Homemaking Tip--Noodles

It’s time to butcher our meat birds. Calvin and I caught them yesterday afternoon along with a few of our extra roosters and delivered them to the Hutterite colony who agreed to butcher them for us.

It was such a beautiful drive through the rolling dry-land fields. The fall planting is mostly done so all of the fields are freshly tilled. The sunset was brilliant.

When I was a little girl, we butchered our own chickens. My oldest brother chopped the heads off on the chopping block and then flung the birds aside. My job was to chase the headless chickens until they dropped. I made a game of it by timing them to see how long they could run without a head, or seeing which bird would travel farthest from the block. After they stopped running, I picked them up by the feet and delivered them to mom and my sisters who plucked them. After they were plucked, we froze them in one of two ways: in large plastic bags or in clean, empty milk cartons. If we were freezing them in milk cartons, the empty space was filled with water before we put them in the freezer (essentially we had chicken cubes). I only remember butchering chickens a couple of times before we started hauling them to town in wooden crates and having them professionally butchered. I’m glad I was young.

Now, I’m even more glad that the Hutterite colony was willing to butcher our chickens for us this year. Hutterites are a religious sect who live communally and self-reliantly. They milk their own cows, gather their own eggs, raise their own crops, sew their own clothes and butcher their own meat. They live a very simple, albeit complex life. Because they are butchering geese this week, they agreed to butcher our birds too. Here, two of the boys who helped us unload our chickens are playing in the straw they had just scattered for butchering day.

We grow our birds bigger than most because I like them mini-turkey size. I figure I might as well add as much meat as possible to the original investment of the bird and butchering. Homegrown birds are so moist and meaty, it'll be good to have some in the freezer again.

For today’s homemaking tip, I could share Calvin’s contraption he made to haul the chickens in, because it's pretty amazing what that man can do with a box, a knife and some tape. Or, I could just give you my noodle recipe for chicken noodle soup. I think I’ll do the latter since I forgot to take a picture of Calvin's ingenious crate and I like homemade noodles because they're as thick or thin as you want them to be, easy, good and . . . cheep :)

Noodles

1/3 cup water
2 eggs, whisked
2 Tbsp melted butter
1 tsp salt
2-3 cups flour

Mix wet ingredients together. Add salt and flour. Knead until well mixed. Let rest several minutes and then roll out to desired thickness on a well-floured countertop. Cut into desired length of noodle. Drop singly into boiling broth and cook 20 minutes or until no longer doughy.

Do you make noodles?

Can you answer Lelly's question of how long chickens can run?