Soup Of The Evening

My freezer is full of jars containing the liquid essence of long-gone hens.  There are also many plastic tubs full of the pureed prolific members of the cucurbit family--pumpkin and her sister squashes:  acorn, butternut, and delicata.

It being, for the moment, slightly wintry outside, with enough snow on the ground to make it look less like late October, I made for supper my famous (to me) Curried Cream of Cucurbit soup, so simple that it qualifies as home-grown fast-food.  Here's how to make it:  into the blender dump a quart of hen broth and a couple of cups of squash or pumpkin, two tablespoons of butter and two of flour.  Salt, pepper, and some hot curry powder.  A splash of sherry or brandy.  Then blend, heat, and eat.

The result lives up perfectly (except for the color, of course.  But you can make this soup with green veg, too, omitting the curry powder) to the lines by Lewis Carroll:

Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, Beautiful Soup!

                                                                                                                           

Chicken Soup Story

One day in April, just as the snow was starting to melt, my husband and I drove up a hill to a farm that sells apple-smoked, free-range chicken.  The road to the farm was long and rutted, so as long as we were there we figured we might as well buy six birds.  The farmer gave us a quantity discount, but even so, those chickens were not cheap.

Here's what I did with the first chicken.  After we had dined for over a week on the legs and breasts, I put the carcass into my big stock pot, with carrots, celery, onion and water, and simmered it for 24 hours, adding a bunch of parsley during the last ten minutes.  This is the method advocated by the Nourishing Traditions cookbook, and stock made in this manner is supposed to do you a world of good.

When the stock was cool, I strained it into nine quart jars, which I put in the freezer.  Then came the job that I detest:  boning the carcass to get the last bits of meat.  It's nasty, greasy work, even with rubber gloves on, and it takes forever.  The bones (every last one, I hope) went into the garbage;  the limp veggies and the skin and any weird-looking bits of meat went into the freezer for future dog meals;  and a scant two cups of meat went into freezer bags to be added to soup or tomato sauce or a casserole for dinner some day.  Then I cleaned up, and took a nap.

When we're done with that chicken, I figure we will have gotten some sixteen main dishes for two out of it.  So maybe it wasn't so expensive after all.

But the reason I'm writing about making chicken stock is that the whole time I was doing it I was thinking how difficult it would be for someone in financial straits to squeeze every penny out of a chicken this way.  I imagined a lone woman with a couple of children and a job.  Once she and the kids have eaten most of the bird, it's time to make stock.  But first, she has to have a freezer in which to store the stock, and a book to tell her how to make it.  The carrots and the celery and the parsley might require an extra trip to the grocery store.  And she needs to have the energy and focus, after the stock has simmered for a day, after she has fed the kids and put them to bed, to spend a couple of hours straining the stock and boning the carcass and cleaning up.

Perhaps most importantly, she needs to have grown up in a culture in which chicken carcasses are not thrown out, but made into soup.  It is still possible (though it's getting harder every day) in this country to eat cheaply and reasonably well, but it takes time and effort and knowledge.  It helps if you know that beans and rice together make a complete protein, for instance, and that you can make a quart of milk go farther if you mix it with reconstituted powdered milk.  (We're talking economic survival here, so anything organic that you don't grow yourself is probably out of the question.)

The director of the local food bank (http://communityfoodcupboard.org/) tells me that one of her staff's main challenges is to teach the clients, many of whom grew up on processed convenience foods, strategies for eating cheaply and well.  Food is a touchy issue for all of us.  Our attitudes towards it are formed in earliest childhood, and are deeply ingrained.  So the food bank staff faces an uphill struggle.

Although attitudes towards food are evolving, the trend towards locally-grown non-processed (let alone organic) food is evident mostly among the well-to-do.  However, I read somewhere that significant changes usually begin at the upper strata of society, and eventually filter down to the rest of the population.  So maybe there is hope after all.  Some day there will be a chicken carcass in every stock pot.  I wish it would happen during my lifetime.

Soup Story

I've been making chicken stock for the last several days. This is the kind of soup that starts with chickens that I knew by name, grown old and slaughtered (by somebody else) and stored in the freezer in plastic bags.

On Thursday, I bunged two of them into my biggest pot, along with eight quarts of water, some vinegar, onions, celery and carrots. They simmered in that pot until Friday, so that the entire house, my hair and my clothes reeked of chicken stock. Then minutes before I turned off the heat, I threw in a whole bunch of parsley. This is all according to a recipe in Nourishing Traditions, a book that tells you what to eat in order to live forever.

In the meantime, I had prepared a lovely curried cream of (home-grown) pumpkin soup for Friday's dinner. I was heating this on the stove when something impelled me to go check my e-mail--and next thing I knew the smell of scorched soup brought me running to the kitchen. The stove top was awash in smooth creamy orange goodness, which I sopped up as best I could. There was enough unburnt soup in the pot to have for dinner, but the bottom of the pot was entirely black. Worse, the burnt smell mixed with the chicken smell took away my appetite.

