Chickens and turkeys

Yesterday was butchering day for the chickens. We had them done at a government inspected plant this year again. With a fifty four dollar invoice and some driving it's very difficult to do anything but be happy about the choice. Doing them ourselves is fun in it's own way I suppose. It's a bit like washing dishes by hand with others. It's a social time that is lost in most of modern day hyper activities. I don't miss the labour of it, but I've only really ever embraced hard work for fun rather than profit anyway.

Just behind me in line there was a fellow picking up some turkeys. Twenty three of them he said there were. The staff there were interested in which one of us was the guy with the turkeys. Once I got a look at the size of them I understood why. The first shopping cart could hold only four of this man's birds. A young guy came out from the cleaning room and grabbed the first one off the top saying "I've got to know what these weigh" and proceeded to the scale in front of us. The bird he chose to weigh was by no means the biggest, but it did qualify for the designation of big irrespective of it's mates. It topped out at just over 45 pounds. I'm thinking that I would likely need a bigger oven for that size of bird.

I wish I had taken a camera with me. When a shop that sees about 600 birds a day, every day is remarking on the size of some bird, I know it's a monster. The staff were all commenting, because none of these turkeys fit any of the equipment they had to deal with their butchering.

Our chickens this year look great. They are a nice size and hopefully not too fat, but we'll see that once we get one toasted up. That's another benefit of not doing the work ourselves! I can eat chicken right after killing day! Otherwise it takes me a couple of weeks before I can stomach the thought of eating them.