Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner: A Photo Essay on Farm-to-Table, Part II (from slaughter to plate)

Look, I’m no Suzy Homemaker, and everyone knows it. Everyone also knows that the kitchen is “Ira’s room.” It’s a wonderful and inviting space where I don’t exactly shine.  But while Ira loves to cook and tinker, daily dinners usually fall on me. I know exactly how I look at 5PM:  blank and vaguely panicked.  Every. Single. Day.  And with kids in and out of our house for well over twenty years, all of them aggravatingly needing to eat, I really should have mastered this ages ago.

But I’m always learning, and adjusting to our still-new reality of having to “process” what comes in from the fields.  Some of the kitchen hacks that make our daily lives easier aren’t linked to the need to handle alarmingly large amounts of produce, poultry or eggs. Here are some of the greats that I’ve picked up over the years: a plastic squeezy bottle for olive oil, keeping a bunch of fresh garbage bags at the bottom of the garbage can (thanks, Mom and Dad for that one), a sachet of potpourri in the bottom of the garbage can (Kayla, kudos for that one), magnet timers for the oven (Fagie Samet-Reeves gets the credit for an old post on that game-changer), a nifty hardboiled egg maker that cost $5 from Ali Express and yields perfect results (also my mother-in-law for the win). And the Ninja! Oh boy. I almost seem professional thanks to the wonderful people who invented that device.

But I can never seem to get ahead of daily dinners. They creep up on me like deadlines in a calendar that I never check, and then…hopa! Hell hath no fury like hungry kids who need to eat NOW.

Then I came across a hack that I’m sure you all practice on the regular and will roll your eyes at having read thus far only to get to this familiar point. But for me, this is big. It’s a scale thing. I don’t think I’d ever bother if I brought home a few kilo of chicken from the supermarket — I would just make one package for dinner and put the other package in the freezer where it would sit, patiently waiting its turn for a few days, when a kid would remind me that it was 5PM and all that’s in the fridge is an unopened box of jello.

In farming fantasyland, you might imagine me wiping my hands on my apron after making pie dough and hollering outside, “Father! I need a broiler for tonight’s stuffing!” That won’t ever happen not only because I don’t make pie dough, but also because Ira doesn’t just corner a chicken and pull out his knife. It takes way too much time to process a single chicken, so he only ever slaughters a large number at one time. And we only had a few bags of chicken breast left in our freezer, so high noon for the hens was quickly approaching.

Now here is where I, the anti-domestic goddess who really has no business being in a back-to-basics-can-your-own-tomatoes type of family, decided to get involved. I found what I hope will be a full-blown game-changer in my lovingly-worn copy of Peas, Love and Carrots by Danielle Renov. Danielle suggests a supreme hack: prep a bunch of marinades for chicken at once, and freeze the marinaded chicken in ziplocs for easy dinners. The instructions are uniform: prepare marinade in the ziploc itself. Add chicken. Close bag. Give a little shaky-shake. Lay flat. Label if you’re feeling peppy. Freeze.

So I told Ira that when he next shechts (slaughters) our chickens, I want to be involved in the processing — and that we’d try both to make use of all the parts of the chicken (his thing), and also prep efficiently for dinners to come (my thing).

Last Thursday, Tziona was off from high school thanks to the teachers strike. It was the perfect time for she and Ira to round up around 30 chickens whose day had come. After slaughtering and kashering:

Ira broiled the livers and…other organs, which he and some other family members and friends always fancy.

He loves chopped liver — he added a few of our eggs and some onions, and we got around a liter’s worth of chopped liver.

Yesterday morning was spent butchering — labor intensive, to be sure, but he delegated to our son-in-law David who I’m sure was overjoyed to spend his one day off from the army at this task. When David (with some help from Tziona) was done, our kitchen table looked like this:

Now it was my turn to shine. I pulled out 30 ziploc bags and went to work.

This method is right up my alley for a few reasons. First of all, these recipes pair nicely with my half-used condiment collection. Secondly, limited clean-up. Thirdly, they call for only a few ingredients, pretty much all of which I had on hand (some of the more “exotic” ingredients, like pomegranate molasses and harissa, are always in my pantry — harissa because my sons-in-law put it on everything — but I did have to run to the makolet for preserved lemon puree.  Two recipes called for Franks hot sauce, which I was about to substitute with sriracha, until Google informed me that they are most definitely NOT the same thing.) Fourthly, these ready-to-cook proteins potentially will give me a daily dose of “mother is wonderful” grace: I can gaze beatifically into hangry faces and say that yes, child, there will be something for dinner other than cereal.

Here are the results of about an hour’s worth of industrious labor:

If you look carefully, you’ll see 28 kilo of marinated chicken, and another 2 kilo (8 small bags) of thighs/legs for soup addition. Can I brag? Why, yes I can, especially considering how all-in I went on variety:

bbq,  artichoke lemon, satay, honey mustard, pomegranate teriyaki, caesar, harissa lemon olive, pesto, apricot soy, and a marinade that the internet called the “best marinade ever” which listed like ten ingredients, but I was feeling the adrenaline by that point and pushed on.

The goal of the shecht-Harriet game is to use ALL of the chicken. Harriet, Maude, Carmine, and friends all lived a good life, and nothing that God gave them should go to waste. We used their organs, we used their meat. So now we have to use everything else. That is accomplished with this ridiculous pressure cooker which would make a good hiding spot for a medium-size child:

Into the pot go all of the parts that cannot be eaten, plus some bay leaves, peppercorns and allspice. (Something is wrong with the dry plucker, so we added the wings this time — normally we’d eat them, but they’re too labor-intensive to pluck by hand.)

A few hours on the stove yielded 38.5 liters of liquid gold.

Chicken stock is probably the one thing that has upped my cooking game more than anything else. I add it to pretty much everything but my smoothies. This will probably last through the chagim.

Here’s a freezer pic of 30 processed chickens, minus the chopped liver and shmaltz, which are stored in the fridge:

And that’s that!