Kitchen Sink Collective

It was before I left the customer service job from Hades that I began brooding a group of lucky 13 chicks. Little Cornish mutts. Blacks ones crossed with an interesting array of other breeds. And clearly a group with some cute little gallitos in it.

Well, the feathered piggies grew up very fast. About a week ago, a couple of the more obvious roosters began practicing their early morning throat trumpet scales. We’ll call them Placido Domingo, and Luciano Pavarotti. Placido had, predictably, more round and even tones, and Luciano could get shrill if he thought he was being ignored. Their practice crows became the group’s “Hey!!!!! The food dish needs a refill NOW!” battle cries, see. We dispatched them on Tuesday morning. Early. Offerings of cracked corn, some poppy capsules, and super sweet persimmon accompanied them on the kitchen counter as I went through the process of detaching and washing up their heads. These two didn’t necessitate tobacco, which I associate more as a summertime offering. Their tastes were very simple. Chicken crack, er, organic cracked corn, sweets, and seeds. No silliness of trying to get the boys drunk before dispatching them either (I told the dood that some people do this and he wondered aloud if the booze goes down the trachea or the esophagus when people do this, and can they even tell?) No, I let the troop out to run victory laps over their favorite section of yard, flapping their wings and posturing at one another, and the dood grabbed the biggest roosters who looked the most digestively complacent (this is descriptive, not a joke… these birds will snarf up everything in sight and then crash where they are, feet tucked under, and nap a spell before they jump up to do it all again) and we went through it, giving thanks for their flesh and sending them into the Great Poultry Beyond.

It was gratifying to find pecked up and gobbled down lamb’s quarter leaves, grass, worms, and sow bugs, in these guys’ gizzards and crops. There’s one approach to chicken dispatching which dictates that the responsible farmer must isolate the birds for a day, no feed, so that their gizzards and crops are empty, and so that their poop chutes are as well. Screw that. Chickens live to eat, and I would rather process birds who feasted last night, slept it off, and then foraged a bit this morning, than birds who went hungry and were distracted and stressed by it. And regarding empty poop chutes, you just don’t see that unless you are dispatching a broody bird who hasn’t eaten much for days. It simply comes with the territory and requires you to work clean and continuously rinse your bird and knife. Common sense.

Going forward, our next group of meat birds is going to pasture like mad, and the organic feed will supplement the fruits of their scratching, digging, pecking, and grazing. We’ll save money this way, for starters.

So, we have chicken meat for our holiday tamales on Sunday, we’ll be getting several meals out of the bird I roasted last night, and the cats have done their share of feasting as well. For the first time, I felt confident enough to give raw tidbits to Lucy and Pancho, and not worry about them getting food poisoning.

Just a basic example of not wasting, I caught the blood from the birds and cooked that up slowly into a thick jelly, which was diced for the cats. Lucy likes it, Pancho loves it. It took them a couple days to consume it. As for raw, I diced up the hearts, cleaned out gizzards, and livers, and chopped the lungs in half, and presented those. Pancho’s a lung cat, Lucy is a liver and heart aficionado. They love the gizzards, too.

So these are mixed Cornish meat birds. Mixed with what? Looks like Americauna, Rhode Island Red, black Australorp, and probably Delaware, as well. Placido had psychedelic wings. Shades of black, purple, and green. I actually saved one for drying/preserving in salt.

They’re way easier to pluck in entirety than a hen who is being culled, being younger animals, but because they are not particularly fatty, I wound up skinning both of them to just avoid removing the pin feathers with my needle-nose pliers. The bird who was roasted last night had some fatty strips of bacon placed over the super lean body parts, just to seal in some moisture, but I could see a body brining a few birds before roasting them, too. We’re still using the pithing and bleeding out technique for dispatch, which makes for calm birds and much looser feathers for plucking.

So I commented previously, I think two weeks previous? that I spotted my pointed ear visitor in the backyard again. At night. As in the moon was pretty damn full, and I was strolling to the chicken coop to make sure the persnickety layers were roosting, relaxing, and telling each other bedtime stories. The roof on their connected run has issues. Issues which can be described with terms like “gaping hole”, “huge hole for predators to leap through”, you name it. The local cats who know and fear the chickens would not be so stupid to go spelunking down into the run, but I could see a hungry raccoon lowering its fat ass down from the torn tarp, and rappelling down the side of the run. Because.

