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Day 1: Chicken Salad, great hot weather fare

We spend a great deal of time outdoors and our kitchen is not particularly air conditioned.  With spring planting and all the springtime chaos, we like things we can have on had to fix a quick meal.  The first thing we will do with the chicken is make some chicken salad for sandwiches.

Chicken Salad

  • 3/4 C mayonnaise
  • 2 TBS dry white wine
  • 2 TBS fruit chutney
  • 1 1/2 T curry powder
  • 1 C cubed chicken
  • 1 stalks celery diced
  • 1 green onions, sliced
  • 2 TBS raisins
  • 1/2 C roasted nuts of your choice (cashews are good)

Mix the dressing ingredients:  mayo, wine, chutney, and curry in blender until smooth.  Add chicken, celery, onions, and raisins mixing well.  Chill.  Stir in nuts just before serving.

My brother isn’t a mayo fan, so, in this recipe you can’t really taste the mayo.  (I don’t like jar mayo)  You may need to tone down the spices for your taste, but I think it’s just right.

Where do you get chutney, you might ask?  Well make it with your leftover fruits in the fall.  We love chutney in the cupboards for putting on meats.  If you don’t like having those stores on hand, you can find chutney in the ethnic section of your local grocery store.  Major Grey’s Mango Chutney is pretty common.  Any chutney will do though, I used a dried fruit chutney.

Also, try your hand at making mayonnaise.  It’s so delicious fresh and your salad will be even more good for you.  So many more nutrients.  If you use farm fresh eggs it will be even tastier.  This is a great tutorial here:  Homemade mayonnaise without tears

Serve salad on baguettes with a lettuce salad and dressing for a complete meal.  Another option is to put it on a bed of mache.  Mache’s nutty flavor makes a great companion to this salad.

(Usually it doesn’t have tiny holes in it like mine does, but I have a terrible infestation of potato bugs in my garden and hate chemicals more than them.)

Stay tuned for…

Day 2:  Lemon Chicken Pasta

Jacquelyne Aubuchon is a guest contributor to this blog and a loving sister and aunt to the residents of Chism Heritage Farm.  You can contact her at Jacquelyne@sew4cons.com or keep up with what she is doing at City Roots and Fruits.

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How to Roast a Chicken to Feed a Family for a Week

This weekend, while I was at the family farm, we got to discussing the size of the chickens being slaughtered.  I personally am all about a 6-7 pound bird.  At the store I can only get 3-4 pounds birds.  I don’t find this to be enough for what I expect to do.  Christopher (Head Farm Steward) finds that many of his customers want the smaller birds and don’t know what to do with the bigger one.  My family of four can decimate a 3-4 pound bird in one sitting.  I almost never make a meal that doesn’t have left overs.  We eat them for lunch the next day, so a 3-4 pound bird leaves me without my lunch.  While Christopher and I were packing up the birds and working on a million other projects, we decided to provide his readers with a meal plan to help them learn what to do over a week with a large bird.

This weeks menu:

Grocery List:

salad Small bag whole wheat flour
baby carrots flour
1 C baby zuchinni cake flour
1 C baby squash baking powder
2 C spinach cornstarch
½ C green beans instant yeast
5 lemons salad dressing
fresh basil red pepper flakes
red onion salt
2 onion lemon pepper
sage leaves pepper
1 bag carrots herbs de provence
3 rutabaga curry powder
2 turnip 1 lb pasta
2 parsnip orzo
1 sweet potato slivered almonds
chives roasted nuts
1 bunch thyme ½ C cider vinegar
1 head garlic olive oil
celery mayonnaise
peas dry white wine
green onions  honey
raisins
fruit chutney
hard apple cider
Parmesan cheese
1 Chism Heritage Farm Chicken
bacon
milk
buttermilk
heavy whipping cream
3 eggs
2 TBS butter

To begin with, we have to bake the chicken.  This is such a nice fix it and forget it thing to do.  The only problem I ever run into is getting the chicken thawed out and remembering it’s ready to bake.  The flavoring on this is simply the chicken.  These have such a nice flavor, nothing else is needed.  On this prep day, you will need to cook the chicken, make broth and start the bread.  Starter for the bread can be prepared ahead of this even.  An excellent tutorial can be found at A Bread A Day.  Ingredients on the grocery list reflect this recipe.

