I’ve been trying to get some GRIT hats ordered for as long as I’ve been here. All my nagging finally paid off – 140 of the most awesome ball caps I’ve ever seen arrived here just the other day. I argued that we needed the hats to hand to special folks we meet at shows and that we needed hats to wear when we were out in the world. I secretly wanted a hat stash because I am a hopeless cap collector – it started with seed companies and moved to machinery makers. I have Caterpillar caps, International Harvester caps, DeKalb, Pioneer and Producers caps. I even have Mother Earth News caps – but until now, I never had a GRIT cap. 

I love my GRIT cap so much that I do chores in it, go to town in it and even forget to take it off while I’m at work. I have even whittled down our original GRIT cap inventory sufficiently to supply the entire GRIT team – they declined my offer to take a group photo – my family and a few friends. So today there are many fewer than 140 GRIT caps in stock (and I am more dollars than I want to admit poorer even though they are only $12 apiece) because of my obsession with great fitting and good looking headwear. I even have a couple of caps stashed away – out of the light and in a crush-free zone – so that I will have a fresh GRIT cap to wear when our one-time inventory runs out.

The powers that be told me not to expect another batch of GRIT caps anytime soon, since we aren’t in the apparel business. I told them that members of the entire GRIT community would really dig GRIT-branded gear – they just smiled uncomfortably like I was some homeless guy explaining the beauty of alley cat culture to an invisible audience. I didn’t mention that I was hoping for a full line of work wear with the GRIT barn and tractor logo prominently displayed.

So, if you want to get one (or ten) of these great looking and great fitting GRIT caps, you need to act quickly. If I am right that you all like this stuff as much as I do, the caps won’t last – and when they are gone, I suspect they’ll really be gone.

It took daughter Alaina and me a while to get to the place where we really felt like eating one of the broiler chickens we processed last week. We finally succumbed to the idea of a succulent, moist, broiler – slow cooked in the oven – on Saturday. Alaina had the presence of mind to put the bird out to thaw early in the morning. By the time I had beaten myself to a tired, sore mass from working around the farm all day, I didn’t have the energy to smoke the bird in the Orion smoker, which was our original plan. We’re both glad now that the smoker never got lit.

I’m a firm believer that awesome food can stand on its own; I find that holds true particularly with clean, healthy, home-raised, free-range meat. I don’t put sauce on my steaks and as much as I like smoked chicken, I love heavy broilers roasted simply too.

Since I was out of steam and fading fast, I took the thawed bird, gave it a quick rinse and patted it dry with a paper towel. I took one fresh lemon, cut it in half and squeezed the juice onto the breast-side of the bird and rubbed it in a bit. I then stuck the lemon halves into the broiler’s body cavity. Normally, I would chop a few cloves of garlic and some rosemary, mix it with olive oil and put it under the broiler’s skin – but I was just too beat to mess with the garlic and we didn’t have any fresh rosemary around so I just skipped that step. Ah, the life of a bachelor – no recipe police in sight.

Even though I knew there wasn’t any rosemary to be found, I cruised the fridge for something green and found a small bundle of almost done cilantro. Yep, I just stuffed that bundle of flavor into the cavity behind the lemon halves. The last seasoning step was to sprinkle a little Kosher salt over the entire broiler. I don’t know why I do that, but I have always done it. Perhaps it’s my way of rebelling against my physician – he’s always brooding about my blood pressure.

I don’t have a proper roasting pan so I set the works into a 12-inch ceramic pie plate (the tail stuck out and made a bit of an oily mess in the oven) and shoved it into a 350-degree oven. And there the broiler sat until the juices ran clear and the meat thermometer that Alaina stuck in the breast said the meat was safe to eat. I can’t report on the actual temperature because it just says chicken on the thermometer’s dial.

Once we let the broiler rest for a spell – while picking and tasting beautifully golden morsels – we served ourselves some generous helpings of the most delicious meat. Light or dark, the broiler’s gift was one of juicy, pleasing sustenance. We managed to eat about half the bird on Saturday night.  It really went well with the squash soup and spinach salad that Alaina made earlier.

