Chicken feed for the soul

A brother blogger mentioned the joys of finding various soil dwellers in the course of gardening (Larval Thoughts) and the joys of bribing the local birds to be your friends.  Our urban farm has a flock of four lovely chickens, which we've bribed since chickhood to be our friends and give us lots of eggs. 

The issue of giving the chickens free range of our entire yard is a bit of a bone of contention in our household.  Resident Spouse likes to let them roam to eat fresh grass and find bugs.  I don't really mind it when I'm digging out sod or otherwise clearing out the detritus because they do a wonderful job of breaking up sod clumps in their quest for worms and other goodies.  I do have an issue when they tear out plantings.  A slightly cavalier attitude towards this behavior on the part of said chicks lead to me having to rebuild and replant a garden bed several days in a row before the issue became a topic of household .... uh.... discussion.

The joys of chicken ownership for any gardener are multitudinous and range from having a wonderful use for lawn clippings (in the coop) to the hottest compost pile you'll ever experience.  The egg shells create a calcium-rich compost that makes for lots of healthy worms to stuff a chicken full in no time flat if you let her at the bottom of the compost bin.  And I have to admit to a bit of vicious pleasure in hunting down that nasty cutworm who dared damage my cucumber and tomato vines. 

Lovely eggs.  Those cutworms do turn into mighty fine omelets.

A chicken with her _________ cut off

Now be nice.  Think positive thoughts when you fill in that blank.

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We have a flock of four lovely chickens.  These are Wyandottes (both silver and golden), which were bred in upstate New York as a more cold hardy variety and we thought they'd fit in well here in high, dry and cold Central Oregon.  We raised them from chicks, first in our bathtub, which earned me the title of Extremely Tolerant, and then in a variety of enclosures, finally graduating to a lovely coop with run.

The chicken run encloses a few volunteer and transplanted volunteer trees that are going on a handful of years old now and who are really showing their stuff in growth potential over the last year or so.  As a result we left a couple of gaps in the "roof" of the chicken run.  The other major gap is in the area over the door to enter the run. 

A little while back, I got a knock on the door from a mom of a family who recently moved into the neighborhood.  Resident Kid was pleased because the new kids on the block attended the same school so there was an instant network.  I answered the door and she said hello and by the way, there's a chicken in the alley.  I stupidly responded, "Is it one of our chickens?"  Duh, we're the only chicken owners on that alley...

I grabbed a can of feed corn, their favorite treat, and went to investigate.  Sure enough, there was one of our golden-laced Wyandotte ladies wandering the alley near the fence backing her run.  I didn't even need the corn because she was very happy to be caught and carried back to the run. 

Later we debated how she got out but, without witnessing the event, couldn't really say for sure. 

A couple weeks later, I looked out the back door and saw one of the silver-laced ladies pacing the run fencing on the outside of the run.  Obviously distressed, she too was pretty happy to be caught and put back with her fellow ladies. 

Finally, Resident Kid witnessed one of the silvers hop up on the edge of some boards we leaned against the coop to shelter their watering dish from the snow and vault out over the run door. 

The motivation for this behavior is obviously a version of the "grass is greener" syndrome with a major drawback being that if only one chicken vaults out of the run, she is too distressed at being cut off from the flock to enjoy the greenery...Leading, course, to her behaving like a chicken with her flock cut off.

Anyone Can Roast

I was always somewhat of an indifferent chicken cooker.  I was always much more comfortable doing a stir fry or some such thing with boneless bits rather than dealing with the entire beast.  The few roast chickens I'd attempted early in my cooking life were, at best, somewhat uninspired.  Then, when local markets started carrying juicy roast chickens, all bets were off.  I gave up on trying to roast my own and bought them at the store.  The one thing I didn't like was all the sodium that tended to be added to these.

One day I impulse bought, and I can't remember where, what looked like a totally funky contraption to hold a can of beer or soda over which you put your chicken to roast in the oven or the grill.  (Bayou Classic 0880-PDQ Stainless-Steel Beercan ChickCAN Rack) I tried it and the results were fabulous.  Nice moist meat and crispy skin with the fat most drained away from under the skin. And I had complete control over seasoning and actually enjoyed playing with mixes of various spices to rub on the skin.  That was a couple years ago or so and I didn't roast more than three or four chickens at the time.

About a year ago, I arrived home late one Saturday evening (probably close to 11:00) after a dance performance to see the bathroom light on.  That was odd because I expected the house to be dark at that hour.  I hauled my dance gear in the house and peeked in the bathroom to see what the deal was.  Well, not only was there a light on in the bathroom, but the light was on in the shower.  Not normal.   I slid open the shower door to be greeted by, "Peep, peep, peep!" 

I pop my head into the bedroom, "Why are there dinosaurs in the bathtub?"

The illuminating response was, "They were the last ones they had so we thought we'd better get them."  Oh...of course.

Long story short, the four baby dinosaurs grew up into lovely Wyandotte layers that provide us with gorgeous brown eggs.  Chickens had become part of our household.  We had already discovered that birds have tremendous personalities through some previous avian encounters but these chickens were better than TV.  The resident kid was totally enamored of the new additions and was having quite the blast rearing them and harvesting the eggs.

Meanwhile, I got laid off from my job and I started cooking more... partly because I had the time to enjoy it and partly to save money.  As I was poking around one day, I remembered my ChickCAN rack and thought I'd make us a nice chicken dinner with all the fixings.  As I set up the chicken and rubbed seasoning on it, I had the sudden uneasy thought that maybe the resident kid would object to eating a chicken that looked like, well, a chicken.  Once you've got the chicken on the can ready to roast with this gizmo, it looks like a naked chicken sitting there.  I thought maybe I could get it off the can and onto the plate before anyone saw it.  And into the oven it went.

I forgot about my uneasiness until I heard resident kid come in the door.  And, guess what, I'd left the oven light on.  Our oven is a wall oven and the window is at head and shoulders level for me and when the light is on, the natural response is to look in the window to see what's happening.  Well, kid dumps the stuff of the day on the floor by the door and walks towards the kitchen with the inevitable, "What's for dinner?"  I respond cautiously, "Chicken."  Kid walks in the kitchen and glances in the window at the chicken sitting on its haunches in a pan.  "Yum!"  A small cord of tension dissolves in my neck.  "You're OK with eating a chicken?"  No pause whatsoever, "I don't know that chicken."