From Coop to Soup

Keeping chickens through the winter months doesn’t make me all that excited. My hens were getting a little “Long in the tooth” anyway, and since chickens will start to lay fewer eggs when they reach about three years of age, I decided it was time to turn the residents of the coop into a winters’ worth of soup.

Joe has a gift for catching chickens.

There was a time my husband used to take care of all the chicken butchering on our farm, but the chicken heads always seemed to end up in the front yard and I’d step on them at five in the morning on my way to the barn, and it scared the hell out of me. We found that for $1.50 a bird our highly skilled Amish neighbors would take care of the butchering and bagging for us. Off we went.

Joe and I love visiting with our Amish friends, we talk shop and compare farming techniques. On this last visit we discovered that we could grow peanuts here in Wisconsin. Henry (Our Amish friend) says they do rather well in the sandy soils he has at his place. They had ten onion bags full of peanuts air-drying on the front porch. He grabbed a few from the bags for us to try and it was remarkable how much they tasted of peas before they get roasted.

Henry’s wife also had some great advice. She said they love using rendered chicken fat to pop their popcorn. The Amish know how to do snack food! She said it’s easy enough to render, just leave it cooking on the stove all day until it’s done. There was a colander full of chicken fat sitting next to our neatly plucked hens for me to take home. Unfortunately, I wasn’t in the mindset to render chicken fat all day and seeing how they loved it so much I said she should just keep it.

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme

I’ve been making up large batches of chicken soup to send to work with Joe to eat for lunch. As I was looking through recipes for chicken stock and talking to folks who make their own I found that there are as many recipes for chicken stock as there are people who make it.

Sally Fallon, the author of Nourishing Traditions, says to add a tablespoon of vinegar to the pot to pull out extra minerals from the chicken bones.

I learned a great trick from Martha Stewart, keep a freezer bag handy in the freezer and add onion peels and bits of carrot and celery, when your bags full make stock.

My mother-in-law said to add a dash of Tamari to build the flavor, and my mother always sings ‘Scarborough Fair’ by Simon and Garfunkel when she’s making her chicken stock to remind her to add parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.

My advice is to find yourself an old hen that was raised organically, and cook it down all day. As far as a recipe for chicken soup, ask your mother, I find that no one makes better chicken soup than your mother.