Ah, the difference between eating a real chicken that has lived an energetic life of many years outrunning the farmer's knife until it got too old and slow vs the caged and forcefed youngster that we buy in the supermarket
Look away now if you are vegetarian or squeemish! You have been warned.
While I have my head down and helmet on from my last post anyway, I may as well double my troubles by recounting the story about my first time flatting while I am at it.
I was 17 or 18 when I decided that it was time to head on out on my own by going flatting with one of my mates, his older sister and her boyfriend.
All went well for a week or so until my mate had a brilliant idea to get four hens so that we could have free eggs and therefore more money to spend on our bikes and beer. We didn't want to clutter up the back yard of our rented house so he built a cage at the side of the house.
This went well for three days until, out of the blue, the landlord turned up in a rage. It seemed that the nextdoor neighbour, outside who's bedroom window we had built the chicken coop, knew the landlord and had complained.
Back in those days there were very few tenancy laws in ANZ and so we found ourselves, our stuff, the hens and their coop out on the road.
I headed around to see the old man and asked him if I could move back home, neglecting to mention that I would have four chickens in tow as my mate's Mum had already told him that they weren't coming to her house!
The next day my Dad sat me down for a chat and said that while he enjoyed my company and that I could stay, those hens had to go.
That weekend we held a gathering at my Dad's house, three of my best mates, a couple of dozen beers and myself to analyze the world on a hot summer day and to decide what we would do with these hens.
After a suitable amount of liquid refreshment we all agreed that the most logical thing to do was to eat them for a late lunch/early dinner.
We then started discussing who would do what and as I was the only person who had ever seen or been involved in preparing chickens to eat I made sure that I got in early and said that I would cook them if the rest of them killed and plucked them.
I knew that there was no way that I could kill an animal myself and I certainly didn't want the hard dirty work of plucking them and so cooking it was for me.
Being the resident "expert" they then looked to me for ideas on what to do next. I told them that the simplest, most humane method of killing the hens was to chop their heads off with an axe and that this was a two man job. One to hold the hen while the other wielded the axe.
So two of them got nominated for that and the third was left to do the plucking, although the owner of the hens said that he would help with that.
If only we had smartphones in those days, I would certainly have recorded what happened next.
I got the axe and a chopping block out of the woodshed and presented them to the two designated dispatchers. One grabbed the axe and the other grabbed one of the hens. My other mate and I sat down on the back steps, beer in hand to watch.
The guy holding the chicken placed it over the chopping block and looked away so that he wouldn't see the chicken head removed. The axeman lined up the axe and then he, also turned his head away so that he wouldn't see!
After several strokes of the axe that didn't come anywhere near the hen or her holder the guy holding the hen realized that the axeman wasn't looking where he was chopping and so was torn between self preservation and not wanting to watch the chicken lose its head.
Meanwhile my other mate and I were rolling around on the stairs, laughing our heads off and spilling our beer.
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Eventually the hens were humanely dispatched, no fingers or hands were lost, the carcases were plucked, a lot more beer got drunk and the hens were roasted.
Unfortunately they were a little tough but I don't think that anyone really cared. We ate the roast potatoes and threw most of the rest away and decided that from then on we would buy our chickens from the supermarket.
Over lunch today in (still) locked down Melbourne Australia, I took myself on a wee virtual Camino walk, courtesy of the Google Maps street view. I followed the waymarks out of Logrono to the park and then picked up the street view just as the park gives way to the path up the hill approaching the Toro billboard. Where I found this. This photo is looking back toward the reservoir: it’s a better view than the others in which the creature is visible. (Google map location: Navarette - La Rioja - 42.439364, -2.552050)
