Posts Tagged ‘egg’
A Peculiarly Typical Day
Posted in Rural Life, tagged dead deer, doll, egg, eggs, fog, roadkill on August 2, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Or, a typical peculiar day? Everyone has a day now and then, with the following sorts of sightings and events and observations, right? A bewitching mix of the beautiful and the profane, the ordinary and the rare…
Morning fog over the decaying barn across the street from the lab.
The vagina tree.
Dead fawn on our road, less than 12 hours after it passed over. Or, more accurately, a car passed over IT.
Is one of my chickens having a problem I should know about?
A baby went through the lab’s laundry? How did I not notice that? And since it’s been through the wash cycle, do I now naturally put it in the dryer? What to do… (I opted to let her dry in the sun.)
Distracted by the baby, I burned the lab’s freebase.
Half-pint Lab Tech sees an alien head in the spill.
It’s only 2pm. What else lies in store for this enchanting day?
Notes from the rest of the day:
Admittedly a crappy photo, of crap in a bag. I just wanted to document the quirks of the day. The youngest lab tech shat herself in the woods. She can’t be blamed; she’s new to the technique of recognizing the onset of poo and finding a good spot to direct it. We all suffered this peculiarity at one point in life.
Dead fawn, Part 2. The turkey vultures have made strong headway, little is left. I wasn’t going to visit it again, but youngest lab tech insisted. Now I wish I’d come every hour since fawn’s decease to document it’s vanishing.
Junior Lab Tech felt it important that this mashed potato sculpture be documented before being eaten. It was accompanied by the following observation, unrelated to potatoes: “I seem to have lost my symmetrical gesture habit, you know, where if I itch one side of my face I then have to itch the other side of my face to be even? It’s been replaced by a fear of pointy things that can impale me. Like that lollipop stick, I have to turn it away. And that pencil, can you please move it?”
We bounced on a trampoline, giggled, tidied up, and closed the lab.
An Amazing Surprise Whilst Slaughtering Our Ducks Today
Posted in Rural Life, tagged abattoire, butcher, defeathering, duck, egg, eggs, farm, farming, grassroots, raising animals, slaughter, small farm on July 26, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
What a cool discovery… albeit common to anyone who has slaughtered female birds of laying age. Here you see a gorgeous (lab partner says “gross”; to each his own) collection of pre-developed eggs found inside one of the female ducks, varying in size from microscopic to nearly fully developed. How long will it be before you see pre-developed eggs on Ferran Adria’s menu? I’m just saying, this seems like exactly the sort of thing an avant garde chef would propose. And you saw it suggested here first. I’m just saying.
Please note: tender viewers may not appreciate the blunt photos that follow.
The ducks enjoying the “living” part of their life. My boy and I grew to heartily dislike our formerly adorable ducks. They lacked curiosity, were perpetually scared of us despite our efforts to be friendly and subservient to their needs, and they repeatedly demonstrated outstanding stupidity. A daily request we posed to the lab tech in charge of the slaughtering of the ducks, was, When we can finally kill these things? They’d become a real bother without any reward aside from food on the table. Let’s get on with it.
Carefully crated, to bring them to the slaughter site.
Our neighbor’s homespun “abattoire” facility, which they kindly loaned to us.
Hanging the ducks to bleed out after a quick, merciful kill. Using the buckets intended for chickens was a disaster. It was an extraordinary struggle to fit the ducks in there in a way appropriate for the job at hand.
This is the fowl spinner. After you’ve dunked the bird in 160 degree water for a minute or two, the feathers are amenable to being plucked with fair ease. The spinner makes quick work of this task.
Even a feather plucker device can be artful and beautiful, it seems to me.
The spinner leaves an unholy halo of feathers below it, somehow poignant in its statement of what once was.
The bird, hanging to be further plucked. Waxed and scraped, actually; not unlike how many women treat the hair on their bodies. There are always more feathers to pull out. Endlessly. Interminably.
After draining and plucking is complete, the next stage is pulling out the innards, also a challenging task for us neophytes. Choice organs were kept- heart and liver- the rest discarded for the dogs or compost heap. Now to rinse and chill the ducks, then eat or freeze. It distressingly took us an entire day to process only nine ducks. Economic value: disastrous. Educational value: priceless.
