chicken factory by Joe Dunckley, on Flickr

Here‘s a fascinating look into the life of a cage-free laying hen.

First, notice the buildings, not yards. Then down the page a little further, how tightly jammed the chickens are against each other.

From the text:

Here, in long plywood-sided barns with metal roosts hanging from wires and pine shavings on the floor, the Hy-Line breed of chicks spend their first 15 weeks of life scurrying around and eating a blend of corn, soybeans, canola oil, flax seed, limestone, calcium and more.

When you take the bird out of the sunshine, they stop making vitamin D for themselves and their eggs. Their production of Omega-3 oils drops and it must be added back in via their feed. So, roll out the genetically modified corn, soy and canola!

The 330-foot-long structures can be loud with an undulating chorus of clucks and coos, and hens occupy nearly every sliver of space, standing on perches, jerking their way around on the floor, drinking water and flapping their wings and tucking their beaks into their chests and sleeping.

That’s a football field long, hens occupying “nearly every sliver of space.” Do they ever get to open their wings and stretch? What are they breathing?

It’s warm in the egg houses, and pungent with the smell of chicken manure…

“Pungent” indeed.

Visitors must wear specially designed jumpsuits, and cover their shoes with plastic bags, to prevent them from bringing disease into the barns.

What does this say about the chickens’ immune system? Are they so frail that they would become ill being exposed to the healthy bacteria a foraging chicken would consume as they scratch for bugs on the ground? If their systems are so weak, would their chicks also exhibit this weakness? Is it a trait passed on through their genes, and therefore present in their eggs? When we consume these “weak” eggs, what impact will that have on us?

The birds don’t go outside, but they do sometimes walk down long, metal ramps to the “scratch area,” a long room with sand on the floor. All of the birds are free to descend into the scratch room, where they “dust” — lie on their sides and kick up sand. Chickens dust to coat their feathers in dirt and sand, which helps rid them of parasites.

Only a few hundred chickens tend to hang out in the scratch area, where they have the run of the place, compared with the barn above, where thousands of chickens congregate.

Only a few hundred take advantage of the extra room to move, the dusting that keeps their feathers and skin healthy, and the decreased stench. Why is that?

Hatcher said most stay upstairs because of proximity to food and water.

Or, perhaps it is because the first several weeks of life are spent in this house and the birds never “find” the scratching area once they are adults.

The scratch area, the perches, the absence of cages, the nests — all of it helps Morning Fresh Farms achieve certification from American Humane, a Denver organization that inspects, evaluates and certifies farm operations that treat their animals humanely.

It also allows them to sell their eggs as “cage-free.”

And here, I’ll bet you thought “cage-free” meant happy, healthy chickens in the sun and fresh air, scratching for insects and fed healthy grains.

Most of the Morning Fresh Farms eggs are sold under the Eggland’s Best brand, but other companies, too, buy the eggs and brand them with their own labels.

Packed into flats and cartons, slapped with labels, stored in refrigerated rooms, the eggs have 30 days before they must be sold.

Wow. 30 days. That’s one old egg.

So, let’s sum up:

• Cage-free means no cage, but also no sunlight
• Cage-free means GMO feed, “enhanced” by probably rancid Omega-3 oils to make up for the loss of healthful oils the chicken would make for itself given proper care
• Cage-free means eggs stored for up to 30 days before sale
• Cage-free means you pay more for the label and the Omega-3 enhancement
• Cage-free means you are voting for more of the same with your food dollar

I can find a dozen pastured chicken eggs for $3 at my Farmer’s Market. There really is no comparison in looks or taste to old, grocery store eggs. If you haven’t tried real eggs yet, why not go search some out for your holiday baking? Be sure you scramble, fry or boil a couple to taste, too. I think you’ll be pleased. I know the chickens will be!

This post is part of Fight Back Fridays, hosted by Food Renegade.

When did the kids get so TALL?

First, the turkey: I pre-ordered a “medium” pastured turkey from West Wind Farms, my local meat provider, a couple months ago. It was about 14 pounds, more than enough for our family, with enough meat for Thanksgiving and at least 3 meals of leftovers. I was a tad nervous about roasting it, since I know grassfed and pastured meats cook very differently from conventional meats. I’ve wet-brined turkeys before and thought about perhaps a dry brine, but, this being my first pastured bird, wanted to keep it very simple this year. The cooking process was very easy: a quick coconut oil rub before 30 minutes at 450° then 20 minutes per pound, or until internal temp hit 180°, covered for all but the last 35 minutes. During its 20 minute “resting” period, the meat reached 190°, perfect.

The skin was crispy, and the whole bird was very flavorful, but the big difference my family noticed was how moist the meat was. For all it’s injected flavor enhancement, conventional turkey couldn’t compare. Personally, I noticed the flavor was drastically different than a conventional bird. I don’t know what it is that gives conventional turkeys that chemical aftertaste, but to me it tastes the way preserved lab specimens smell. This turkey had not a bit of that, even cold and rewarmed the next day. The moistness was achieved without brine and without basting (I did baste once when I took the cover off to brown the skin, but that was it.) Amazing. Some chicken broth I’d made earlier this month rounded out the pan drippings for lots and lots of gravy.

