Met the island beekeeper today, and it turns out he's an ex-zoologist. We chatted about the important secret things zoologists talk about - the sex life of invertebrates, just in case you want to know (the details of which are only for those initates into the inner circle who survived second year Zoology. Don't ask. I might tell you, and brain-floss is hard to get through your ears). Anyway, he grows berries (and honey) - might get a boysenberry cane or two from him. I said my dad had kept bees and I'd always thought I'd like to try it. He was really encouraging, said the Island needed more beekeepers, and he'd help me with a hive if I liked. We looked at Sue's chooks together, and I soon realised the core secret of chook-keepers. Every single one of them SWEARS by his or her breed. All others are inferior ;-). Honestly it's like AFL team rivalry. I want a bird which is OK for eggs and meat occassionally. Not for for being the best... well, not yet.
Artichokes are possibly my favourite veggie. So my delight today at getting some - all at the stage of take them now or they'll flower, was very great. I did manage to grow them with difficulty back in South Africa, but I've never had anything LIKE enough (enough in Dave's book too many to eat, and enough to pickle) I got some seeds too (from some that had already gone past the eating point), so hopefully will get some plants going. I wonder if they can be grown as a field crop :-)
First bell peppers (capsicums, sweet peppers) went out today and first cucumbers (the gerkin source) too.
Anyway, we got home from the chook-yard tour to discover the back door hadn't latched properly and our dear dogs (brought at great expense and heartache from South Africa) had emptied the garbage pail onto the kitchen floor, and transported the salt outside and eaten a carton of 2 minute noodles.
They were NOT popular.
Showing posts with label chickens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chickens. Show all posts
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Monday, December 21, 2009
omelette du fromage (cheese and chooks)
Well, I am more or less recovered from cheese and chicken mayhem and B being sick on Friday night. Had her in extreme discomfort and me (watching her, and worrying) trying for the underslept and braindead championships. Yeah, I know, I'm winning anyway. She seems fine now. So let me recap in more detail some of the bits I might want to remember.
Ok cheese – I am very fond of cheese (and spare me the man or a mouse comment ;-). I already know I am a rodent – or at least an ex-rhodent). About the only Australian product we didn't wax lyrical about was the cheese – there probably are good ones, but our small selection of the soft-ripening French-style ones (brie-camenbert sort of thing) consisted of the dull cardboard brick variety. Very useful for cardboard brick houses, not much of a positive addition to a slice of bread. I guess if that is what you are used to, you might like it. I've been told that there are some good Aus cheeses (some from King island I believe), but I need to win the lottery or at least do something more lucrative than write. Ergo – the thought – why can't we make our own? After all, Etruscsan peasants were doing it tens of centuries ago, even before the internet.
Hmm. I am now filled with new respect for those Etruscan peasants and had not been aware that digital watches and thermometers had been around so long. Warm curds (after the addition of rennet and culture-stuff you buy from little boutiques at opera houses and art galleries -- which explains all sorts of things – or if you want to be dull you can buy them freeze dried from the internet. I don't know what those poor Etruscans did.) have the texture of slightly glutinous black dam mud and feels much the same if a different colour. And warm. That creeped me out a bit. I kept expecting leeches. You then cut the curd to help the wey get away. There is way to much wey, and you weight it to waste awey... ahem. Anywey... anyway moving on. What struck me is how similar the early stages of this process are and how varied the end result. And how DULL the stuff in the middle part tastes. Oh and that Cheddar comes from a bloke near Bristol tossing his slabs of off milk into the gorge, and the furious bloke at the bottom hauling it out and tossing it back at him. Ok I made that bit up, but cheddaring is an amazingly labourious process of slapping slabs of curd on top of each other, and then hauling the bottom bit up and putting it on top. Etruscan peasants might have made cheese, but it has become quite precise and requires a lot of attention. Still, I reckon a decent camenbert style cheese is do-able, and Feta too. Don't know about the hard cheeses.
I battled a little (ok a lot) with with the chicken killing. “Pull the neck down and then up...”
