Mexican Turkey Broth (What is a Gizzard Anyway?)

At 6:30 this morning Homero and I squelched out through the cold mud and light rain to the chicken coop, to catch sleeping turkeys before they woke up. The processor had asked me to be at his place by 7 am. Homero would grab a turkey right off its perch and take it into the mama barn, tie its feet together with hay twine, and hand it to me. I'd wrap my arms around it to keep the wings from flapping and lay it down on its side on a tarp in the back of the van. Then I'd throw a blanket over the turkey and it would lie there quietly, seemingly resigned to its fate.

As soon as I had four strangely quiscent lumps under the blanket, I drove as quickly as I could out to the processor's facility. We unloaded the turkeys and the man asked me "do you mind if I kill them in front of you? I'm in a hurry."

"Not at all," I said, "do what you gotta do."

He had a neat contraption; a round stand with three metal, upside-down cones attached. The bottom of the cone is open. You dump a turkey in headfirst, so its head sticks out the bottom, and then when you cut its throat, it can't flap around. A twenty five or thirty pound bird can really beat you up with its wings. Even a healthy chicken can be difficult to manage. When I got home, I told Homero to look out for a discarded orange traffic cone; I bet we can use it for chickens here on the farm.

I asked the man to save me the livers and the necks. He said "don't you want the hearts and gizzards?" Actually I did not, but I knew Homero would, so I said, "yeah, save me all of it."

"Come back in an hour."

I spent a very pleasant hour at a local coffee shop with the sunday paper. It might not have been so pleasant for the people around me, however. I didn't have time to change my shoes before I left the house. I was in my barnyard gumboots. I did look for a good deep puddle and waded through it before I went into the coffee shop. Heck, its a rural area. I'm sure I'm not the only fragrant farmer who passes through.

The turkeys were just about exactly the sizes I had estimated - the smallest was fourteen pounds and the largest was twenty. They were beautiful, wrapped up in big clear plastic bags looking just like supermarket turkeys. Then the man's son, a husky twelve or thirteen year old boy who was helping, handed me a gallon sized ziploc bag full of innards. The gizzards were the most disgusting things I've ever seen; big, round, veiny softball-sized lumps of gore. I figured Homero would take one look at them and decide to throw them away.

I was wrong. He took one look and started rooting through the kitchen drawer for our sharpest knife. While I put a big pot of water on for the necks and started chopping vegetables, he carefully cleaned the gizzards, while we had this discussion:

"So what is a gizzard, anyway?" I asked.

"I hate to tell you this, amor, but it's the butt."

"The WHAT?"

"The butt."

"That's not a chicken butt," I said. "I think it's the crop."

"The what?" he asked.

"The crop. Or is it the craw?"

"What's that?"

"You know, the neck pouch where they eat little rocks to chew up their food."

"No," he said, "I've cut it out of too many chickens. It doesn't come from the neck. That's the buche, this is the butt."

In the olden days, we might have had to agree to disagree, but today there's google. According to Wikipedia, arbiter of 9/10th of all marital disagreements, the gizzard is neither the butt nor the crop. It's a secondary stomach, a grinding chamber additional to the crop (or, colloquially, craw). Although it is located in the last third or so of the digestive tract, it is definitively not the butt.

Gizzards are apparently pretty hard to deal with, though. It took Homero a good twenty minutes to split open, wash, and peel the four gizzards. There's a tough membrane that has to be removed. After serious washing, he tossed them into the pot with the necks and vegetables. That broth turned out to be the best broth I've tasted in AGES. We were all swooning over the soup, although only Homero elected to actually eat the gizzards. I don't know if the gizzards added materially to the flavor, or if it would have been just as good with only the necks, but it seems likely they added something.

Here's my recipe for Mexican turkey broth. This stuff will cure you of colds you haven't even caught yet, it's that good. Probably, however, it only has that magic if you have access to pastured turkey.

MEXICAN TURKEY BROTH
and Mexican Rice - makes a whole meal

for a big pot:

4 turkey necks
4 well-cleaned gizzards (optional but recommended)
1 yellow onion, rough chopped
3 cloves garlic
2 carrots, chopped
1 fresh jalapeño chile, chopped
teaspoon whole allspice
10 or so whole cloves
teaspoon whole black peppercorns
tablespoon salt

Put all ingredients into a large stockpot with a gallon of water. Bring to a boil and then turn down to a fast simmer. Skim any scum. Let simmer two hours.

Meanwhile, make Mexican rice - heat a tablespoon canola oil in a large non stick skillet, and put in a cup and a half of long grain wite rice, a diced onion, diced red pepper, two cloves of minced garlic, and a large pinch of cumin. Stir with a wooden spoon until rice is lightly toasted and just beginning to  color. Add 1 can of diced tomatoes and several ladles of the simmering turkey stock. Turn heat down to low and cover tightly. Let steam twenty minutes or so until rice is tender and fluffy.

