The Cheepah Chicken

Okay, maybe I am the only one who remembers "Father of the Bride" with Steve Martin, but hey, the title makes me giggle and it is what goes through my head whenever I get chicken. I am not a huge fan of chicken generally, which is unfortunate because a whole chicken is a budgeting dream. This fryer was regularly 1.49 a pound, and while the roasters are .20 cents less, they are also much bigger. With a small family and only one large appetite, the smaller ones work better for us. That and the roasters tend to be less tasty when fried, which is what the legs will be used for.
Since I am usually not well, the idea of spending "spoons" making a grocery list and menu within a budget, and then going to the store and fighting the masses, then lugging it all home, putting it away and starting to process meats and fruits for use, it is a bit too much. I have lost a lot of meat and vegetables trying to do it all, even in a few days, so now I often go through Peapod online. My husband can pick it up for free, and that way doesn't have to work so hard after working so hard at the job all day. I have learned how to keep within a budget this way, and have stopped buying some things that are much more expensive through the service than if we went down ourselves. All of that was a lead up to saying that I got two chickens by accident. This worked out for you all, because after I processed one bird, I had my husband come in and take some photos of the second one to share on this blog. I would like to apologize in advance for the photo set up. The pictures were great, but I had to compile them like this to keep the page from loading improperly. They also seem somewhat over-sized for the blogger format even though I used their settings. This is the smallest I could set them and still be able to see anything.

Each chicken left me with:

2 boneless chicken breast halves
1/2 pound of chicken tenders
2 drumsticks
2 thighs
2 wings
1 carcass, bag of innards plus scraps for stock
1 liver which I freeze in a container until I have enough to do something with.
2 quarts of clear chicken broth

Keep in mind that there are more than one way to process a chicken. If I were making a large fried chicken dinner, for example, I would have kept the breasts on the bone and cut each half in half again. If I wanted to also serve chicken wings at the same time, I would have cut them off slightly different, so that they would have more meat on them from the breast. In this case, my husband has been helping with the cooking a lot and is a bit leery of cooking meat on bones, so I went ahead and boned the breasts which gave me more bones for the stock pot.

The one thing that will save your sanity while doing this very simple task is preparation. Yes, processing a chicken from the market is pretty simple. Once you do it a couple of times you will be a pro and wonder why you haven't been doing this all along.
Clean your work surface thoroughly and remove any clutter. You will need:

1 large cutting board
Various knives, I use my 8 inch chefs, Sontuku and paring knives
Poultry shears, these are not a "must" but they do make some of the jobs easier
Soft headed mallet, OR a nice heavy cleaver
2 clothes, one sanitary one that is not to be used with any of the actual chicken or juices, and one that is okay to wipe your hands on, it should be immediately put in the wash after as salmonella bacteria spread pretty easily and cross contamination is how most folks end up sick from it.
Paper towels
1 bowl for livers
1 bowl for chicken wings
1 bowl or plate for finished parts
1 large stock pot, if you have any bags of scraps saved for stock, now is the time to put that in right off.
1 wash cloth
Dish soap for clean up and washing hands. You will wash your hands a lot.

Set up your work space, making sure everything is easy to get to. I keep the wash cloth rinsed and by the sink so I can use it to turn on the faucet to avoid cross contamination from my chickeny hands.

This is part of my set up. As you do this more often, you will find your own way that works best for you.

First, remove the wings

For a better view of the photos, right click and choose "open image in new tab". When your cursor is over the photo, you should see it become a magnifying glass with a + inside of it. Just click on the photo to make it original size.

Next we take the legs and thighs

Removing the back will help with boning the breast

De-boning a breast is easy!

When I was done I had a bowl of chicken parts, a stock pot of extra bits for the stock and froze the liver separately for another use one day down the line. I also freeze my wings separately until I have enough for a meal, because buying them pre-cut is ridiculously expensive.

I have a new found respect for folks who blog actual step by steps with photos now. Practice makes perfect.. right?  Practice applies to cutting up your own chicken too. My husband took a lot of pictures, but the best ones where the ones when I was not trying to show anything, because it has become second nature to me. It is like trying to say the alphabet without the song, something you have to think about, otherwise you just do it.

