avidity
Songster
tl;dr I cut off chunks of meat and put it in a freezer bag. Do I still need to wait 24 hours to eat it? Sorry about the story, I just need a good whinge.
I butchered my first chicken today. I read up on BYC's excellent resources, watched several yt videos, got all my tools ready to go, and mentally prepared myself. I chose the broomstick method to dispatch a 1.5 year old speckled sussex rooster that kept injuring himself in fights.
I had to try multiple times. I think he suffered as long as a minute, possibly less. I really did not think it would be so upsetting, but I was upset. I'm still upset. I'm disgusted. He really suffered.
There was very little blood, which I thought was strange. But I had a job to do, so I cut off the head and dunked him in a pot of prepared water. The scalding turned into a production immediately: turns out my thermometer is broken. In the end I just hacked at whatever feathers I couldn't yank out, and left most of the tail feathers in. THEN I started skinning. It took a long time because my chosen knife turned out to be surprisingly dull, and I had to find one that wasn't. At some point I stabbed something (heart?) that bled all over the place, so that's where the rest of the blood was I guess. I gave up on skinning after I cut myself.
New bandaid, new plan: carve the meat off the bones. Deboning the meat now will save time spent deboning later! At this point I've been bitten by two mosquitos and the flies are crossing the line from vaguely annoying to downright obnoxious. It took a few passes but I had a nice pile of breasts (in pieces) before too long. One of them was almost whole, like it was cut by someone who knew what they were doing! I was proud of myself for that one. I set it lovingly beside the rest and started on the drumsticks. That was a struggle. The pieces of leg that I started piling up were much smaller than the pieces of breast.
So while I was struggling with one of the legs, a hen wandered over from the other side of the property, snatched the biggest breast, and took off with it swinging in her beak. Just like that. JUST LIKE THAT. My nearly-perfect cut! She darted off, dropped it, and managed to pick it up and slap it into the dirt twice before I caught up. TWICE. She's still in disgrace. What was she even doing there, her chicks were crying for her on the other side of the house! She just abandoned them to wander alone, all alone, until she found me and my ONE practically normal-looking chicken breast. WHY? She's not allowed to leave her babies OR her brooder anymore.
Back to the very sorry-looking corpse, now covered with flies. I hacked on for a while, but I'd lost whatever energy not sapped by the failed culling, failed scalding, failed skinning, failed carving, and mosquitos. So I packed up my pieces of raw chicken, rinsed bagged and refrigerated them, and cleaned up everything else.
Do I still need to wait to eat it given the size of the cuttings? The sooner all evidence of this experience is behind me, the better. Thanks in advance!
I butchered my first chicken today. I read up on BYC's excellent resources, watched several yt videos, got all my tools ready to go, and mentally prepared myself. I chose the broomstick method to dispatch a 1.5 year old speckled sussex rooster that kept injuring himself in fights.
I had to try multiple times. I think he suffered as long as a minute, possibly less. I really did not think it would be so upsetting, but I was upset. I'm still upset. I'm disgusted. He really suffered.
There was very little blood, which I thought was strange. But I had a job to do, so I cut off the head and dunked him in a pot of prepared water. The scalding turned into a production immediately: turns out my thermometer is broken. In the end I just hacked at whatever feathers I couldn't yank out, and left most of the tail feathers in. THEN I started skinning. It took a long time because my chosen knife turned out to be surprisingly dull, and I had to find one that wasn't. At some point I stabbed something (heart?) that bled all over the place, so that's where the rest of the blood was I guess. I gave up on skinning after I cut myself.
New bandaid, new plan: carve the meat off the bones. Deboning the meat now will save time spent deboning later! At this point I've been bitten by two mosquitos and the flies are crossing the line from vaguely annoying to downright obnoxious. It took a few passes but I had a nice pile of breasts (in pieces) before too long. One of them was almost whole, like it was cut by someone who knew what they were doing! I was proud of myself for that one. I set it lovingly beside the rest and started on the drumsticks. That was a struggle. The pieces of leg that I started piling up were much smaller than the pieces of breast.
So while I was struggling with one of the legs, a hen wandered over from the other side of the property, snatched the biggest breast, and took off with it swinging in her beak. Just like that. JUST LIKE THAT. My nearly-perfect cut! She darted off, dropped it, and managed to pick it up and slap it into the dirt twice before I caught up. TWICE. She's still in disgrace. What was she even doing there, her chicks were crying for her on the other side of the house! She just abandoned them to wander alone, all alone, until she found me and my ONE practically normal-looking chicken breast. WHY? She's not allowed to leave her babies OR her brooder anymore.
Back to the very sorry-looking corpse, now covered with flies. I hacked on for a while, but I'd lost whatever energy not sapped by the failed culling, failed scalding, failed skinning, failed carving, and mosquitos. So I packed up my pieces of raw chicken, rinsed bagged and refrigerated them, and cleaned up everything else.
Do I still need to wait to eat it given the size of the cuttings? The sooner all evidence of this experience is behind me, the better. Thanks in advance!
I am also sorry the rooster suffered, but it wasn't intentional so not much you can do. I didn't know you needed to wait 24 hours after processing. Had a good laugh and learned something new,