So this visitor with the pointy cat ears, casting an up-right walking shadow on the back fence like someone 6 ft in stature… That in itself should scare off the hangers-on readers who live to blog and bluster hot air that makes them look like they have practical knowledge (at least I can hope so, about the scaring off part) that would make them speak in tongues and voluntarily check in to Napa State Hospital, if they actually encountered it.

When we moved here over three years ago, the yard was downright feral. As in nothing warm-blooded but pissy and poopy feral cats had dared to occupy the space in eons. They’d been in the yard yard so long as to leave their energy behind, in the cases of those who has passed on. I was first aware of them when I’d be kneeling and digging up bermuda grass roots, and I’d spot a cat sitting like a sphinx, out of the corner of my eye. Usually my left eye, incidentally. A few yards to my left, a gray marble statue of a cat, lets say with pointier ears than Bastet, would be visible in profile, and when I blinked, it would be slowly backing into the background and I’d see no outline of the cat after a moment. Months passed with this happening. It was not a “We are here” announcement so much as a “We can see you’re civilizing a wild space, and are glad” general announcement. The statues were never tall. No taller than a large cat sitting upright. And, the ears were ears. Never horns.

The cat visions always happened during daylight. Usually early morning or late afternoon. It would just be me out there. Lucy and Daisy would be crashed on the bed snoring, because this was back before we were able to sleep in the bedroom, and they’d generally sleep at the foot of the bed at night with us, or during the day, tucked into the rolled up bedspread. It bears mentioning that these kids let us know they were aware of other cat energy on the property, when we moved in. For very pragmatic reasons. The openings to the crawlspace under the house had been open for years, and those cats had all congregated and defecated under the house, and Daisy and Lucy could smell it. Our first night, these two went on rounds, hissing and growling into each corner, one after the other. They made the circuit twice, before hopping up onto the bed where they did something completely out of character and took turns head-butting and nose-kissing the dood, purring like outboard motors. I woke up and caught Daisy giving him a full spitbath on his head, while Lucy was burrowing into his armpit. It was the nose kisses finally woke him up with a start. The cats didn’t seem to care, they just burrowed against him and crashed hard for the night. To this day, I think they were saying, “Thank you! This place will do just fine!” That was certainly how the dood felt, the following morning, when we were drinking coffee and the cats were snarfing their wetfood ration.

And then a stereotypical poltergeist energy started squatting on my kitchen space, and in the garage.

And it is here I should mention that I’d been claimed by then. That I’d had all the interesting dreams about the two contrastingly gendered baphomet beings in the backyard, and experienced the weirdness with black nightshade berries, and related, in the yard. We had a lot of magic going on in the house then. Both of us. Daisy and Lucy, no, but they picked up on the energy I’d imagine, and didn’t change in behavior particularly. The dood saw in one reading of the cards that Daisy might not make it to summer (and this was last fall he saw it), but we just kept nudging her outside to claim her dominion as per usual, for as long as she felt up to it.

But this energy. It manifested itself with objects thrown across the room. With things like spice jars swept off the counter and onto the floor. With tools flying across the garage if the dood was fixing his vehicle. Nothing hostile at all, but more like a snotty kid stamping his feet in the corner. Very odd.

Yesterday afternoon, I was heating up leftover turkey day duck and frying a diced potato for the dood’s lunch, and whoever/whatever it is, decided to dump a handful of pennies into our wine bottles in the kitchen which are set aside for selling at the recycling yard. It was not Daisy. She did visit me when I was last prepping a beef tongue for cooking, and she did visit me when I was cutting our holiday duck into quarters for easier roasting. She’s emphatically not a poltergeist force though. I chalk this up to her lack of opposable thumbs as much as anything. What a cat would be doing with a handful of pennies is beyond me, and my imagination is pretty fucking vivid. I did offer her odd bits as I was cutting up slices for lunch, and Lucy and Pancho were eating up the odd bits full of cartilage or sinew, and she partook because I saw them both stall on eating some pieces (and this is where I mention that I invited her to stick around in whatever capacity she wished, last winter.)

Today’s the kind of day where I’ll have to dive into dreaming and ask about the upright-walking cat-eared creature. Lucy and Pancho are snoring in the living room next to their space heater best friend, and the chickens outside are stuffed with cracked corn and/or feed, poultry-snoring in the coops. I did tell the shadow on the fence last night that I’d love to know what is needed from us, but have yet to receive a response.