Easy Baked Chicken

  • 1 Chism Heritage Farm Chicken
  • 2-3 TBS melted butter
  • salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  (Why 400? It’s a good temperature for this.  If you go 350 you will still cook the chicken, it will just take longer.)  Salt the chicken all over.  Melt butter and brush on breast and legs.  Cook until 170-175 degrees on a meat thermometer.  Brush with drippings every 15 minutes or so for a really nice skin, or forget about it and wonder why your timer is going off and find a perfectly good chicken when you pull it out.  Cook one hour for the first four pounds and add 8 minutes for each additional pound.

  • 3 lb – 1 hour
  • 4 lb – 1 hour
  • 5 lb – 1 hour 8 minutes
  • 6 lb – 1 hour 16 minutes
  • 7 lb – 1 hour 24 minutes


Mostly I just wander off and once in a while smell something and go test it for temperature.  Often I put it in at 3:30 when I leave to pick my son up from school and it’s mostly done when I get home.

After roasting the bird, let it cool for 15 minutes on the counter.  If you want to trim it for immediate eating it’s ready.  For this meal plan, we will take all the meat off the bones and cube it.  By combining it with other ingredients we can make it stretch further.  Once cubed, put in a large zip lock bag and refrigerate it until ready to use.

Chicken Broth

  • leftover chicken bones from cubing chicken
  • 1/2 C cider vinegar
  • 2 carrots, chopped
  • 2 celery stalks, chopped
  • 1 onion, quartered
  • 2 sprigs thyme
  • 3 cloves garlic
  • salt
  • pepper

Place all ingredients in a pot and cover with cold water.  Let sit for one hour.  Turn on heat and bring to a boil.  Reduce heat and simmer for several hours or until you can’t stand cooking it anymore.  Let cool and put in fridge overnight.  In morning skim off fat.  Broth with be gel like consistency.

Stay tuned for….

Day 1:  Chicken Salad, great hot weather fare!

Jacquelyne Aubuchon is a guest contributor to this blog and a loving sister and aunt to the residents of Chism Heritage Farm.  You can contact her at Jacquelyne@sew4cons.com or keep up with what she is doing at City Roots and Fruits.

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How Many Meals Can You Get From One Chicken?

Several customers have requested help figuring out how to use a whole chicken without feeding part of it to the dog.  This is more of an issue for singles and empty-nesters than for parents of hungry teens.  I would like this to be a regular feature but I’ll get started simply.  Forgive me if I go too fast.  Feel free to ask for more detail in the comments.

We try to get three meals out of a chicken for the six people in our house.  Most commonly we thaw the chicken well, mix melted butter, garlic, salt and pepper, give the chicken a good coating of the mixture inside and out, place most of a quartered onion in the vent hole and the remainder in the flap at the neck.  We place the bird in a cake pan with the breast up and bake at 350 for about 15 minutes per pound.  As the bird bakes, the breast will brown.  My youngest son likes flaky skin but you can get carried away.  When it’s brown enough for your taste, cover the breast with a tent of aluminum foil until it is finished.  We usually fight over the leg quarters with the evening meal.  The girls eat a bit of the breast too.

After supper we cut off the remaining breast meat for use in another meal and place the carcass in a stewpot with half an onion, a few carrots, a bit of celery and a splash of vinegar.  We usually let this stew for at least 24 hours helping drain the bones of all minerals (see Susan Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions.)  Then we separate the broth from the meat and bones.  We sometimes stop here and just can the broth which you can use for anything.  More often we add the meat back in, add a freshly chopped half of onion, a few carrots and a few stalks of celery along with a few spices.  We allow this to boil for around 30 minutes while we make noodles.

