The Chickens Went Off To Freezer Camp

Which is a nice, non-gory way of saying early this morning, before the sun came up (and in the rain), I loaded all my broilers into the cages I'd placed in the back of the pick up truck, and drove them off to the processor.

Yes, these cute little guys that arrived at this little place here this spring:

That looked like this when they were ready to move from the brooder in the garage to the portable pen in the great outdoors:

Came home from the processor today looking like this:

After parting out about half of them before putting them in our big chest freezer (in other words, cutting them up and packaging them as boneless skinless breasts, leg quarters, wings--have you started growing the ingredients for your Super Bowl party yet?--and soup carcasses), I sat down with my chicken catalog and figured up my next batch of meat birds, plus a few more pullet chicks for the laying flock.  Then I ordered up about 40 more birds to arrive in early August!

More birds because with so many of us living at this little place here, we are going to need 50+ chickens in the freezer to feed us for a year. We ran out of homegrown chicken before winter arrived last year, and having to rely on chicken from the store has been a frustrating experience.  It doesn't taste as good, the texture isn't as good, it's origin is questionable (has it traveled to China and back?); plus, my lifelong low-end-of-normal blood pressure (even during pregnancies!) is now flirting with the high blood pressure classification.  With the doctor asking me if I have been eating a lot more salt since my physical in 2014, and me not liking salty stuff at all (I salt almost nothing on my plate) DH is pretty sure it's the sodium-solution injected chicken from the store that is to blame for this drastic change in my diastolic and systolic numbers.  So, I'll be raising more chickens yet this summer, and for many summers to come.

You gotta do what you gotta do.