Ok so we're doing neck yo-yo. And it's not happening. Bergen stepped in because we're both firm believers in quick clean merciful livestock killing. I will leave to your sordid imaginations the chicken drawing (it's where the cheese culture for art galleries comes from, maybe) except to say that violating a still warm dead chicken's tail end is over-rated. But I can do it. Might have to get an elephant gun for the killing though. As for plucking – is there a Mexican hairless equivalent of chicken? A lot more pragmatic information about chooks, roosters, breeds, and broody hens (look a bit like Lord Byron) which I will probably wish I could remember came my way. I fancy English game hens, I think.
Anyway I got my own back on Bergen with the de-boning (less than usual, he's handy) and we had lunch beside stalag bunny, where we learned to sex ducks by their quacks and curly tails, and how to tell when a chook was going to lay an egg.
B: “is that chicken all right? The one over there, cackling.”
C: “She's fine. Just getting ready to lay an egg.”
D: So that translates out of chicken to ' Give me an epidural, NOW!'
C: 'Medic! You should hear when there's a bunch of them laying. They all get in on the act, encouraging each other. 'Push Muriel, push!'
I wonder if they compare egg sizes?
Ok cheese – I am very fond of cheese (and spare me the man or a mouse comment ;-). I already know I am a rodent – or at least an ex-rhodent). About the only Australian product we didn't wax lyrical about was the cheese – there probably are good ones, but our small selection of the soft-ripening French-style ones (brie-camenbert sort of thing) consisted of the dull cardboard brick variety. Very useful for cardboard brick houses, not much of a positive addition to a slice of bread. I guess if that is what you are used to, you might like it. I've been told that there are some good Aus cheeses (some from King island I believe), but I need to win the lottery or at least do something more lucrative than write. Ergo – the thought – why can't we make our own? After all, Etruscsan peasants were doing it tens of centuries ago, even before the internet.
Hmm. I am now filled with new respect for those Etruscan peasants and had not been aware that digital watches and thermometers had been around so long. Warm curds (after the addition of rennet and culture-stuff you buy from little boutiques at opera houses and art galleries -- which explains all sorts of things – or if you want to be dull you can buy them freeze dried from the internet. I don't know what those poor Etruscans did.) have the texture of slightly glutinous black dam mud and feels much the same if a different colour. And warm. That creeped me out a bit. I kept expecting leeches. You then cut the curd to help the wey get away. There is way to much wey, and you weight it to waste awey... ahem. Anywey... anyway moving on. What struck me is how similar the early stages of this process are and how varied the end result. And how DULL the stuff in the middle part tastes. Oh and that Cheddar comes from a bloke near Bristol tossing his slabs of off milk into the gorge, and the furious bloke at the bottom hauling it out and tossing it back at him. Ok I made that bit up, but cheddaring is an amazingly labourious process of slapping slabs of curd on top of each other, and then hauling the bottom bit up and putting it on top. Etruscan peasants might have made cheese, but it has become quite precise and requires a lot of attention. Still, I reckon a decent camenbert style cheese is do-able, and Feta too. Don't know about the hard cheeses.
I battled a little (ok a lot) with with the chicken killing. “Pull the neck down and then up...”
Ok so we're doing neck yo-yo. And it's not happening. Bergen stepped in because we're both firm believers in quick clean merciful livestock killing. I will leave to your sordid imaginations the chicken drawing (it's where the cheese culture for art galleries comes from, maybe) except to say that violating a still warm dead chicken's tail end is over-rated. But I can do it. Might have to get an elephant gun for the killing though. As for plucking – is there a Mexican hairless equivalent of chicken? A lot more pragmatic information about chooks, roosters, breeds, and broody hens (look a bit like Lord Byron) which I will probably wish I could remember came my way. I fancy English game hens, I think.
Anyway I got my own back on Bergen with the de-boning (less than usual, he's handy) and we had lunch beside stalag bunny, where we learned to sex ducks by their quacks and curly tails, and how to tell when a chook was going to lay an egg.
B: “is that chicken all right? The one over there, cackling.”
C: “She's fine. Just getting ready to lay an egg.”
D: So that translates out of chicken to ' Give me an epidural, NOW!'
C: 'Medic! You should hear when there's a bunch of them laying. They all get in on the act, encouraging each other. 'Push Muriel, push!'
I wonder if they compare egg sizes?
