What to eat?

We watched Food, Inc. the other night, which we had thus far resisted, feeling like we had a pretty good idea of what it was about. But then a couple of different friends talked about how wonderful Joel Salatin was in the movie, and so I got it from Netflix, and sure enough, there wasn’t much new to us, barring a few details. Joel was delightful, appealing and wise, and we thoroughly enjoyed all of his appearances.

The interesting thing is, the film served as a reminder of why we live the way we do, and what we’re ultimately doing here, even though we get lazy or do a bad job or whatever it is that keeps us from eating more of our own food. This past year we have found ourselves eating more from the grocery store, and not feeling good about it, but finding it difficult to get back on track. Dairy foods, of course, we rarely ever buy—just a little during the two month dry spell—and we mostly get all our eggs either ourselves or from friends. But this winter we found ourselves buying lots of meat and vegetables from the supermarket and not feeling so great about it.

So now, after the movie, we’re all four in agreement that we really need to do better about weaning ourselves from the big corporate food chain. It’s lovely when it’s all four of us, because when any one of us isn’t on board it makes it a lot harder!

So for supper last night we had cream of ramp and nettle soup—lovely—and an amazing salad of lettuce from the garden, little pieces of home-grown, -cured, and -smoked bacon that a friend of ours traded for milk, and crunchy sweet potato chips from another friend. And then ice cream made from lots of our yellow Jersey cream. We were all pretty satisfied with ourselves! Now, though, can we keep it up?

The Happy Birthday Roosters

So, as I mentioned in an earlier post, our chicken thing has been pretty much out of control since we’ve lived here, and last fall we finally had to do something, or we weren’t going to have any chickens left.

One group of three young roosters—half Buff Brahma Bantam and half who knows what—had moved into the yard and were destroying flowers beds and garden beds when they could slip into the garden. They were a wily crew, sleeping in the hemlocks outside my bedroom window, and crowing at 4 am with their distinctive crow, which sounded like somebody shouting, “Happy birthday!” in a crazed clown voice. They crowed a lot.

At some point in late winter, we managed to catch two of them and lock them in a cage on the front porch, waiting for the day when we could catch the third and butcher them all together, but the third proved almost impossible to catch. Things came to a head recently when I decided I just couldn’t take the manic “Happy birthdays!” any more, so DH and I really stepped up our efforts to catch him, spending hours a day stalking him, and even going out in the middle of the night to climb the hemlock with a net in hand. All to no avail.

Well, yesterday I’d had enough, and I built a special trap involving lots of old fencing wire and a fair amount of bleeding on my part, but I caught the sucker. I’ve never felt so victorious in my life.

So all three cockerels went under the hatchet, and the girls helped me pluck them. Unfortunately under all those feathers, they were still half bantam, so it’s going to take all three to make the pot of gumbo I have planned for them.

But I bet it’s going to taste amazing.