Sunday was a changing day in my life.  And, no, not like a Dr. Phil "it's gonna be a changing day in your life" kinda day.  This was an experience I never imagined I'd partake in, BUT I did.  I survived.  I enjoyed it.  And I'd do it again.  Period.

Above are 15 hens, roughly 2 years old.  These are the hens that once gave Korey and I our eggs.  These hens were raised by Ronnie, the man who we buy our grass-fed beef from.  Last week while at Ronnie's, stocking up our beef he mentioned to us that he was interested in getting rid of his hens as they were aging out of egg production and he needed to find them a home.  After talking with Korey about it when we left, we thought it was a great opportunity for us.  Of course, I'm thinking FREE MEAT--WHAT COULD BE BETTER...even though it would come at the price of having to slaughter them ourselves. 

We gave him a call this week and let him know we'd come by any day to get them.  Any day was yesterday.  We gathered the hens early in the morning, toted them up the road back to our house, prepped our shed for what was to come and got to it.  After a few hours of hard, dirty work, we had 15 hens stocking our deep freezer...well, 13...one went to dinner and one went to this week's batch of broth!

People might turn there noses up or question my decision to take the lives of these chickens in the manner that I did, but it wasn't inhumane, the chickens didn't suffer and we used every usable part of these beautiful birds that we could...nothing went to waste that could be eaten in one form or another (by us or our dogs for that matter).  I'll caution those that tend to be a little squemish, as the following set of photos may be a little much for some folks.  Keep in mind that these birds lived long lives on a farm, freely roaming and stress free.  They never suffered and were never tortured, even on the day that they gave their lives for our nourishment.  They were never confined, forced to live in such tight of quarters that they never learned to stand or walk.  Their beaks weren't cut off to prevent them from pecking and they weren't electricuted at their time of death. 

Which would you prefer to have placed in front of you on your dinner table?!

We took pictures of the entire process to document exactly what we had done for future reference since this was the first time in doing this for us.  I've left out the pics associated with the actual demise of the hens.  I'll admit it may be a little hard to look at, but I think back to the stories of my grandmother and how it was just a means of getting dinner on the table.  That's what gets me through...and the fact that I know there was no suffering involved.  Below you'll see me with the first bird to go into the water.  After they've been humanely killed, and drained of any remaining blood, the bird has to be immersed in 150-160 degree water for a period of 30-45 seconds.  This process makes the feathers come out with ease.

De-feathering the birds was actually my favorite part. They came out so easily. We were so surprised. When you're done, it almost looks like the whole fryers that you see in your local grocery store.

Dad and I took the reigns with the feathers while korey continued to prep the birds for the scalding process.

Here's the haul all fresh and clean of their feathers before the gutting...there's simply no other way to put it folks.  You have to get what's on the inside out, no matter how gross it may be.

Trying to figure out exactly how to start this part of the process was key.  You never want to make the wrong cut and end up contaminating the meat...this would easy to do since all of the "cleaning out" is done primarily from the business end of the bird.

As you can see in the pan on the right, some of the birds had "presents" left inside.  Out of the 15 hens that we cleaned, we harvested 3 ready-to-eat eggs.  Nature is such a wonderful thing, full of surprises!

These are all 15 hens, cleaned and ready to go inside to be prepped for the freezer.  We also saved the hearts, livers, and kidneys...and the FEET (smiley face!).  Andrew Zimmern would be proud of my willingness to try and find a use for chicken feet!

We're almost done with the process...if an only if the damn vaccum sealer decides not to act up!  It did fine, thank goodness!  Here I'm simply taking some tweezers and removing any remaining feather follicles, rinsing the hens and getting sealing bags.

This is what a long morning of hard farm work looks like!  We were so proud of ourselves and the best part about it is that we don't take our food for granted.  We know where it comes from, how it was raised and how it made it to our table.  I totally enjoyed the experience, learning what my grandparents considered second-nature.  Through the whole day I kept thinking how my Grandma Grace must be looking down on me and how happy she must be. 

Korey and I are very grateful for the food on our plates.  We can now say we know exactly where our beef comes from, where our pork comes from, where our chickens came from.  We have our own chickens for eggs now and meat later.  Korey and I hunt for dear and he hunts turkey.  We have fish in the two ponds on our property and we grow a plethora of veggies.  It couldn't be better than this!