13 years ago today

It's gone by in a flash. I still remember the day vividly.

The wedding party: Christina Foster, Heather Robson(or was it still Wells?), us, Mike Owens, Bill Owens.

This one makes me feel really old! Those three adorable kids in the front are all in college now and one has a baby of her own!

Delicious!

The first chicken was roasted and eaten this evening. It was declared delicious by ALL THREE KIDS! This from the kids who said they would not eat one bite of these chickens. I guess they got over that when the aroma started pouring from the oven. I wish I would have gotten a picture of it before it was devoured. It was a beautiful sight. I'll try to remember when I cook the next one.
I do have some pictures of tonight's dessert.
I had a pleasant surprise while grocery shopping this week. Fresh Oregon Stawberries had returned! I thought I had missed out on them for this year. It's just not summer without strawberry shortcake.



The one on top was for us and the one below was a final treat for the meaties.

Our First Batch of Broilers are Finished

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS INFORMATION AND PICTURES THAT SOME MIGHT FIND TOO GRAPHIC. PICTURES WILL BE AT THE END OF THE POST.

Yesterday was processing day for our first batch of meat birds. I haven't posted about our meat birds yet. To catch you up to speed, head over to our friends' blog (first post was june 16) where they have been posting from day one and my myspace. We raised sixteen Red Bros from one day old to ten and a half weeks. This has been quite an educational experience for us all. I was really nervous about us completing the task when it came time to butcher, but it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd psyched myself out for it to be. The guys did the killing, scalding and plucking. Sounds like a lot of work, but with the handy equipment we rented, it took them all of 5 minutes to do two birds. They then handed them off to the ladies to do the dirty work of cleaning. I now know the insides of a chicken better than my own!

We set up the rented scalder and plucker the night before so the water was heated and ready in the morning. We started around 7am, getting the rest of the station set up. The first bird took almost an hour from start to finish because we wanted to be sure we did it right. Once we got the hang of it, we were moving along pretty quickly. We were finished with all the birds by noon and spent less than an hour on cleanup. Not bad for our first time! (Did I mention that none of us have done this before?). True to our sustainable living, nothing was wasted. The feet and necks were made into delicious broth, the organs were made into pet food, the blood and feathers were composted for our vegetable garden. My only regret is that we didn't raise more birds. Eight chickens aren't going to stay in the freezer long. Oh, to have a few acres of our own!

Last shot of the beautiful birds

Killing cones keep the bird calm and somewhat still during killing and bleeding out

Doing the chicken dance! This is the automatic plucker that sprays water down while it rotates and the fingers clean the feathers off the bird. I wish you could see it in action. The kids (and adults) found this part amusing. The spray went further than expected, hitting us all the first time.

Tyler playing with chicken feet.

And in the spirit of the Olympics... Synchronized Cutting!

New Floors

We recently had the pleasure of getting new floors put in our house while we were on vacation. My brother Ryan did a fantastic job with help from one of his friends and John's dad. While it was nice to avoid the whole mess, I don't think I would have another project done while we are gone. There are a lot of decisions to be made and questions to be answered on a project like this. Don't get me wrong, we are very happy with the finished result. It just made it harder for them that we weren't able to communicate during the process.



We replaced everything but the bedrooms with laminate from Dream Home Magic. The bathrooms are sheets of laminate that look like stone tiles. The rest of the house is single plank laminate in augusta cherry. They will look much prettier when we aren't living next to a construction zone with a constant layer of dust on everything!

Breakfast is Served!

Our young hens have just started laying and one of them is taking her job very seriously. Each morning for the last three days, she has flown out of the chicken yard and come to the back door to deliver her daily egg. The first morning, I had the back door open for fresh air. I heard a strange noise and turned to see her walking right in the back door, on a mission. She tried a few places in the laundry area, but they just weren't right. I finally put her back in the henhouse. A while later I noticed she was out again. That's when we discovered the tiny egg in the toy barn that sits by the back door. The next morning, I wasn't aware that she'd come in the house until I saw her in our laundry hamper. She left another tiny egg in there for us. This morning, she was kicked out as soon as she came in because I had to leave for work. I came home to find she'd left the egg in the little barn again. I'm sure this will stop once she becomes to big to fly over the fence. For now, I'm going to enjoy the daily egg delivery!

Welcome to our Blog

Welcome to our blog! I don't really know where to start, so if there's anything you'd like me to blog about, please ask. It may take me a while to get the hang of this, but bear with me. It will get better!