Monday, October 5, 2009
cannibal chickens and a spinning head
My attempting to be self-sufficient friends (the warders at rabbit-stalag-luft) and I had an important discussion about cannibal chickens. I shall never attempt to convert the savage chickens and keep a weather-eye for roosters with large cooking pots... actually as far as I could figure the chickens confined their cannabilistic behaviour to other chickens, and if they ate you anyway, it was just fine because as you weren't a chicken or an egg, it wasn't cannibalism. According to them chickens are good evidence that yes, birds are the lineal decendents of T.rex and haven't really changed that much. Their birds had gone egg-cannibal which they cured with extra calcium in the diet. I'm listening very carefully to all this stuff as we expect to have to keep chooks. I hope my next effort is better than my success at it as a young shark biologist. We stayed in a rented cottage on a run-down farm and had semi-inerited a flock of feral bantams that came to be fed every day. We'd had a spell of bad weather (ergo the fish and shellfish we normally principally lived on were low) and the exchequer was at its usual biologist's income flush point. And the chickens had increased vastly in number. So I went out with mayhem or at least chicken dinner in mind. I baited the feeding area well, and put more food under the steel bucket with one edge propped up with a stick with a piece of thin fishing line attached... leading to my lurking place 50 yards away.
Of course one of the roosters led the charge.
Did I mention that thin fishing line has quite a stretch factor and that the bucket was heavy and not easy to balance on the stick. The stick had to be pushed into the ground a little...
Wait.
peck
peck peck
peck peck peck
wander off and bully a hen.
return. Peck. peck peck. advance.
NOW!
er.
Pull harder.
Heave!
HEAVE HARDER.
Line snaps
The next day I used 200kg tuna line.
Now I''m not very squeamish, but I really hadn't thought through the 'how to kill a chicken' bit. I'm a firm believer in quick and clean (I do not approve of people who leave fish to flop on the deck or beach.) I'm an omnivore, prepared to eat meat, so in need, I'll kill it. Quick, neat and painlessly as possible. I've been dealing with fish-killing all my life. So I ran out there, and beside the fact that I was not going to have the scene with the headless chicken running around spewing blood, I really didn't know what to do.
Grab chicken.
Not happy rooster. Bullying is left to him, not happens to him. Decide to wring neck.
So I did. Several times as I had no idea what it took.
And the dastardly deed done I turned to pick up the bucket to put the rooster into.
And the chicken dinner -- just like in the cartoons -- stops being dead.
Starts running, its wrung neck unwinding, head spinning (you heard of someone's head spinning? Bet you didn't know it was on a rotating neck.)
The next few hours until dark were spent by a horrified Dave (you've injured it, you must kill it mercifully) chasing chickens through about 100 acres of scrub.
I never caught it, and it continued to rule the flock until we left the farm.
Of course one of the roosters led the charge.
Did I mention that thin fishing line has quite a stretch factor and that the bucket was heavy and not easy to balance on the stick. The stick had to be pushed into the ground a little...
Wait.
peck
peck peck
peck peck peck
wander off and bully a hen.
return. Peck. peck peck. advance.
NOW!
er.
Pull harder.
Heave!
HEAVE HARDER.
Line snaps
The next day I used 200kg tuna line.
Now I''m not very squeamish, but I really hadn't thought through the 'how to kill a chicken' bit. I'm a firm believer in quick and clean (I do not approve of people who leave fish to flop on the deck or beach.) I'm an omnivore, prepared to eat meat, so in need, I'll kill it. Quick, neat and painlessly as possible. I've been dealing with fish-killing all my life. So I ran out there, and beside the fact that I was not going to have the scene with the headless chicken running around spewing blood, I really didn't know what to do.
Grab chicken.
Not happy rooster. Bullying is left to him, not happens to him. Decide to wring neck.
So I did. Several times as I had no idea what it took.
And the dastardly deed done I turned to pick up the bucket to put the rooster into.
And the chicken dinner -- just like in the cartoons -- stops being dead.
Starts running, its wrung neck unwinding, head spinning (you heard of someone's head spinning? Bet you didn't know it was on a rotating neck.)
The next few hours until dark were spent by a horrified Dave (you've injured it, you must kill it mercifully) chasing chickens through about 100 acres of scrub.
I never caught it, and it continued to rule the flock until we left the farm.
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