The July Round Up

I would be lying if I said that I haven't been a little disappointed with this years crops so far. Although my zucchini are looking really healthy, many of the baby fruits are shriveling before they become more than 1/2 inch wide (there are 8 ball zuccs, so they are round), the raspberries did produce well for the number of plants I think, but I was expecting enough to do something other than a syrup with, and the garlic was really tiny, much smaller than the bulb the cloves came from. Also, every time I plant lettuce, chard or spinach, something comes in and decides to flutter about in it, so all of my carefully placed seeds end up in piles, meaning any seeds that sprout are so close together that I lose more through thinning than I should. I try to transplant them back where they started, but they haven't been sturdy as of yet.

On the up side, and there is definitely an up side, I have harvested and eaten quite a lot. Oddly, despite the old French ways of cooking vegetables (braising a delicate lettuce like Boston Bibb for two hours? Really?), re watching old "The French Chef" tapes helped me to see how to circumvent some of the waste. For example, my family just won't make salad. It only gets made if I can stand up long enough to make it myself, and even then there are moans of sadness when it is presented on the plate. My husband seems most hostile to it.

So, when several pounds of it bolted in the garden, I despaired, until I saw Julia Child braise that unsuspecting lettuce. What if I peeled the thick stem that was bolting? I experimented and found that it tastes a lot like asparagus! Some of the leaves were also saved, but more was wasted than eaten because the tough ones and the ones with even a little of the red that happens once bolting starts was simply way too bitter for my family's taste buds. What was left though was excellent. If I have more in the future I will try to make something more interesting than a short braise with butter, salt, and pepper on it. One step at a time.

As stated before, the Mouse Melons are really happy where they are growing with my last remaining cabbage. I allowed a couple to get very big, but found that, like their cousins, they start to get more seedy and bitter as they get bigger. I will be saving some seeds from these plants though, because I am definitely growing more next year.

Even though the zucchini have been slow to produce viable fruit, I did get two lovely ones that were put together with some of the tomatoes into a gratin of sorts, with buttered bread crumbs and a tiny amount of Swiss cheese (told you, Julia...)

Harvest from today and some of yesterday's harvest too (at least the part that wasn't eaten)

Yes, the picture is from August. July was a tough month to even manage the basics of the garden, so no pictures. Okay, that is partly because my kitchen was a mess and I generally didn't have enough spoons to clean AND snap photos. Below are the totals for July only. I haven't posted amounts for June other than the 20 pounds of strawberries which still amazes me.

Rhubarb: 1 pound 9 oz
Garlic: six really small heads. Tasty, but small
Lettuce: 2 pounds 3 oz of Salad type leaves and over 3 pounds of bolting stems and leaves. This was supposed to be a head type lettuce, but that never happened.
Raspberries: 11.5 oz
Swiss Chard: 1 pound 8 oz
Mouse Melons:  1 pound 7 oz
Carrots: a few spindly bits, not enough to weigh really.
Snow Peas: not even a full handful over the course of the month.
Cabbages:  3 pounds 8 oz I planted three heads, one is still in the ground, the other two are making sauerkraut. :)
Tomatoes:
Patio Princess: 6 oz (large cherry tomatoes or small regular ones)
Snow White: 3.25 oz (cherry tomatoes)
Plum: 4 oz
And many bunches of basil, cinnamon basil, mint, flat leaf parsley, chives and snippets of other herbs like rosemary and French tarragon.

The tomatoes are heavy on the vines though, I expect a lot of ripening in the next couple of weeks.

For the record, here was the June harvest:

Strawberries: 20 pounds (can you tell how happy I am about that? LOL)
Rhubarb: 2 pounds (maybe a bit more, I let some sit outside and get ruined after harvesting)
Broccoli Rabe: 14.75 oz (test crop)
Bok Choy: 2 pounds
Spinach: 6 oz
Lettuce 1 pound 6 oz
Radishes: 6 oz
Kale: 1 pound
Swiss Chard: 1.5 oz
Assorted herbs