A Video to Prevent Chicken Back-Up

We signed up for a CSA last year through which we could get pastured, whole chickens. My mom went a little overboard and ordered us eight chickens a month. Eight chickens a month. Now, this isn't unreasonable to meet all the monthly chicken needs of six omnivores. The problem is that I was used to just going to the grocery store and buying six individual chicken breasts for dinner. Now if I wanted six breasts, I had to defrost and cut up three whole chickens. And then I had to use six legs, six thighs, six wings and not let the rest of the carcass go to waste. That bird, after all, was a happy free-range bird. She had a job eating bugs and scratching through manure, helping to both prevent parasites and fertilize the soil. She was a successful career chicken, an important member of the farm community. A chicken with a dream. I can't let a chicken with a dream die in vain!

But habits are hard to break, and needless to say, I still went to the grocery store and bought chicken breasts. This led to some serious pastured chicken back-up in my freezer.

I'm a little wiser now, having learned how to plan a little better. One way that I'm making things a bit easier is by picking up batches of whole chickens fresh on the farm the day of processing. I can then cut them up and freeze individual pieces, so it's more like going to the grocery store. I think there will be less waste this way, of both chickens and money. Here's hoping!

Even if you just go to the grocery store, you can save a lot of money by buying a whole bird and butchering it yourself. Here's the video that I watched countless times, my laptop on the counter as I stood next to my cooler full of chickens on ice, pushing the spacebar with my elbow to pause every now and then as I followed along. It's by far the best one I've found at explaining where to put the knife and it's pretty clear to see how she does everything in the video. And I think that it's awesome how she gives you homework at the end. I feel like writing and telling her that we cut up ten chickens, so could I have some extra credit? I know, I'm a total over-achiever. ;)

I hope you're having a great week!

How I Make Home-Made Stock

Have you ever made home-made stock, either beef, chicken, or vegetable? It's so much more flavorful than the store-bought kind, but to be honest, I used to think it would be too much trouble to make. Every celebrity chef has their own recipe for chicken stock, but I always find it so wasteful. They often want you to use the whole chicken (or two, or three!)  and then just throw it away once you have strained the liquid. This offends my sensibilities. Waste a whole chicken???? What are they thinking? Likewise with the vegetables. Veggies are relatively inexpensive (only compared to meat and dairy, though), but I still find it bothersome to have to buy vegetables just to make stock.

At last I found a kindred in The Unplugged Kitchen, by Viana La Place. She suggests saving all your kitchen scraps: onion and garlic peels, vegetable peelings, tops, and stems, cheese rinds, and even bread crusts and making soup every week. Then, one of my friends wrote on her blog about saving vegetables scraps in the freezer and making vegetable stock with them. So I decided to try it. Voila! Luscious, dark, flavorful broth, made for free, out of the stuff you usually throw away. And it's super easy to do.

All week long, I save my vegetable scraps, and I mean, everything. Tops, peelings, and root ends of carrots, turnips, eggplants, sweet peppers (though not the seeds or core), celery, okra, potatoes, sweet potatoes, stems of herbs, the tiny little garlic cloves that are too small to use, you name it, I save it. Because I'm using the scraps instead of throwing them out, I make sure to do an extra-thorough wash and rinse of everything before I use it. I put trimmings in baggies and store them in the freezer. We eat a lot of veggies in this house, so I end up with a lot of scraps. One day a week, I roast a chicken. Whatever day that falls on is the night I make stock. Before I go to bed, I ceremoniously dump the carcass and all the pan juices into my large crockpot (not sure of the actual capacity, but it's at least 6 quarts), then I dump all the frozen veggie trimmings on top, and cover everything with pure, filtered water. The only thing close to measuring I do is to make sure I don't over-fill the pot. I add the tiniest pinch of salt and two or three black peppercorns, put the lid on, turn the crockpot on low, and forget about it until the next day. Whenever I get around to it the following morning, I pour the liquid through a fine colander and into 3-cup-capacity Tupperware containers. I use a ladle to press and squeeze every last drop of goodness out of the scraps, then throw the scraps away. Then I label each container and put it in the freezer.

If you are only making vegetable stock, you could make your scraps do double duty by then throwing everything in the compost pile once you've strained your broth. If you are making a stock with meat in it, then throw the scraps away, as animal products are not supposed to go into a compost pile.

The flavor of the stock will not be consistent when made this way, as it would if you followed a recipe, but I have yet to make a batch that didn't taste good. And, I make mine almost for free with hardly any trouble, which is more than I can say for the Barefoot Contessa recipe (although I'm sure hers tastes fantastic). Oh, I do have to confess that I do not include beet scraps. The thought of red or pink stock is just not appealing to me.

And finally, I'll leave you with a link so you can read up on why broth and stock are so very good for for the body. Everyone's grandmother says that if you are sick, you need home-made chicken soup. Well, it turns out there is some actual science behind that old wive's tale. You can read about how good broth is for you here.

