So yeah we got a few more chickens the other day. One of them was a hen from Calderglen Country park that kept jumping out of its enclosure so they wanted to rehome her and the others were 3 Scots Grey hens and a cockerel. Unfortunately the cockerel didn’t go down to well with the neighbours or my sleep as you can imagine. With still being ill I’m not getting a good sleep anyway but to wake up every morning at 5am to the cockerel telling everyone in the neighborhood it was morning puts the icing on the cake.

We tried to rehome it at short notice but like most people looking to offload a cockerel we had no chance. So at 10pm on Monday night after trying to completely blackout the cockerels coop we decided that if that didn’t keep him quite to a reasonable hour that was it. So we went to sleep.

At 5.30am I woke up to the chickens morning call. By 6am I’d grabbed it mid crow and dispatched it. Its an awfully weird experience sitting on your back door step watching the sun come as you pluck a chicken. Especially when you live in a town as large as the one we live in! It was round about now that I realised that we never got any photos of Glen, as that was what we named him, before his run in with the broom handle. I’ll stick a LJ-cut style thing in here I think to spare those that may be squeamish from the pics.

This is the first photo we got of Glen.

Not really the best angle I know. Ignore the background as thats my ‘building’ area for my carpentry projects. I say carpentry what I mean is knocking together badly designed things using bits of old fence panels. Anyway as he was such a big chap I didn’t feel comfortable using the hand/neck dislocation method so opted for the broomstick method. Basically you hold the bird by the feet upside down where it goes surprisingly calm and then lower it to the ground where it lays its neck down. You put a broom handle over its neck and stand on both sides and pull on the legs until the neck breaks and the chickens dead. You then have to hang it up and cut its throat so that the blood drains. Its best if you put a little water in the bucket you use to catch this as it makes it easier to clean up afterwards.

Once you’ve let it drain you can get to work plucking the feathers out. It depends exactly what your going to do with the bird but if your not that bothered about eating the wings you don’t have to worry about the tough feathers on the edge and tip of the wing. Some people like to dip the bird in scalding water which makes it easier to pluck but I found it was easy enough without doing this. Once its plucked I hung it up by one leg in the fridge. With the recent demise of my huge fridge freezer though I may have to rethink this for next time.

A couple of days later I prepped and gutted the bird. Using a pair of garden shears I cut the head off at the base of the neck. The tips of the wings were bent back until they cracked and then cut off with a sharp knife and the same was done to the lower legs.

The neck and tail were trimmed off and a hole cut just below the vent to start getting the insides out. It’s not the nicest job but you need to get your fingers inside and free the organs up and pull then out.

Stringing the chicken up was always going to be a problem for me. I can’t tie knots you see. I think I found about 3 ways to tie it up properly and managed to get it close to looking like one of them. Between the size of the legs and the chicken being stiff from being in the fridge they didn’t quite get tied down just as tightly as they should have.

After 2 hours in the oven we had a roast chicken to eat. Not sure if it was anything to do with the size of the bird but it took longer to cook than any other chicken I’ve ever roasted before. It was given the requisite time per kg and then some but it still needed to be put back in the oven for another 30 minutes to finish it off.

Thanks to the aforementioned fridge freezer fiasco we had to freeze the meat to keep it until we could eat it. Thankfully I made a lovely chicken and vegetable pie with shortcrust pastry. There was more than enough to feed the family and was probably the best way other than a curry for us to eat the meat first time around. The breast is nowhere near as big as on commercial meat birds but you get alot on the legs. In fact I’d go as far as saying that between the thigh and leg theres more meat than on a normal breast but as its dark meat it is very strong tasting. You don’t need anywhere near as much meat on your plate because of this. I also found that the breast meat actually tasted more like the dark meat from a supermarket bought chicken. I’ve often wondered where they dream up the taste of chicken stock cubes from as I’ve never tasted chicken like that before. Now I have.