Chickens in the Freezer!

Saturday morning we were up at at 'em to get the chickens in the freezer.  We went out and built a nice hot fire in the yard with cedar, then set a galvanized tank full of water on some cinder blocks over the fire.  

Then The Husband went to collect the first 4 victims and we were in business.  Sometimes we skin the birds and sometimes we pluck. If you skin, you don't need the tank of hot water, but this time we were chicken pluckers!

I have spared you pictures of this part of the day, but after we got them all killed, plucked and gutted, we brought them in the house to finish cleaning up.

  The way that works is, I put a whole bird down in the nice clean kitchen sink, and wash the heck out of it with cold water.  

 This is when I remove any lingering "leavings" in the body cavity, and pull off any stray pin feathers.  Once the bird is nice and clean, it goes into a tote of ice water on the back porch.  

Where they stayed to chill for a couple hours, while we delivered two ricks of firewood...

After they have chilled in the ice water for several hours, or even overnight, they are ready to finish.  At this point it's all up to you.  You can package them up as whole birds, or cut them into parts.  Since it's only the 3 of us, and we aren't really big eaters, we cut them into parts.  3 legs in a package, etc.  

We skin and bone the breasts for boneless breast meat...

And we put one half a breast per package....

then we cut the thighs in half to make "fake wings".  We really love hot wings, so this way we have twice as many wings.  Then we've still got the other half of the thigh, without a bone to use however we'd like.  Sorry, I didn't take pictures of that!

We left one whole bird for us, and one whole bird to take to our beautiful neighbors...

And by Saturday night my little 50$ c/l freezer looked like this.....

God is good, and as our visiting preacher said last night, we must "count it all Joy"!  To God be all the glory!!

Till next time....