When reality sucks, I am very good at escaping into stories. Between this pregnancy destroying my joints, my blood pressure making me want to pass out and my children screaming at me, I can safely say reality sucks, and so I won’t be writing about it.
Instead, you can have some stories from my childhood. I grew up the daughter of two punk/hippy/greenies who built their house out of recycled materials and killed their own meat. My childhood was awesome.
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I remember being about four years old when my father first showed me properly how to skin and gut a chicken. We’d had poultry for as long as I could remember and Dad had always killed them for us when chicken soup was required, or when our young roosters started to crow, but this was the first time I remember him walking me through the steps.
He was good at it and by this stage it didn’t take long for him to finish, lopping off the ends of the wings to dry out for me (I liked feathers) and asking me if I remembered how he’d done it.
Of course I remembered.
Then came the cool bit.
You know how chickens scratch and peck around? Not everything they’re eating is edible. Half of the time they’re picking up small pebbles and stones to store in their gizzard to help grind their food.
My father hunted through the entrails he’d dropped below the dressed out chook and picked up the gizzard.
“Look at this Ronnie” he said, as he took his knife and split it, showing me how poultry actually crush and partially digest their food before it hits their stomach. Inside was a mess of pebbles, rocks, grass and a few tiny squashed grasshoppers. Our hen had been happily pecking in the yard the moment before Dad dispatched her and had obviously found some tasty bits.
He explained how it worked, before rinsing the gizzard free of rocks and rubble in the bucket of water next to us.
Grabbing the hen, he lopped her feet off with the choppy thing he had and with me tailing him, we took the hen inside for Mum to make dinner.
Dad kept the gizzard for us, slicing it finely and frying it with some onion and bacon.
Turns out, gizzards are delicious on toast for lunch. I made Dad save them for me with every bird he killed after that.
Except pigeons.
Pigeon gizzards are too small to bother with.
When I first met your father I was a 17 year old punk rocker and he was a 20 year old “bikie” complete with straggly beard and tattoos 🙂 It took your father four years to catch me , I called it stalking, he called it courting. I was nearly 23 when you came along my lovely girl and I had morphed from a full blown punk into your generic punk/hippy/greeny and much to your fathers relief I had replaced my screamy music with his preferred Pink Floyd and Jackson Browne.
You and your father share the same taste for the oddest pieces of animals. I don’t like the giblets at all. Thank you for this sweetheart, I look forward to reading the rest of your selection.
With help from YouTube and online forums we have progressed to killing and butchering our own roosters, but we’re certainly not eating the organs.
yes, I do know what the inside of a chicken looks like and it isn’t pretty. Several sets of insides dumped in a bucket while the chooks hang upside down to drain, 44 gallon drums with smoky fires surrounding the killing patch to keep the flies away, blood and feathers covering the ground, the clean 44 gallon drum full of boiling water for the dipping and plucking….it’s messy, but those chickens sure were tasty. Mum raised poultry for sale and near christmas the killing yard was very busy with ducks, geese and turkeys being prepared to fill Christmas orders.
This is why I love your blog.
You say whats in your head!
I find talking about our habits of eating our chooks, ducks and lambs either interest people or it sends them running.
Or they tell me that my children will turn into serial killers after seeing how to process the meat!
I am yet to do or watch a kill, (have to turn my head) but watched The Miner do bits. He loves explaining all the bits and pieces to the kids and how the anatomy all works.
I think it is such a valuable lesson for kids. To see where their food really comes from.
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