Figuring out first-hand food
4/30 Update: Despite several warm baths and one attempt, by me, to make tactile sense of what’s on the nether side of a chicken’s vent, our chicken remains the same. If there’s no change tomorrow, we may have to take that most drastic of measures. Thank you for all your good wishes, and for the [...]
I ask forbearance from those of you who are tired of, put off by, or simply uninterested in deer hunting. The season ends this coming Saturday, and then I promise I’ll be back to chickens, shellfish, vegetables, and variety. In the meantime, though, it’s all deer all the time. When I signed up for my [...]
This morning we opened the run to let the chickens out and we were missing one. Last night, we’d closed them in just after dark, and Kevin hadn’t done a beak count. We usually check that they’re all there, but we got a little carried away with all the Thanksgiving festivities so we didn’t notice [...]
Today I cut the throat of a turkey Kevin and I had raised from a poult, and it was hard. The throat-cutting itself wasn’t difficult; it was one decisive stroke with a knife I sharpened to within an inch of its life. It was summoning the willingness to make that stroke that was hard. The [...]
It was back in September that Kevin decided to pound the last nail in the coffin of our urban-sophisticate image by building a chicken plucker out of an old washing machine. He acquired the machine, for free, from a very nice real estate broker in Orleans. He stripped it down to just console and drum, [...]
I’ve never been able to get behind catch-and-release fishing. Seems to me it’s fish torture, pure and simple. We’re putting an animal through what must be an unpleasant experience, just for fun. There are arguments about just how unpleasant that experience is. Ichthyologists disagree about the extent to which fish feel pain, but no one [...]
I’m pretty sure that none of my New York City friends can to do a chicken autopsy. It’s a pretty arcane skill but, if you need to do one, it’s very helpful to have a friend who knows how. Enter Jen, from Milkweed & Teasel, who, with her husband, Mike, walked me through it. Any [...]
We had a snowstorm last night, and I had to shovel five inches of heavy, icy snow out from in front of the run door before I could go in and let the chickens out of the coop. I heard them squawking as I shoveled. When the door swung free, I went inside and hung [...]
Tamar Haspel has been writing about food and health for over a decade. She recently moved from Manhattan to Cape Cod. She’s adjusting well. [Read More …]
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