Set out a plate with the following condiments: quartered limes, diced avocado, minced green onion, cilantro, and more jalapeños. Also set out a bowl of good quality corn chips.

In every bowl, put a scoop of rice, then ladle over the broth. Everybody seasons their soup as they like best. I like mine with everything, including crumbled corn chips. Delicious and warming.

Freezer Puzzle (Turkeys for Sale)

Our four turkeys have a date with destiny on Saturday morning. I found a guy who will process them professionally (i.e., he has a defeathering machine) for $10 apiece. That is apparently a cheap enough price that Homero will allow me to pay somebody to do it rather than doing it himself. We do not have a defeathering machine. Nor has Homero ever butchered a turkey before. It's probably more difficult than a goat. You can shoot a goat.

I put the turkeys on Craigslist - I'd like to sell two of them. We don't need four turkeys, nor, indeed do we have room in the freezer for four turkeys. We already have a quarter of beef and most of a goat in the freezer, as well as many gallons of berries and about a dozen frozen zucchini breads that I baked earlier in the year when somebody left  a crate of squash on the porch. Oh, and a few gallon bags of broccoli.

Damndest thing. Homero was in Mt. Vernon in August, buying school clothes for the girls at the Goodwill there. A Mexican gentleman approached him with three enormous grocery bags of fresh broccoli and asked if he wanted them. Not if he wanted to buy them; just if he wanted them. Like, take some of this fresh broccoli off my hands, willya, friend? Nobody is surprised when their friends try to give them free zucchini, but a stranger proffering free broccoli is something I've never seen before. Of course, Homero took all the broccoli. Not knowing what to do with it, I blanched it and froze it in gallon ziploc bags. Turns out, frozen broccoli kind of sucks. It works for soups or quiches, but not for eating by itself.

Anyway, nobody has called me about the turkeys. I suppose it's kind of awkward to try and sell fresh turkeys ten days before Thanksgiving. But many people say that poultry is improved by a few days freezing, especially lean pastured birds like these turkeys. I hold out hope - I'm selling them at  the very reasonable price of $4/lb, and I expect them to be the perfect Thanksgiving size of about twelve to fifteen pounds each. In the meantime, however, we need to prepare for the possibility of having to fit four turkeys into the freezer by sunday.

I can consolidate a little bit, and probably bring a few more gallons of berries into the house-freezer, but we need to start eating out of the freezer NOW. I'm making a blackberry pie today, and I can do something with another gallon of broccoli - soufflé, maybe? What's really taking up space is the goat. Since I butchered and wrapped that myself, and I don't have a saw, it's in pretty large and awkwardly shaped packages. Maybe I should haul out the ribs and make barbecued goat ribs with broccoli on the side and blackberry pie for dessert.

Redneck Shopping List

This is how much of a redneck I've become: my shopping list for today? A case of beer, propane, and bullets.

It's goat slaughtering day. Our friend C. is here with his family, and all four baby goats are meeting their end today. One will be cooked up for the taco feast later on, one will go home with C. as his pay, and the other two will go in the freezer.

At this point, we've done this enough times that I no longer feel the need to take a bunch of pictures and post about the process. I've listed some related posts which do have photos and musings if anyone cares to get the details.

The Redneck Rubicon (WARNING - GRAPHIC)

Great Goat (Manly Food)!

Farm Folks Are Friendly (Home-style Goat Tacos)

Too Many Roos, and Musings on Meat (WARNING - GRAPHIC PICS)

Aimee Gotcha Gun (Finally!)

My first bullseye (probably a fluke)


Homero takes aim


My target.


About two years ago, I bought a handgun( http://newtofarmlife.blogspot.com/2009/10/armed-aimee.html). I was almost totally inexperienced with guns: my siblings and I were given daisy air rifles one christmas when I was about eight, and we merrily donned puffy jackets and shot each other until our outraged mother caught us and took our guns away. Only once had I ever shot a real gun. When I was fourteen, my Dad won a tiny little pearl handled .22 in a poker game. It was almost small enough for me to palm, small as my hands were at the time. He took me down into the sub-basement of our apartment building and showed me how to fire the gun into the damp, crumbly brick walls. That was that as far as my firearms experience.