I made a fermented cranberry relish this year from cranberries I purchased through West Wind Farms as well. On Monday I washed the cranberries and chopped them roughly. I put them in a quart canning jar with a scrubbed, quartered organic lemon, a couple tablespoons of whey, a tablespoon of sea salt and filtered water to cover. By Thursday, the fermented “zing” was most pronounced, so I dumped the contents of the jar into the blender and added a little drizzle of local honey. Delicious!

Delvin Farm‘s potatoes got the traditional mashing with some Hatcher’s Dairy cream and butter I’d made from skimming my raw West Wind Farms milk. I was thankful hubby was available to mash when the time came. He’s such a pro! It was hard to eat these potatoes without crying thankful tears that Hank Delvin is at home with his family for Thanksgiving after his brush with death earlier this year.

I made dressing from Twin Forks Artisan Expedition Bread. I’ve posted a photo recipe for this because I’ve never made anything but open-the-bag-dump-in-the-soup type of dressing. I’m glad I didn’t make more because although a one-day feast is a blessing, having leftovers around that taste that good for too many days might quickly become a curse!

I caught a good bit of flak from one of the kids for my decision to skip the Martinelli’s sparkling apple cider this year. I understand that tradition is important, but I wanted to keep this meal close to home, and as near as I could tell, Martinelli’s comes from California and that’s just not local enough. I started a batch of plain water kefir on Monday. Wednesday night I juiced a couple pounds of local fruits and added the juice to the kefir after the grains had been removed. By Thursday afternoon, the kefir was sparkly and delicious, a light sparkling apple juice with probiotic benefits! I made three bottles with apple, three with grape and one with pomegranate (boy, those seeds really don’t put out much juice, do they?)

Bottle of white, Bottle of red, perhaps a bottle of pomegranate instead...

After all that, we needed a couple hours to breathe before digging into the apple and pumpkin pies. I’ve never been a pie crust maker, but this recipe worked just great! More local apples from Rainbow Hill Farm (or as Rose calls him “The Apple Guy”) and a couple small pie pumpkins from the farmer’s market filled the crusts most beautifully. The dark orange egg yolks from Three Meadows Farm‘s chickens made a delicious custard, indeed! The flour wasn’t local, but I ground it in my own kitchen, so that’s local enough for me. Also not local were the cinnamon and allspice used in the pies. (Haven’t figured out local spices yet.) More West Wind Farms cream became whipped cream, and topped my very welcome cup of dessert coffee as well as the pie. Those beautiful beeswax candles were handcrafted by a bee farmer who frequents our market and they smelled wonderful as their glow lit our table.

I’m thankful for the warm sun, nourishing rain, living soil, sleeping seed and the farmers who know how to work their alchemy on these to coax food from them to bring to market. I’m grateful for my year of Real Food, the newfound knowledge of local providers and the fellowship of friends, neighbors and family. I’m thankful, too, for the electronic media of blogging that permits me to wax philosophical about those things that make me laugh, cry, and fume. Life is good.

This post is part of Fight Back Fridays hosted by Food Renegade.

Butternut Squash Gratin

In my continuing quest to use all the winter squash provided by my CSA, I stumbled across a recipe that didn’t sound half bad. With a few tweaks, it would do the trick quite nicely.

It’s a well known principle in our family that to get the kids to eat something, just cover it in cheese. This dish turned out so well that I could see it at our Thanksgiving table easily. It was sweet and savory, gooey and melty, and had just the right “punch” from the rosemary. I served it with salmon and kale. It did take a two-step cooking process, something I’m for the most part against for daily cooking, but the end product was very much worth the trouble.

Butternut Squash Gratin
2 tablespoons coconut oil, plus extra for casserole prep
1 tablespoon pastured butter
1 small yellow onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 two-pound butternut squash, peeled, seeded and cut into 1/2 inch chunks
1 teaspoon real maple syrup
1 cup chicken broth
8 ounces each shredded Havarti and extra-sharp Cheddar
2 bread heels, whirred in blender to crumb
1 tablespoon stripped and chopped fresh thyme
1 tablespoon stripped and chopped fresh rosemary

Preheat oven to 350° and rub a 9×13″ casserole dish with coconut oil. Melt butter and coconut oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Stir in the onions and cook until they caramelize. Really take your time here and let them develop a light brown (they will continue to caramelize in the next step). This took me about 13 minutes. Add the squash and cook about 8 minutes until it is browned on the outside but still pretty firm in the center. Add minced garlic and maple syrup and cook, stirring, 2 minutes more. Put squash mixture into prepared baking dish. Pour chicken broth over squash and bake, covered for 40-45 minutes.

Stir together the breadcrumbs, chopped herbs and two cheeses. Cover the squash evenly with this mixture and return to the oven, uncovered this time, for about 15 minutes, or until topping is very lightly browned. This made 10 very generous servings.

This post is part of Twister Tuesday, hosted by Gnowfglins, the Make it From Scratch carnival and Real Food Wednesdays, hosted this week by Cheeseslave.