Friday night I put the pot of chicken soup into our supplementary winter fridge (the front porch) and set the pot of burnt pumpkin soup in the sink, filled it with hot soapy water, and turned away from the depressing sight. In the bedroom, I dabbed lavender oil on my temples to distract me from the chicken and burnt pumpkin smells.

This morning, the most daunting part of the chicken stock task awaited me. But first I had to tackle the burnt pot. I contemplated just throwing it away, but this being Vermont, I figured it would be a while before I could get to a store to buy a replacement. So I rolled up my sleeves, put on my rubber gloves and started scrubbing. I didn't think I would be able to even make a dent in the burnt gunk, but lo! with amazingly little effort, it all came clean.

I lifted all the limp veggies, all the deconstructing carcass parts, all the semi-congealed fat into a large strainer, which I put inside another pot, lest a single drop of stock go to waste. Then I lined up eight quart jars on the counter. I picked up a jar, set a big funnel into its mouth, set a small strainer into the funnel and poured in some stock until the jar was almost full. Then I shook the contents of the small strainer into the big strainer and started on the next jar.

When all the liquid had been poured into jars, it was time to deal with the meat. This is the part I hate. The meat of old chickens, though flavorful, is too stringy and tough for human consumption, but the dogs love it. That means that I have to go through every last ounce of chicken and get rid of every last bone, while worrying that I will miss one and thereby cause the death of one of my dogs.

You should know that, despite my would-be country ways, I am extremely squeamish about the anatomy of cooked chickens. I cannot bear the sight of a chicken leg on my plate, much less eat it. I will eat chicken breasts, but only if they are removed from their bony armature. And yes, I think that the least upsetting way to eat chicken is in the form of "chicken fingers" and other fast-food aberrations. Or in the form of eggs.

You can imagine, then, how I felt, combing my way through mounds of chicken knees and vertebrae and those horrid things that cling to the inside of the rib cage. It is a measure of the love I bear my dogs that several times a year I go through this ordeal for them.

Eventually, the last wee bone was thrown into the trash. The deliquescing vegetables, the stringy meat and the amazing amounts of fat went into plastic freezer containers labeled "dog meat." Just for fun, I weighed them: eight pounds in all. Lexi, Wolfie and Bisou will get a lot of joy out of my morning's work.

The eight quarts of stock will make eight wonderful soups (I don't mind consuming chicken in liquid form). I just hope I don't burn them.

Farewell, My Flock

I've been putting it off for at least a year. I started thinking about it when my hens became peri-menopausal, then menopausal. This summer, in hopes of stimulating their laying, my husband built them a magnificent portable coop which we placed in the field, surrounded by a movable fence. But even the endless supply of green grass and bugs and snails didn't make a difference. Buffy One, Two and Three, Blackie, and the three Reds were deeply into retirement, laying occasionally, and only for recreational purposes.

A responsible homesteader, one who cared about things like investments and feed costs and productivity, would have slaughtered the flock a couple of years ago. But when you know your chickens by name, and they know your name, getting rid of them is easier said than done.

So I let time pass and waited for a miraculous reversal of my hens' life cycle. Every day or two, just to keep my hopes up, there would be an egg or two in the nest. But an egg or so a day is not worth the pounds of feed that seven hens and their husband consume on a daily basis, even if they are on pasture.

Reason ultimately prevailed and yesterday I got on the phone, and after a couple of calls located a pleasant man who “processes” poultry not too far from here. Yes, he would be “processing” this morning and yes, he could “process” my flock.

We got up extra early and caught the chickens one by one and put them in a large dog crate. The normally gentle rooster Charlemagne didn't like my grabbing his hens, and as I type this post I can see the deep red bruises that his beak made in my hands. Not that I hold it against him—he was just doing his duty, defending his wives.

In fact, I felt I deserved those pecks. What was I doing, taking the chickens I'd lived with for four years to a slaughterhouse? The least I could have done would be to kill them myself. That, it seemed to me, would have been the only morally responsible way to handle things.

But have you ever killed a chicken? In the course of our long married life, my husband and I have slaughtered a few chickens. And although we're masters at ensuring a quick and easy death (I used to carry the chicken under my sweater to the chopping block, so it was practically asleep when it died), the task of plucking and gutting and cleaning took forever, and left us with no appetite for anything, especially not chicken.

So the slaughterhouse solution seemed convenient, if morally irresponsible. But we did it anyway.

As we took the dog crate out of the truck I peeked inside the barn where the slaughtering was being done. There were “killing cones” hanging on the walls, and dead chickens in them, and blood running down...I averted my eyes and told myself that the people in charge had so much experience doing this that my little flock would meet a quick end at their hands.

And now my chickens are back home, each one bare and pink and unrecognizable (except for the giant Charlemagne) inside its plastic bag. I will honor my flock by extracting every last ounce of nourishment from their bodies. I will simmer the carcasses overnight in water with carrots, celery, onions and parsley. I will carefully strain the resulting broth and freeze it for winter soups. I will grind the meat and bones and freeze them for Wolfie's and Lexi's dinners. And every time I make soup or spoon the meat into the dogs' dishes, I will gratefully remember Buffy One, Two, and Three, Blackie, the three Reds, and the rooster Charlemagne.