I decided I needed a gun when it became clear we would be doing our own slaughtering and butchering. Homero's friends dispatch the goats by the old-time method of a sharp knife to the throat, but I prefer a bullet to the brain. The first time I saw one of our pigs killed, by the very professional Keizer Meats men, they used a .22 revolver at point blank range, and that pig was dead before it hit the ground. If I'm going to kill an animal myself, I want it to die just that fast. So I asked the husband of a friend, who is a very knowledgeable enthusiast, to help me pick a gun that would serve my needs. This is the gun I picked:


It's a Ruger single action .22 revolver. 19th century technology that still works with perfect efficacy. It may not be the most excellent choice if you are looking for personal protection, but for dispatching pigs and goats, or for target shooting, no problem whatsoever. Plus - and forgive me, anti-gun folks - it's a COOL gun. It's a cowboy gun. It LOOKS like a gun, unlike modern automatics, which to me look like they came out of a vending machine. If - God forbid - I ever did have to use it to protect myself, whoever was threatening me would feel for certain like he was looking down the barrel of a real gun.

It was recommended, it was reasonably priced, it was nearby. So I bought it. Then it spent the next year and a half in a box on a high shelf. I never touched it. I must have been scared, I guess. To myself, I just kept saying "I need to sign up for a safety course." My friend who recommended it to me asked me, every other month or so, "so have you taken that pistol to range yet?" No, not yet. My younger brother likes to shoot, and he offered to take me to the range several times. "Oh, sounds like fun," I always said. "Yeah, I should really do that."

Meanwhile, the gun stayed in it's box.

Yesterday, my brother came up to spend the night. He brought his pistol and just flat out told me we were going to the range. He provided the ammunition (I never bought any) and we paid the entry fee (a very reasonable eight bucks, paper targets and earplugs included). My brother taught us the four cardinal rules of shooting:

-treat every gun as though it is loaded
-don't point the muzzle at anything you don't want to shoot
-keep your finger away from the trigger until you are sighted and ready to fire
- and I think I forgot the last one but it'll come to me.

He helped us learn a basic stance and a basic grip, and taught us the basic etiquette of the public range. Then we spent a happy hour and a half shooting. It was really very fun, although much more difficult that I would have guessed. Even a .22, for example, gets quite heavy after a while, and my injured shoulder did not stand up well after the first half hour. I learned that there is a big difference between my accuracy at 21 feet (the minimum) and at forty feet. I learned that with a little time and practice I can get over that panicky OH MY GOD THERE'S A GUN IN MY HAND feeling. And I learned that Homero is a much better shot than I am.

I enjoyed target shooting. I will do it again, and again, until I feel comfortable and reasonably practiced. But somewhere in my future I know there looms a much more difficult test: the day I actually shoot an animal. I'm not looking forward to that day at all, but at least I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I have done what was needed to ensure that my animals suffer as little as possible in their final moments.

On Beyond Goats (WARNING: GRAPHIC PIC)

This post is actually a bit delayed: life has been rather hectic around here lately, what with all the baby goat activity. In the the last three weeks, we've had three births, two of which required intervention (including a screaming bombing run to the vet at high speed with a bleeding, bleating mama goat in the back). We've had disbuddings and complications of same, and we've had illnesses of varying severity among the adults. We've wormed and trimmed hooves. We've had a steady stream of visitors to the farm looking at the babies, and I've sold every last one of them, including the ones I thought I might keep. We have harvested our first quart of milk.

Of course, other activities HAVE been going on, activities which have absolutely nothing to do with goats. It's just that nobody would guess that by reading this blog. I actually felt compelled to put a post on my facebook page that said "Aimee insists that, all evidence to the contrary, her life does not revolve entirely around goats." Really.

I have attended church and dyed eggs for easter with my kids. I have been cleaning and cooking and supervising as usual; generally fulfilling my function as the superego of the family - a thankless task if ever there was one. Tonight I finally (with the help of a bottle of wine) finished the taxes.

And, somewhere in there, I scheduled the pig for slaughter. I think it was wednesday. The men from Keizer meats came out and did their thing. I wasn't home but Homero was. Unfortunately, Homero told me that this time the pig was not cleanly dispatched: he moved his head at the last second and was shot through the jaw. He ran away and the men had to chase him down and hold him and shoot him again in the head.

I am really really glad I wasn't there for that. I arrived just about ten minutes later, after the pig was good and dead and laid out upside down on the sawhorse. The men were just getting started with the skinning and gutting. Homero had already told them he wanted all the bits that they usually throw away, so I went and got a couple of large clean bowls. We were given the liver, the heart, the feet, and the head.

That's the head, there, in the picture at the top, just as they tossed it in the bowl. I washed and trimmed the liver and stored it in a gallon sized ziploc bag in the fridge, but I refused to have anything to do with the head or the feet.

Once, many years ago when Homero and I were still dating, he brought me some fresh pig's feet and asked me to find a recipe and make him some tacos de patita. It's amazing what young love will drive you to. I did my best, but the smell of boiling pig's feet utterly defeated me. I ended up saying something like "I love you, but I will NEVER allow pig's feet to be boiled in my kitchen again."