Just feeling so very blessed and wanted to share.

buggy sign by Lyndi&Jason, on Flickr

Sometimes I feel so…different. At the orthodontist’s office the other day, for example, the receptionist and I started talking about homeschooling. We don’t really have “school hours,” I explained, we just live and learn as we go. I do a lot of teaching from the kitchen because I’m there so much. She knows we have a large-ish family and thought a moment. “I’ll bet you cook a lot. How often do you cook?”
“If all goes according to plan, I cook three meals a day, six days a week.”
Her jaw dropped and she was utterly dumbstruck for several long seconds. “You cook…BREAKFAST?!”
“Most of the time. There are a couple days a week that we have some homemade cereal if I have an early appointment or I’m not awake enough to cook safely.”
“What kinds of things do you cook?”
“Oh, you know, bacon and eggs or pancakes. Muffins a lot, they’re easy.”
“What do you make for lunches?”
“Today we’re having lunchmeat sandwiches because I’m not going to get home until right at lunchtime. More often, though, we’ll have a homemade soup or some pasta.”
“Yeah, Chef Boyardee is a blessing huh?”
“We try to have it a little more fresh than that, and making homemade sauce is almost as easy as opening a can anyway.”
“You make homemade stuff for lunch? What on earth do you do for dinner?”
“A roasted meat and a couple vegetables. Nothing extravagant. I have planned a squash casserole to use up some of the butternut squash taking over my kitchen, but we’ll have a simple meat like hamburger patties or roast chicken with it.”

From there, the discussion evolved into CSAs, the farmers who grow my veggies and provide my meat and milk. Then, the dreaded question, “The milk is all pasteurized, right?”
“Um, no. We drink it raw.” This time, her jaw dropped and her eyes bugged out. “But, I have an allergic daughter and a lactose-intolerant husband who can both drink raw milk who can’t tolerate pasteurized.”

She loves asking questions like that of me when we are there. She knows she’ll hear something totally different from me than she hears from most of the moms who come to the practice, and I think that’s probably why she asks. But it still sometimes makes me feel…so different.

This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays, hosted by Cheeseslave.

baked kale chips by eraine, on Flickr

My kitchen is being overrun by kale. For some reason, my CSA box has had two huge bunches of kale every week. Lacinato kale, Dinosaur kale, Red Russian kale, they are beautiful and apparently plentiful, even in our 90° heat.

I’ve served kale for breakfast in green smoothies and as the nest in eggs in a nest; for lunch sauteed with pasta and in soups; for dinner lightly steamed and tossed in a wilted salad; for snacks as chips. Every time my kids see something green in a dish, they have taken to asking, “Mom, is that kale again?” If I serve kale one more time this month, I just know the kids will pool their life savings and buy a McDonald’s franchise.

And still the kale comes. There were a record three bunches in my CSA box this week. I just knew I had to do something with it, other than feed it to the family. I have been guilty of “gifting” my neighbors with the hot peppers that arrive later in the season since I can’t hide them well enough in food to serve to my tenderfoot family. But I want to avoid that if possible since I don’t think most of my neighbors would have any idea what kale is or what to do with it.

I’ve done a bit of canning in my day, but the meager storage we have here is near full and I don’t imagine kale cans much better than spinach. So, I’ve decided to dehydrate half of it and freeze the other half. Washed, stemmed and dehydrated leaves can be tossed into soups and salads all summer when (and if) kale eventually goes out of season. Blanched and frozen flat in airtight bags (yeah, I’d like to get away from plastic here, but options are limited for space-saving freezer storage) they will take up as much room in my tiny freezer as a paperback book, but be available for side dishes once the kale flood slows to a trickle.

Finding new ways to deal with a bountiful blessing is an unexpected and previously unexplored creative avenue for me. I love learning new things, and this Real Food lifestyle always presents me with educational opportunities!

This post is part of the Pennywise Platter Thursday blog carnival, hosted by The Nourishing Gourmet.

Several years ago, I joined a polling company that accumulates data from households all over the country. They gather and tabulate purchasing information and provide it to companies seeking marketing data. It’s a rather cumbersome system right now and takes more of my time than I’d ideally like, but it goes like this: A handheld scanner and base is provided to me. For each and every item I purchase, I scan the UPC code with the scanner. Most items I scan require a price entry as well. If an item doesn’t have a UPC code, I scan a bar code provided by the research company so the item is put in the proper category. Once a week, I send the information to the company by plugging the scanner into the base, and the base into the phone line. I am not paid for collecting this data, but gain points for faithfully sending it which can be traded for merchandise.

Because I am part of the sample group, what I purchase sends an even louder message to corporate America. My purchases represent something like 10,000 homes. So picture this: three months ago, 10,000 homes very suddenly stopped buying your crackers, Nabisco. Four months ago, 10,000 homes made their last purchase of sugar, Domino. There hasn’t been a loaf of your bread sold to 10,000 previous regular customers in the last five months, Arnold Bread. There has been a very sudden upsurge in the number of American homes purchasing food through CSAs, farmers markets and local sources in the last twelve months. I have to smile when I hear those reports, knowing at least part of that is me!

So, let’s hear it, readers. How are you voting with your dollar these days?