Chicken Joy

The girls relating with the chickens.

My nieces have been staying at the house for the past few days and I've been teaching them a little bit about cooking. Yesterday, I showed them how to individually freeze fresh bing cherries and also how to make cherry jam.

The thing about working with me is that it's not a show-and-tell demonstration class, it's live and hands-on. They're doing the work. I'm just making sure they're doing it correctly.

But today we drove up to Springfield Farm to tour the grounds and see how the animals live. Touring the farm is always enlightening. Over time, you start to get a feel for how they do things as the pens move across the land offering the chickens, ducks and geese new, fertile ground upon which to graze.

Ready to eat those chickens.

Since my experiences last year, I've become a believer in understanding where your food comes from. Which is why I brought the girls here today and let them mingle with the chickens. They asked learned that this is where our chickens come from. That these chickens pecking around in front of us would, someday, be in front of us again - and on a plate. They seemed very comfortable going from talking with the chickens in the pens to pulling whole birds out of the refrigerator.

Back at the house, it was time for fried chicken. After butchering a chicken (okay, I did that part), the girls dried off the parts, seasoned them with salt and pepper, then shook them in flour before we laid them in the cast iron filled with 375F oil.

Fifteen minutes later, the chicken was golden, crispy and delicious. I wanted mine with rice. They wanted theirs with ketchup.

Guess I'll have to keep working on them...