Not to repeat myself, but it's amazing what ten years of marriage will drive you to. As long as he was willing to do it all himself, who am I to say no? It's his kitchen too. And I have to give the Devil his due: the soup he made - which involved not only feet but tongue - was seriously not bad. I mean it! I must have done something wrong all those years ago.

It's been a while since I posted a recipe here. I'll ask Homero for his foot-and-mouth soup recipe. I know you don't think you are interested, but there is a surprising amount of meat on a pig's head. It seems a shame to let it all go to waste. I mean, if you ever find yourself with an extra one.

Things I Don't Understand

1) Why the chickens are not laying eggs. A few weeks ago, we decided to put the chickens into a coop because we weren't getting very many eggs. Since then, we've been getting no eggs at all. Before you suggest it, yes, I let the chickens back out and still got almost no eggs at all. Put them back in so at least we would know whether they were not laying or laying but hiding eggs in the blackberries. They aren't laying. I'm feeding twenty chickens and getting two eggs a day. Why?

2) Why I can't figure out how to cook a farm chicken and make it edible. In light of the rediculous feed:egg ratio, we decided to kill a few roosters today (note to self: later, post pics and praise Rowan highly for doing her part). This time, we picked the very youngest roosters, neither more than four months old. Same result: tough, inedible, rubbery flesh in a grimy broth. Happy dogs, unhappy people.

3) Why I even have chickens at all.

4) How to clean up beehive frames and put together a beehive. It seems simple when you read about it in a book. There are only four or five parts to a beehive, none of them moving parts (until you put the bees in, anyway.) Why can't I figure it out? Today I scraped down about thirty frames and tried to sort my big jumble of equipment into recognizable bits: bases, boxes, lids, queen excluders, feeders..... I just got hot and confused.

5) Why the beeswax won't melt. When I scraped the frames, I scraped them into a big cardboard box. Beeswax is really nice stuff, and expensive, too. Of course, the crap I was scraping off the frames wasn't nice clean wax, but rather blackened, hardened lumps full of dead bees. However, I figured it was at least worth a shot to try to save it, beeswax being so valuable and all. I dumped it all into the top of a double boiler and it's been simmering away on the stove (along with the hideous chicken soup) for hours. No melting yet. I planned to sieve the melted wax through a triple layer of cheesecloth, but I can't do that if it WON'T MELT.

6) Why in God's name there's no beer in the house.

Runaway Chickens: The Final Chapter

After our neighbor brought back the two chickens a few days ago, I thought we had them all. There was the one we caught ourselves; the one they brought back and which escaped again; then the two they brought back together. That makes three. I had seen a big pile of brown feathers, and I hadn't seen any more chickens, so I thought they were all accounted for. 

Not quite. Yesterday evening, the neighbor brought back the last hen. What an incredibly nice man. I was mortified by the whole incident, and asked what I could give him for the trouble he'd taken. Did he like goat cheese?

No, he hated goat cheese. Grew up with goats. His wife liked it, but no need, no need. No big deal. Just chickens. Then he asked if we'd like him to come over with his big tractor and mow the small field so we could put up the hay. Well, hell, sure we would. Then he chatted for a while with Homero about welding, then he climbed in his truck and drove off.

After a couple of minutes thought, I decided I just couldn't leave it alone. I grabbed some of the chevre I made on Friday, and which turned out terrific, and a big ham steak from the freezer and ran over there. "If you won't take anything for catching the chickens, please take this for mowing the small field. I felt awful about the whole chicken thing and I didn't know what to do when I couldn't catch them. They won't come back, I promise, we're going to kill them tomorrow." He said "Well, thank you. It's okay."

This morning he was here at 8 am mowing the small field. 

He kept his word; we kept ours. 

I was canning beets this morning (lovely lovely beets given to me by my friend Marissa) so I had an excuse, albeit weak; Homero did the actual killing. He showed me how to pluck them. You just dip them in boiling hot water and then the feathers come right off, mostly. You only have to tug a little, on the wings where the feathers are strong. He gave me the plucked chickens to gut; but I confess, I couldn't do it. Part of the problem was the lack of a good cleaver, but I can't blame it entirely on that. I just didn't want to stick my hand in there with all the guts. Then I sliced open the craw by mistake and all the grain came out, and I went and told Homero I'd finish plucking, he had to gut.

There were two whole, fully formed and hard-shelled eggs inside the hens. 

We decided to cook all the birds at once because plunging them in hot water had half-cooked the outer layer of flesh. As I speak, there is a giant kettle of chicken stock on the stove, just coming to a simmer. We invited Homero's partner Juan and his family up and we're going to have a big mole feast. I'm very proud that almost everything in the feast (except the rice) will be either produced on the farm or traded for locally.