Real Food for Weight Loss, or How I've Lost 25 Lbs (and counting)

A quick hop on the scale the other day brought the rare good news that I have lost weight! Almost twenty-five pounds in the last six months, to be precise. I always shut my eyes as I step up on the scale, not able to bring myself to look at the number until it stops spinning. This time, I just starred at it in disbelief. I have not been at this weight since before I was pregnant with Darling, five years ago.  I am also a mere six pounds above my my first goal weight! The astonishing thing is that after five years of feeling like I had to starve myself to simply not gain any weight and constantly losing my battle with sugar cravings, the weight has just melted off without exercise or restricting calories in any way. It has happened very steadily these last six months. So what's changed? Well, my diet has changed, yes, but also my mentality. See, I decided to only eat Real Food. When I say "real food", I mean Nina Planck's definition of real food. In my own words, I eat the food that God made. Lots of grass-fed beef and dairy, pastured pork, chicken, and eggs. Tons upon tons of vegetables. As much fruit and nuts as I want. I sweeten things with honey and real maple syrup. Salad dressing is olive or hazelnut oil and balsamic vinegar. I never count calories. In fact, I way upped my fat intake so I wouldn't get hungry. Just between you and me, I eat insane amounts of butter. In the morning, I have a slice of sprouted-grain cinnamon raisin toast with a huge pat of butter, along with two scrambled eggs and half of a pink grapefruit. I eat pasta or rice only occasionally. I indulge in dessert at least four times a week. Usually it's a small scoop of all-natural ice cream (the closet kind to home-made that I can find), or frozen berries topped with heavy cream and sprinkled with real maple sugar. Carbs and sugar are the only thing I monitor, and I still eat plenty, I am just careful not to over-do it. But I don't eat food unless it tastes good. I just enjoy food too much to starve myself. I found that once I brought my meals into balance, the food cravings vanished. I don't snack anymore. I finally gave up all sodas and haven't missed them. I no longer have those unbearable moments of, "I need sugar!" that used to plague me every night. And meanwhile the weight is coming off very steadily, at about a pound a week.
While I am doing so much better, I do find that some foods are hard to eliminate totally. Damned if I don't love Pepperidge farm goldfish!

Anyway, I have just been so flabbergasted by my results that I had to share. If you are wondering what in the world we eat, here is my menu plan from last week:

Sunday: homemade chicken soup with celery, carrots, potatoes, and turnips
Monday: apricot chicken, bok choy with cashew
Tuesday: meatball stroganoff, roasted Brussel sprouts
Wednesday: home-made tacos
Thursday: pot roast with celery, carrots, tomatoes, and potatoes, roasted cauliflower
 Friday: girls were with Nana and Papa for dinner and I ate leftovers
Saturday: Ratatouille with zucchini, yellow squash, eggplant, green peppers, and tomatoes

If you are interested in learning a little more about real food for health, I would highly recommend:
Real Food: What to Eat and Why by Nina Planck
The Schwarzbein Principle by Diana Scharzbein
I have read a lot of books about real food, some better than others. Those are my two favorites.

You know, of course, that this is just my personal experience. If you want to know what you should eat, do your own research! Don't listen to a rambling hobbyist like me.

Link: Simply Recipes

For the first time ever, all of my children are sleeping though the night. It's been a long, winding road to this point, but I finally feel like all the sleep battles and nighttime parenting has finally paid off. This means that mommy has a little more time for herself these days! One of the great benefits of not being so exhausted all the time is that I'm cooking more. In my search for whole-food recipes, I came across this lovely blog.  It was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for-- lots of yummy recipes that don't require a gazillion ingredients, have a range of flavors, and basically only use real foods. No condensed soups here! The recipes posted seem to be seasonal as well, although you can of course browse the archives for whatever you're craving. It's great to plan your meals according to the season, because the ingredients taste better, but are cheaper, too.

Check out the Butterscotch Pudding recipe....I must make it! Also, the Apricot Chicken and Baby Bok Choy with Cashews are on my meal plan this week.  Yum!

A Trip to the Farm

I took the kiddos to a local farm for their annual Apple Butter Day, where they make apple butter the old-fashioned way: in a copper kettle over an open fire! It was truly a great day. While we were there, we took a hayride and saw one of the surrounding family farms. We watched cows, sheep, and horses grazing lazily in the fields, turkeys actually running around and puffing up trying to impress the ladies, and chickens pecking at bugs and trying to find some shade (it has been unseasonably warm this year). When they realized we weren't bringing food, they soon lost interest in us and went back to scratching. In the afternoon, we ate dinner, complete with butter so yellow it looked like margarine. Except that it wasn't. It was the real thing. Not like those white sticks you buy at the grocery store, oh no! I'm talking real butter. Spread on home-made bread, it was just about the best thing I've ever eaten in my life.

It was so wonderful to be able to see where my food, the food that I feed my kids, comes from. Every time I hear of a salmonella or e.Coli outbreak, I can rest easy: I know where my food came from. And if I needed to, I could probably track down the cow from my plate back to it's birth, and everyone who handled it in between. I pay good money for good food, but the piece of mind is priceless.

I developed a hypothesis about food when I was in college. At that time, I knew very little about actual nutrition, I basically starved myself to be thin, and, not coincidentally, I was sick, sick, sick all of the time. But oddly enough, I still have my little hypothesis, and the more I learn about nutrition and real food, the more I think I was right on the mark. Basically, I believe that if God made a food, our bodies can process it and use it. And if man made a food, it's poison and will kill you very slowly, painfully, and most likely, expensively.

Here are a few pictures. It was really one of the best days.