You’re not done with those chicken bones!  When they are finished boiling they will be soft and crumbly rather than brittle.  Soft bones are no longer a choking hazard for the dog or pigs, the cat will love them or they will compost quickly.  You can still find uses for them even when you’re finished eating…there is no waste.

By doing this we can feed six people at least three times, usually with a bit of leftover chicken soup for the pigs.  This kind of use makes a $15.00 chicken easy to swallow.  If you picked the bones clean at the first meal (as sometimes happens) you should still be able to make a good broth out of the carcass.  If nothing else, you can use the broth to make the best mashed potatoes you have ever eaten.

Now, I think we’re doing a good job being frugal with the bird but my sister can do even better.  She’ll be publishing a series here on how to really stretch a chicken.  I’m looking forward to it…even if I’m not a big fan of mayonnaise.

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Vegetarian…Chicken…Soup?

Humanely-raised, vegetarian fed.  That’s what the label said.

My wife’s aunt called asking how she makes such delicious chicken soup.  My wife replied, “I don’t know how you can do it without one of our chickens.”  Nearly all of her siblings have our chicken in their freezers.  She should too…lol.

Well, that doesn’t help.  She needs chicken soup now and lives four hours away.  What to do?  What to do?  She went to the local supermarket looking for the next-best thing.  She found a humanely-raised, vegetarian chicken.

Now, I’m going to offer my wife’s chicken soup recipe in a minute but bear with me here.  How can a chicken be both humanely-raised and vegetarian?  Chickens are omnivores.  You give the chicken a choice between wheat and worms and the chicken will choose both.  They also seem to really enjoy flies and larvae.  I understand what they are really trying to say…the chicken wasn’t fed beef tallow.  But a lack of beef tallow does not a humanely-raised chicken make.

If you deny an omnivore the chance to eat meat you are denying it an expression of self.  That’s pretty inhumane.  Though humans are omnivores in their natural state, some people choose not to eat meat.  That’s fine.  They make a choice.  I promise you, no chicken on earth would make such a choice.  Further, I almost guarantee these chickens are raised in a building, with fans blowing to keep the ammonia smell down.  They can’t see the sun, they don’t get fresh grass under their feet daily, and they never escape their manure.

Our chickens thrive on a diet of mixed corn, oats, roasted soybeans and fish meal.  They also get fresh alfalfa daily and all the worms they can eat when it rains hard and the worms surface.  That is, I think, more humane.  The chickens are on pasture, in the sun, eating a variety of feed they enjoy.

Now on to chicken soup.  Buy a bag of Chism Heritage Farm backs and necks.  Place 3 backs and necks in a stock pot and cover with water.  Add a quartered onion, 6 sliced carrots, 6 sliced celery stalks and a little salt.  Bring that to a simmer for at least 24 hours, adding water as needed.  Stewing them for 3 days would be better, resulting in a dark, rich, fatty broth and soft chicken bones.

Strain the broth into a fresh stock pot.  Here’s a picture of broth we intend to can.  We’ll strain it and place it in a smaller stock pot which we will refrigerate overnight.  Then we’ll skim the fat off of the broth and can it.  We like to use chicken broth when we make mashed potatoes among other things.

Pick the meat off of the bones and add back into the broth.  Chop an onion, slice 6 more carrots and 6 more celery stalks and add in garlic, oregano, pepper, salt and maybe a little basil.  Maybe a bay leaf toward the end.

Set this to boil while you make the noodles.  You need:
1 cup flour
1 egg (Chism Heritage Farm happy chicken eggs!)
1/2 egg shell full of milk

Mix these together in a mixing bowl.  Flour the countertop, roll out the dough to 1/8″ thick then slice into 1/4″ wide, 4″ long noodles with a pizza cutter.  Add the noodles to the soup stock and boil for 30 minutes.  Remove the bay leaf and serve.

Now you have a humanely-raised, omnivore-fed chicken in your soup.  If you want to do even better, buy a Chism Heritage Farm stewing hen in the fall…if you can.