I really thought it was going to be horrible, I got all these horror stories from people and I was really worked up about it all. The chickens did not flop around, there was not tons of blood and it was not nasty. We prayed before we started, thanking God for the provision of the chickens, allowing us to raise them and then allowing us to enjoy eating them. The Lord really blessed and the kids actually enjoyed the process (I don't mean like YEAH we are doing this, but it was in no way traumatic to any of them, from ages 11 and under). I was the only one that cried and I was fine until our friends showed up and then I just bawled!
We only got 6 butchered and packaged in 5 hours (but we had 7 kids and 3 adults).
Plucking the chicken this was very easy, people told us it was hard to do and it stunk, nope, easy as pie. (chicken pot pie that is!)
We got chased inside by a severe thunderstorm with some vicious lightening! lol Otherwise we would have stayed outside working in the rain, but instead we had to drag in the dead chickens and all our tools lol.....yes it was rather interesting to say the least.
The kids learned a lot, our friend is an RN and he showed all the kids the body parts and explained how the chambers of the heart work and what and where the organs were. They loved learning about the tendons and how the feet move. They played with the feet and a pair of pliers.
Oh yeah, two things I forgot to mention. Oh, wait no, three things I forgot.
ReplyDelete1) DS knows his chickens so well that he could tell them apart when they were processed. That bothered me, knowing who was who. :O(
2) We kept finding these oval shaped organs and could not figure out what they were, the guy helping us is an RN and he kept saying "I wonder what these are? They are soft and fleshy, almost like a fat pouch." I finally said after like chicken #4 (we had a small pile of those 'things') "Could those be the male parts?" And everyone said "Oh, yeah, forgot about those!" We laughed. I googled it and found a picture of them, sure enough they were testicles. The boys all told the one girl "Those are just like our testicles." (all serious like). I'm on the floor in the kitchen dying over this! lol.
3) I am grabbing baggies out of the fridge because I wanted to put all the dissection items that were bagged up in lunch size baggies into a large freezer bag for storage and all the sudden I open a lunch size baggie and it has a CHICKEN HEAD in it! Thankfully I don't know who it was......lol. It was a Barred Wyndotte that is all I care to know! The kids want to dissect the brain and see it. This was enough to shut down the processing plant for the night for me!