it up and reading it out loud is every bit as wonderful as David and I had hoped it would be, now that we have kids old enough to enjoy it with us:-)

Any time we're at home there's a good chance of some visitors coming by.  There are often visitors living upstairs in our duplex, who we mostly don't interact with as they are "just" regular tourists coming and going every few days.

Other times we have had community dinners here where Jerami invites over his yardie friends and we meet some new people.  Ele is often around and will often pitch in with dishes, cleaning, or bedtime reading with the kids.

Alex from Belgium is often over here helping Jerami with the bajillions of projects to be done.  He recently married a lady named Ellen, a U.S. citizen, and they moved up here to Alaska for her job.  Alex doesn't have a work permit yet, so he offers to help Jerami.  Alex has his own wealth of knowledge too.  He's the main brain behind the bee hive in the yard:

I will admit to being nervous about a beehive in the yard where my kids play.  But now I know it's a non-issue and I usually forget about it.  The boys know not to play near the entrance to the hive and it's all good.  We enjoy getting a peek inside the hive periodically to see it grow, and I tasted a waxy thing the bees make to seal off open areas in the honeycomb, called propolis.  (I just looked up what the propolis is made of:  bees wax, plant resins, and bee saliva.  Yum!)  Also known as bee glue...which made sense upon tasting it:-)

Today Alex brought some of his friends over who are visiting from Belgium.  Gun laws in Belgium (or pretty much anywhere) are much more strict than in Alaska, so Jerami gave us all a tour of his gun collection.  The brown gun on the floor on the left is the one that Jerami used to hunt game while he was stranded on an island for a month (with his father) when he was a kid.  When he told me that story I thought he was kidding, but he wasn't.

Six of Jerami's guns.

Another gun not in this photo...Jerami showed us a dart gun he uses on mice.  I thought he was kidding about that too but, again, he was not.  He has a gun for mice.  And a gun for bears that's not pictured here.

Alex taught us how to make cheese one evening.  It does take a long time to make, but a lot of it is just waiting time, and it's not complicated.  Our main issue was miscommunication between phases, and we ended up adding 2x the amount of salt.  So it tasted awful when eaten plain, but was good sprinkled on spaghetti.

Salty cheese.

Inspired by the foodies around me and learning more about the history of sourdough bread here in Alaska, I have continued to run with the sourdough starter.  I've enjoyed cranking out various types of bread...egg bread, potato bread, sourdough panckaes, pizza crust, biscuits, burger buns, French bread and the basic sourdough bread.  The crazy part is that making bread from this starter is actually easier than making bread from scratch with store bought yeast.  There is the commitment and small amount of time (2 minutes) each day to keep the starter going on days I don't bake, but in exchange there's no messing with water temperatures and worrying about killing the yeast.  The rise times are much more flexible with the sourdough starter allowing me to flex the bread making around my life instead of vice versa with store bought yeast which seems less flexible to me.  Maybe I'm just in a honeymoon period for my sourdough starter.  But still, it's been fun.

There's also an ice cream maker in our house, so that needed to be used.  This led to sourdough bread and ice cream for breakfast two days ago.  They were both fresh and ready to eat at 10am so we dug in.  Jerami tapped the birch trees on the property this spring and made birch syrup and birch soda.  While maple syrup is a 40:1 ratio of sap to syrup after it's cooked down, birch syrup has a 100:1 ratio.  So the birch syrup is a yummy addition to ice cream or pancakes around here.

Then of course there are the chickens.  For the boys, the chickens are easily one of the highlights of our time here, electric fence and all.

At least the chicken heard my request to look at the camera and smile.

Speaking of that electric fence...Matthew and Timothy have both been repeatedly warned that if they touch the electric fence it will HURT REALLY BAD.  So I was observing Matthew the other day as he contemplated stepping over the bottom spring part of the electric fence gate, pictured here with David:

Matthew thought about stepping over it for a while, and decided to try to step over it without getting zapped.  He failed, and was zapped.  I just watched his reaction, quite curious.  (I've never touched it so I honestly didn't know how much it would hurt, but I saw the baby bear get zapped and jump back.)  Matthew was certainly surprised, jumped back, and started to freak out, but just barely didn't cry.  Then he paused, gathered himself, and smiled.  I asked him what it felt like to be zapped by the electric fence.  He said "It felt like a cloud!  It was great!  It didn't hurt AT ALL!"  (We were hiking in the clouds a few weeks ago...so there's a recent fascination with all things clouds now.)  Later Timothy heard this story and soon went out and intentionally zapped himself.  And he said it also felt like touching a cloud.  Boys.  Ele later touched the fence (100% accidentally of course, being that she is a female) and reported that it HURT.  A lot.  She's no faint of heart, but we think she probably felt it worse as she wasn't wearing shoes like Timothy and Matthew were when they touched it.  Fun times!

