Wild Blackberry Memories

One of my fondest memories is exploring our land for the very first time way back in July 1997.  We have lovely footage of me working my way through a patch of wild blackberries with our then 10-month old daughter slung on my back.  In the video I'm picking berries and handing them to her over my shoulder.  She's making a valiant attempt to get them into her mouth but every time I get snagged on a thorn, she gets jarred and the berries go flying.   Eventually I notice the berries whizzing past my ears and (in typical oblivious mom fashion) say, "You better hang on to those berries kid 'cause they're kinda like gold."  At that point my amused husband zooms in on our daughter and you see she's got berry mash from ear to ear. 

Chicken Soup Magic

An ad I wrote last spring for our processed chicken..... at the time we were getting $6/lb on the regular birds and $9/lb on the dark birds.  -AR

Free-range heritage breed and dark flesh chickens locally grown and processed for your culinary creations. This will not be a typical grocery store eating experience! 

These are extra roosters from hatches last fall. We've been tinkering around with ways to increase carnosine (ie chicken soup magic) in meat birds. There's a relationship between darkness of flesh (melanin levels) and carnosine levels but the challenge is the birds with the highest (by far!) carnosine levels also happen to be small....as in silkies. While we're waiting for the research to tease apart all the different aspects to fibromelanism, we're exercising a bit of homegrown selective breeding - on behalf of chicken soup lovers wherever they may be 

Dark flesh chickens have a slightly different flavor and have high levels of taurine and carnosine - ie "chicken soup magic".  Information about cooking heritage meat is below.

We hatched these birds and then fed and watered them daily for the last 5 months - trudging through wind and sleet snow, pouring rain and deep mud. They've slowly grown eating a diet of hand blended whole grains through the winter and wandering about eating tender grass and dandelion greens (and the occasional tasty worm) this spring. When the time was right the birds were taken to a small USDA inspected, family operated processing facility in Garnett, Kansas

I typically squeeze 3 meals of of each bird - baked chicken for meal 1, pulled chicken for casseroles for meal 2, and a rich soup made from thick chicken jelly for meal 3, plus several quarts of high quality broth for comfort food.  

Cooking traditionally raised chickens is different from cooking with industrially raised hybrid broilers. Recommendations from Heritage Chef Steve Pope. 

The US Ark of Taste is a catalog of over 200 delicious foods in danger of extinction. By promoting and eating Ark products we help ensure they remain in production and on our plates. http://www.slowfoodusa.org/index.php/programs/details/ark_of_taste/

Slow Food KC http://www.slowfoodkc.org/

     

The Milk Jug Saga

For complicated and situationally irrelevant reasons I have LOTS of plastic water jugs at my disposal.  These came in handy last winter when the water lines froze.  I would fill 10 jugs with hot water and haul them out to the barnyard to thaw out waterers.  Thank heavens that only went on for a week....  (It was a long week though.)

But then, it happened.  It started snowing and by nightfall we had several inches.  By morning we had over a foot and it just kept coming down, a cold and windy white out, all through the day and into the next night.  Schools closed, stores closed, roads closed, even the state closed.

Everyone in town was stuck in town; everyone in the country was stuck in the country. By then the birds had been cooped up for nearly 36 hours.  There was no way around it;  I had to dig out the coops and get everyone fed and watered. That's about BeakHouse coops & SparkyCrows houses spread across about 2 acres.