Meat Birds

Hubbards at week 10, having a lie down to rest from all that
eating and all that growing.

At this time of year we start to feel a bit 'over-run' with chickens. Our Hubbard 'meat birds' are 10 weeks old now and seem HUGE, like good sized white, honest, chicken-shaped chickens; they have left all traces of fluffy chick babyhood behind them. They are also lazy things and their idea of free range is to hang around in the yard and by the back door waiting for the next dole out of food, so they begin to feel a bit as if they are under foot. This is no doubt bad tactics for a meat bird, because we humans find ourselves starting to appraise them in a new, not quite so benign way - look at the legs on that, feel the heft of the bird, feel that breast-meat and so on.

Busy hands for about an hour per bird, but they are fairly
easy to pluck. There is more risk of that tender skin ripping
 than of leaving any feathers in. 

Going on previous years, when we have not 'harvested' (now, there's a euphemism!) them till about week 12 or 16, though we know that the commercial boys will have had them all sorted by weight/size long ago, we would not normally be starting them yet, but we decided to try a couple at this stage. Our process involves me killing them and passing them straight in to Liz while they are still warm. Liz plucks them dry, singes them if they need it and then guts them out and tidies them up for either cooking or the freezer, jointed if appropriate.

Oven-ready at 2.45 and 2.75 kg respectively. 

The Hubbard is an excellent bird for meat - we certainly think it is the meatiest, tastiest and most delicious chicken we have ever had. We enjoy them in all manner of recipes but we rather fancied having our first one of the year just roasted with oil and salt and with just lemon and garlic stuffed up its 'fundament', to get the full flavour un-enhanced by sauces or fancy marinade. It did not disappoint and the bird was so big (at 2.75 kg oven ready) that we actually only had the legs and a wing at that first meal. Like the Christmas turkey it reappeared as risotto the next day and will join me for a solo supper of stuffed pepper tonight, with Liz off on another Silverwood run minding 'Daddy' while Steak Lady whizzes up to Dublin.

"Gribbly bits" - not everyone's taste but we like the  livers, hearts
and gizzards off our birds too.

They say that every part of the pig is used except for its squeal, and we seem to come pretty close with these Hubbards. Liz saves the hearts, livers (for paté) and gizzards. If you have never had gizzard, I recommend you try it. The gizzard is a powerful food-grinding structure like the stomach of a mammal which also contains grit to help with breaking down the corn and therefore has a very tough lining to stop the grit damaging the gizzard (stomach) muscles.

The finest roast chicken you can come by.

That part is inedible, but if you slit the gizzard open you can easily then cut out the sheet of tough lining, leaving you with pure, lean, fine-grained muscle as good and red as the muscle of heart or steak. Cut it up into bite sized pieces and use in stir-fry or toss, fried, into a salad. We tend to use the hearts in the same way; they just need trimming to remove any membrane and tubular bits which you do not fancy. I'll leave the liver to you - everyone has a good liver-paté recipe somewhere.

New potatoes from the poly tunnel. "British Queen", I think.

That meal turned out to be a first for this season of that lovely and satisfying thing, a menu sourced entirely from your own 'farm'. We had gone exploring in the polytunnel and found, to our delight, that the spuds were ready; our first go at new potatoes in the tunnel. These had been planted on 20th March (Solar Eclipse day, if you remember) so were only 15 weeks old and they were streets ahead of any outdoor crop, but I was worried that in the tunnel, where you never seem to be able to get enough water onto things, we'd have no crop. We were wrong, and the goodly bucket load in the picture is from one plant. The soil left behind is so good, that we are now thinking we might do more spuds across the rest of the tunnel in the future or, possibly now for Christmas as crops finishing permit.

That front garden gravel strip gets its first (Rhapsody in Blue)
rose and then, with the encroaching grass of the drive (right)
 close-shaved, it looks even neater. 

Spuds, then, and chicken, but we fleshed the meal out with purple-sprouting (ex-freezer) and a salad of lettuce, radish and chives. Gorgeous. Only the PSB was not killed/harvested on that very day. If we'd not had a bottle of rosé to hand, even the drink could have been ours - that lovely sharp, lemony elderflower cordial.

Shepherding the "flock" home to the East Field of an evening.
It's more like them scampering and me trying to keep up!

What else is new? The baby turkeys have now passed the 4-week stage, so have finished with all that "electric hen" heat-pad pandering and being rescued back to the spare bedroom at night. These nights are lovely and warm, so they are now outdoor birds, all be it in a rabbit run with a lovely warm, dry, draft-free "bedroom" into which to retreat. They are doing really well and have you in mind of Hubbards with their growth rate but, as Liz pointed out, they have a good deal of growing they NEED to do to reach Christmas Dinner weights. The 2nd batch is still in egg-form, with hatch day due in a couple of days. Regular readers will recall that I am a bit worried on behalf of these 5 possibles because of the nasty, long power cut we had in the middle. We were minus power for a good 6 hours and I was putting mugs of boiling water into the incubator and throwing blankets over it to try to keep the temperature up. At about 3 pm I was contemplating sitting with the eggs tucked down my shirt when the power came back on. We'll see, I guess.

