I guess living in Africa has really emphasized how hygienic and sterile things are in the states.
Especially when it comes to our food.
I love those wonderful 2 and 5 pound bags of boneless, skinless, (smell-less), flash frozen chicken. They are fabulous….one of my favorites actually.
I missed the last slaughtering of chickens here at the house. I made it just in time to see the event today because I was drawn outside by Eli announcing that he had a “kid-sized slasher” which he was proudly swinging around. “Kid-sized slasher” is really just a big knife (ponga). I was horrified and told him to put it down, to which he argued and I had to repeat my directive 3 more times before the groundsman Patrick stepped in to take his ponga back.
So, by then I realized why Patrick was at the back of the house with his knife next to the chicken house. I hoped that the chickens weren’t being killed because I had been overheard complaining about them destroying all of my succulents (the same ones that a not so nice little visiting boy ripped completely out of the ground). But, secretly, I was glad that they wouldn’t be ripping my flower garden to shreds any longer.
I briefly considering shooing Eli and Lucy inside, but they seemed quite interested in the process….so I decided to go with the flow.
Eli did not seem bothered by the whole idea of a chicken being killed like I thought he might. In fact, at one point, he looked like this:
Preparing for the 1st chicken
And then, after the 1st chicken, he screamed, “Yey!!”
Then, after a the first two chickens had seen their day, Eli asked, “They’re in heaven now right mom?”
Yep.
Then, when we were down to the last one (the bold rooster who likes to cock-a-doodle outside my window every morning at 5am) Eli said, “Paaa-trick, don’t cut the cat too, he’s our friend!”
Then Lucy, who had been quite close to the whole process, backed away and said, “I don’t want to get cut either!”
We finally convinced Megan that she needed to witness the event, and then I got her to pluck a feather out of the chicken. Lucy did too:
To top the evening off, later, when it was dark out and we were all relaxing after dinner, we heard a thump, thump on the door and there appeared Evalynn, the househelp from next door with a covered pot.
Inside was my surprise. A dead, skinned chicken. I told Ian to throw it in a gallon freezer bag and into the freezer to deal with at a later date. Feet and all. I’m wondering if I can just forget about it for awhile and then it will be freezer burned & ll have to get rid of it?? Or, I guess I can suck it up and make a soup or something.