[Leica] birds

[images at InfoAve.Net (Tina Manley)]

At 12:04 PM 9/30/2006, you wrote:
>She would grumble, put a pot of hot water on a fire outside,  and we'd go
>stalk a victim.  She was a pretty good sized woman, and she'd  grab 
>one, and give
>it a couple of flips with her wrist, and it would be flopping  around.  We
>dip it into the hot water, pluck it and clean it, then go in  and fry it up.
>
>There was no breading, just flour and salt and  pepper fried slowly in a
>black skillet in a half-inch of melted  lard.

Back in our "back to the land" old-hippie days, we lived on a farm in 
Kentucky and raised almost all of our food.  We would order 100 
chicks from Sears, raise them for 6 weeks, kill all of the roosters 
but one or two and put them in the freezer, and raise the rest for 
eggs.  The days that we killed all of those chickens are very 
memorable.  I would wring necks and my husband would chop them off 
with an ax.  The worst part was the dipping in hot water and 
plucking.  We'd usually have to burn off small feathers that 
remained.  The smell of scorched feathers and boiling chickens was 
enough to make me not want to eat chicken for months!!  We did fry up 
a few for immediate consumption, but most went into the freezer for 
some much later day when the memory and scent of the slaughter had faded.

Now that we are both in our 60's we're going "back to the land" again 
and have bought a farm to raise chickens and whatever else we can 
that doesn't have e-coli bacteria sprayed on it!!  I just hope that 
this time we raise only hens for eggs and maybe one or two roosters 
to keep the hens happy.  Roosters are not pleasant farm animals.  I 
like the crowing at a distance but not under my window at 2 AM, where 
most of the roosters in Honduras and Guatemala like to crow.  My son 
was spurred through the cheek by a rooster when he was 3 and he still 
has the scar.  I'm all for more hens, less roosters - ;-)

Tina

Tina Manley, ASMP, NPPA
http://www.tinamanley.com