Tom is on the right in this pic by younger brother, Mark, which
was actually taken in 2013. I have no more recent picture.

Finally on this one, I need to say a big Happy Birthday to "big brother" Tom, who is 60 today. Tom does not do internet or on line, but he does get to read this in hard copy when Mum gets one through the post, so all the best, Tom. Hope you had a great day. When I spoke to him today and asked was he doing anything special he said, "No, just working". That would be fairly typical for we three brothers, never great ones for 'ripping it up'. I certainly spent my UK time trying to keep mine quiet and my head below the parapet; the fewer people who knew it was my Birthday the happier I was! Good on yer, Tom. Many more.

Improving Cookery Skills.

The raw North East wind is with us for another day and is cold enough to drive us inside, but at least it is dry, so we can moan about the chill but be sympathetic to those poor souls in Cork, Dublin, Northern Ireland and the UK who are contending with floods, snow and 2 days without any electricity. We retreat indoors for the most part and catch up on indoor jobs. I do a bread making marathon, making yesterday a 1 lb soda bread, a 2 lb batch of wholemeal yeast-bread and a 2 lb batch of naan breads from a Madhur Jaffrey recipe. The thought occurs to me that we are currently enjoying a huge expansion in the cookery skills  we (but mainly Liz) use round here.

We have talked about this and mainly put it down to having more time to explore methods and to practice the more fiddly, time consuming recipes. When we were in UK and both of us were working, I'd be getting up on an 04:15 alarm to be out of the house in time to be in work at 06:00 and Liz would not be back much before half five and often considerably later. We were also fairly tired after the working day so food was, to a degree 'fuel' rather than anything creative or artistic. We are both good cooks and have always believed in steering clear of ready meals and using fresh ingredients and plenty of veg so it was commonly meat and veg but usually very simple, quick dishes - grilled pork chops with boiled or steamed veg, steaks with oven chips and mushrooms, etc. We would very occasionally stray into ready meals (usually pizza) or head for the chip shop

Only at the weekends did we have the time or inclination to 'bother' with more complex stuff like kidneys done in creme fraiche or a full roast.

Only now we are here and settled in, semi-retired, do we find we have all the time in the world to explore around the types of food which we could not contemplate back in the UK. Liz has found herself buying 'Jus-rol' frozen pastry and making pies and tarts. She gets a baking 'bug' and spends afternoons making scones, fruit loaves and cakes. It is lovely, when we do get visitors, to be able to offer them more than tea and ginger biscuits. Liz also sometimes creates desserts, which is not anything we used to do - tonight's chocolate/coffee/whisky mousse being a good example. Our chickens (and soon, hopefully, our geese) sometimes have us in a glut of eggs and baking is a good way of getting through them.

We are also enjoying a different and broader range of ingredients, partly by being in Ireland where the local taste is for some fare not common in the UK, and partly by producing our own meat and dealing with entire animals. We used to buy lamb sometimes in England, but it was generally a leg or shoulder joint. Chops seemed ridiculously expensive lying there, all straggly, in their expanded polystyrene trays with their cling film. Here we have had three whole lamb carcasses to get through so we have tried out several chop recipes, as well as dealing with main joints, shanks, breast meat, hearts, kidneys and livers. The suet from around the kidneys and hearts gave us our first real try at meat 'puds' (suet crust puds). We cooked one of the young rooster chicks and have also used the hearts, livers and gizzards of both.

The shops here regularly have all the meat commonly 'forbidden', or too 'low-grade' for sale in the UK; ox tail and gammon shanks for example. The local 'Lidl' supermarket regularly has quails, pheasant, duck and goose. and sometimes frozen lobster, all at easily affordable prices. The Madhur Jaffrey book has us exploring interestingly spiced (but not fizzingly hot) Indian food and our big collection of favourite cook books is now getting taken down from the shelves and used regularly. The internet is an easy source of recipes if, for example, you suddenly have bulb fennel and you are not sure what to do with it. Tonight the bulb fennel was tossed in balsamic vinegar and olive oil, then roasted for 20 minutes before the quail were put in on top. They were as sweet as chocolate. We find ourselves regularly trying these new things and saying, 'Mmmmm - we can DEFINITELY do this one again!'.

We (mainly Liz, as I said) are thoroughly enjoying this new exploration of cookery skills and both of us are loving eating the products!