On Sunday we cleaned the carcass of the remaining meat and boiled the bones. The meat went into the crockpot with a mess of dried herbs (poultry seasoning, sage, and some other grey-green stuff), a pinch of salt, one yellow onion diced and half-dozen stalks of celery sliced. Next we dumped a cup of long grain rice into the slow cooker and added sufficient chicken broth (from the boiled bones) to cover the works. We set the crockpot to high for a few hours and then to low. We forgot to time it – but it was on low overnight. The rice was a little on the soft side, but it reminded me of chicken dumplings a bit. In any case, the slow-cooked chicken and rice was positively delicious – no doubt because of the broiler and not my slow-cooking prowess.

As I reflect on the entire raising, processing and eating of that broiler chicken, I can only conclude that it was entirely worth it. Alaina and I both agree that home-raised broilers are positively delicious. With food that good, it’s not a chore to use it up, which makes me feel like that creature’s life was well celebrated and not wasted. I know we’ll smoke one of those broilers soon. Stay tuned.

Photo: iStockphoto: adlifemarketing

The GRIT and MOTHER EARTH NEWS Community Chicken project came to closure last Sunday when 8 people gathered at my Osage County Kansas farm to kill and clean the commercial broilers we had been raising on range for the past 12 weeks or so. The event brought together a most unlikely group of editors, spouses, advertising sales people, teacher, librarian and medical intern. Most of these folks had never taken a vertebrate animal's life with their bare hands. Most had never felt the slickness of warm offal. Most had never been that up close and personal with the animals whose lives help sustain us.

MOTHER EARTH NEWS Sr. Associate Editor Troy Griepentrog and I took responsibility for raising the birds and supplemented their diet of bugs and clover with an antibiotic-free grower ration, which is part of the Homestead line offered by Hubbard Feeds. We kept the birds enclosed, and safe from predators with electric net fences and chargers supplied by Kencove and Premiere One. Feeders, knives, fowl catchers, waterers, chicks, hatching eggs and a vacuum sealer were all supplied by the various advertisers listed prominently on the Community Chickens website.

Killing any animal with your bare hands, is never easy – at least when you don’t do it every day. When I demonstrated a humane way to nick the birds’ jugular, using killing cones supplied by Featherman to restrain the birds, there was a hush among the group as folks reflected on what it means to take (and honor) a life and accept the animal’s gift of sustenance. When the blood flowed freely, some people turned away. My daughter, Alaina told me later she thought she was going to cry. To paraphrase Joel Salatin, it isn’t good to kill chickens too often, because you run the risk of becoming desensitized and of taking their lives for granted. That definitely was not the situation at the farm on Sunday.

Once their life blood ceased flowing, we dunked the birds in a beautifully constructed, thermostat-controlled, propane-fired scalder provided by the Featherman Equipment Co. We found that several brief dunks (5 – 15 seconds long depending on bird size) (each followed by a test pluck to see how easily we could remove tough flight or tail feathers) helped us get the scalding just right. From the approximately 150-degree water we placed two birds into the Featherman drum plucker for a 30 second ride that removed the feathers easily and virtually completely. The Featherman drum plucker is nothing short of phenomenal.

The next step in the process was to remove the birds’ feet, crops, heads and oil glands, which was followed by opening the abdominal cavity and removing the viscera. Check GRIT Assistant Editor Caleb Regan’s blog for more on that activity. Alaina kept the fresh water flowing throughout the process and gave the birds a final rinse before we placed them in an ice-water bath for rapid cooling. Beautiful broiling chickens were then packaged in plastic and packed in coolers for the rides home.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my colleagues Troy Griepentrog, Caleb Regan, Megan Phelps and Steve Sabran for their participation. I’d also like to thank Troy’s wife Sue and Megan’s husband Nate and my daughter Alaina for taking ownership of the process as well. I know I will kill chickens again next year and I hope that it will be in the company of such thoughtful and careful folks. I also hope to have access to the Featherman cones, scalder and plucker – they definitely made the entire process easier.

Photos courtesy Suzanne Griepentrog.