But back to those chickens...the time came a little over a week ago to butcher the first round of chickens.  The roosters are crowing now, and Jerami doesn't want the neighbors to be annoyed.  And the fenced in area that they have is really too small for the number of chickens out there.  So butchering time it was.

I've "wanted" to participate in butchering chickens now for at least 5 years.  I want to be less ignorant of the food I eat.  I pick up these neatly wrapped packages of chicken each week at the store as if that's where they come from.  But of course if I eat chicken I am butchering chickens, only "hiding" behind the labor of underpaid migrant workers who do the bloody work for me.

I still can't bring myself to do the actual killing of a chicken, but I did watch Jerami and Alex do that.  I was sitting 20 feet away hugging Matthew, who was understandably very sad.  I told him he was welcome to go inside, but he wanted to stay outside so that we could be sad together.  Timothy was fascinated by it all, getting up close to watch the blood drain out of the chickens into the bucket.  I now know the distinct smell of chicken blood.  It it not pleasant, but thankfully did not make me nauseous as long as I didn't stop too long to think about it or peer into the bucket of blood.

Timothy getting a bird's eye view of the blood bucket...

Next we boiled a big pot of water to dip the chickens in.  This helps their feathers come out easily. David and I helped take out the feathers.  Matthew (to my surprise) wanted to help with this part, while Timothy had no interest here.

Jerami pointed out all of the various organs as they were coming out of the chicken.

I will admit to being unreasonably grossed out seeing "my" kitchen knives and cutting boards being used for this.  Like I wanted someone else's stuff to be used for this dirty work.  Later I washed them all twice and ran them through the dish washer.

Miscellaneous chicken parts in my salad/mixing bowl!

Then we brought the chicken inside to cook it.

Washing the chicken.

Seasoning the chicken.

I had waaaaay more questions than answers at this point so mercifully Alex took pity on me and coached me through how to prepare the chicken for cooking.  He smeared butter all over the inside.  He told me the best spices to add.  We didn't have his top recommended seasonings on hand so we improvised with what we did have.  I remember lots of rosemary and basil were included.  Jerami thawed some moose broth from his freezer as a base to bake the chicken in and keep it moist.  We had to rotate the chicken in the pan every 5 minutes, a team effort, as it baked so it didn't dry out.  As Alex grabbed a big chunk of butter and smeared it around the inside of the raw chicken that was still warm from being butchered, he was telling me how absolutely floored he was that I had never prepared a whole, uncooked chicken..  He did this with his family every Sunday back home in Belgium and Portugal.  Me not knowing this was the equivalent of not knowing how to wash laundry, or make soup.  He was not trying to make me feel bad, but it's just so basic in the world where he's from.  I told him that I suspected most of my American peers were as equally as ignorant as I, and that I didn't think I was an outlier in this regard.  (You all can feel free to correct me if I am wrong...maybe you all are preparing whole, raw chickens out there each week and I missed the boat.)  I told Alex that I felt pretty down-to-earth in my cooking when I went to Costco and bought a whole, cooked rotisserie chicken and took the meat off of the bone myself.  His response was one of incredulity and he said nothing.


That evening, Matthew said butchering chickens was the saddest part of our trip to Alaska.  So maybe with this whole process of butchering and preparing a chicken I have ruined my children's innocence.  Maybe these city kids will look back at butchering chickens as the end of their childhood.  So we talked through that.  It also led to conversations on what it means to be a vegetarian, vs. vegan vs. freegan.  Ele (from California) is a former vegetarian and later a freegan, so she enlightened our conversation.  Jerami pointed out that's it's basically impossible to live off of the land year round here in Alaska and not eat meat.  It's salmon harvesting season now, and imported food is expensive, so Jerami is stocking up his freezer with salmon and depends on that food source through the winter.  He also graciously shared one with us, which the boys scarfed down

Salmon going in the oven...caught about 3 days prior to eating:-)

In our conversation we came up with different reasons why people might decide to be vegetarian.  We talked about how pasture-raised chickens differ from factory farm chickens.  We mused how much more we'd be willing or able to pay in order to eat more pasture-raised chickens, why pasture-raised chickens cost more, and what we'd be willing to give up in order to eat more pasture-raised chickens.  Honestly I call this education at its finest, but do hope Matthew isn't scarred for life for his education being too hands on.  He did mention he wants to be a vegetarian because he just felt so sad.

But in return we did get to eat this glorious bird for dinner (and Matthew gladly participated in the eating):

The chicken was butchered about 2pm, and by 6pm it was time to sit down for dinner.  I make no pretenses of being a food blogger, so I'll just say it tasted really yummy.  The left over chicken became chicken noodle soup.  After dinner I was exhausted.  We finished eating, cleaned up the exploded kitchen mess from all of the work, and went to bed.  Life is good.