Stinkerpants

Adventures in Backyard Chicken-ry

February 6, 2009 in Urban Hippies • Backyard Chickens

This is not my chicken.  This is not even what my chicken will look like, but this chicken is cute.  I found her here.

Yes, I totally made up the word Chicken-ry.

Y and I have decided to get two backyard chickens.  Why are we doing this?  Well, because we tend to hear about things, get really excited about them, and get carried away.

I don’t remember where we first heard about backyard chickens, but we loved the idea of having fresh eggs.  The more research we did, the better the idea sounded.  Did you know that backyard eggs have way more good stuff (like vitamins and Omega-3’s) and less bad stuff (like saturated fat and cholesterol)?  And they taste way better than store bought eggs?  It’s true.  And because raising urban chickens is totally legal where we live, and it seems relatively straightforward, we’ve decided to do it.

This past weekend we took a big step: we bought a chicken coop.

Originally, we were thinking of building our own coop.  We were inspired by awesome coops we saw online (see above) and got really excited.  However, neither of us has any carpentry skills and I insisted that we could end up wasting a bunch of money.  Then Y found a guy on Craigslist who could build one for the low, low price of $500.  Yikes.After a bunch of reading, we learned that chickens aren’t actually that difficult to please–it’s just that their owners get picky about wanting a pretty coop.  We found an inexpensive coop online and drove to Santa Rosa (a pleasant hour and a half drive from home) to pick it up.  We also bought some feed and feeders.Our coop isn’t very pretty (photos to come later), but it’s not ugly, either.  It looks like a rabbit hutch.As of now, we have feed, feeders, and a coop…but no chickens.Until two days ago, we were still a little up-in-the-air about what kind of chickens to get.  Y really liked the idea of getting heritage chickens, which are the breeds of chicken that have become relatively rare because of farm breeding.  He was mostly focusing on Delaware chickens.  We don’t want to have to wait 6 months for eggs, though, so we didn’t want to raise chicks.  And all the Delawares around here are chicks.Then Y found a woman on Craigslist who sells Rhode Island Red chickens.  They’ve just started laying, and they’re apparently quite friendly!  So on Sunday, Y and I will be driving north again to pick up our chickens.  We have decided to name them FiFi (I’m stealing this name from Sarah) and Petunia.

Hey look!  My chicken might look like this!  Image from here.

To be totally honest, this is mostly Y’s project.  I will dutifully feed and water these chickens (and grudgingly probably clean their dang coop, too), but Y is the brains behind the operation.

I will be the documentarian, though. You can expect to see many photos of chickens in the months to come!  I hope you’re riveted.

Why I’m a Vegetarian (no gross details, I promise!)

February 4, 2009 in Urban Hippies • Urban Farming • Miscellaneous Ramblings

Photo from here.

Y and I are in the process of doing something right now (we’re getting chickens), and I’m going to talk about it tomorrow.  As I was writing that entry, I realized that I needed to provide a bit of background about why we’re doing what we’re doing before I could describe the chicken situation.

Okay, so I’m a vegetarian.  It’s not that I don’t like the taste of meat–on the contrary, I actually like it quite a bit.  I’m a vegetarian because I’m disgusted by how animals are treated while they’re being raised for food, and how they’re slaughtered.  I won’t go into detail here.  I figure you’ll do the research yourself if you care about the poor widdle animals.

I was a vegetarian for five years (back then, it wasn’t about the animals–I just felt like I wanted to be a vegetarian for some reason), until I went to live in Italy for three months.  I started to feel really sick after awhile, because there aren’t many options there for a well-balanced vegetarian diet.  I ate meat for about four or five years.

Then I started reading.  If you’re interested in learning more about how animals are raised and slaughtered (and their impact on the environment), I recommend checking out these books:

Skinny Bitch / Animal Liberation / MAD COWBOY / Slaughterhouse

I personally feel that you should know what an animal had to go through to provide your meal.  I also believe that if you’re going to eat something, you should be able to kill it.  I know I wouldn’t be able to kill an animal, so I don’t think I should be eating meat.  I have no problem slaughtering a vegetable, though (haha).  I’m not doing this because I think I can make a difference in the meat industry.  I’m doing it because the idea of eating meat now disgusts me.

I am not a vegan.  I don’t really care if it’s “unnatural” for humans to drink milk.  It is delicious.  And life without ice cream and cheese?  That sounds horrendous.  I also don’t care if an egg is an unborn chicken.  It doesn’t hurt the chicken to lay the egg and it doesn’t hurt the chick to eat him, so whatever.

Photo from here.

Except.  Except it does hurt the cow to give milk, and it does hurt the chicken to lay the egg.

I have been trying to reconcile this for quite awhile, and up until this point, my solution has been cage free eggs and organic milk.  I knew that neither of these were awesome solutions (because animals who are part of any industry probably aren’t treated that well), but I wasn’t sure what else to do.

Anyway, I’ve eaten cage free eggs for as long as I can remember, and I’ve converted other people to eating them, too.  Recently, though, I learned a lot about what it means to be a “cage-free” or “free-range” chicken.  To be honest, there’s not really that much of a difference (this documentary looks awesome, and it’s all about chickens if you want to learn more).

I don’t think I can continue to eat eggs without picturing their poor little chicken faces (dammit!).

Sooooo…that there’s a good reason to get some backyard chickens.  Which we are doing!  I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.  :)

Eating Organic

December 19, 2008 in Urban Hippies • Cooking

Image from here

Last week, Y sent me an email and asked if I would be interested in subscribing to a weekly box of organic and locally grown produce.  I had a few questions, but overall, I was like, “heck yeah!  Let’s do it!”

I might have been slightly over-confident.

We received our first box today.  I have to say, it looks delectable.  In fact, I can tell you that it is delectable, as I have already eaten three satsuma oranges.  The contents, however, are a little scary to a novice cook like me.  Here’s what we’ve got:

• 3 lbs Yukon Potatoes
• 2 lbs Satsuma Mandarin Oranges
• 2 lbs Red Jonagold Apples
• 2 lb Kabocha Squash
• 4 very large leeks
• 1 bunch of radishes
• 1 bunch of  green chard
• 1 Treviso Radicchio
• .5 lbs button mushrooms
• .5 lbs mixed baby lettuce

When I first looked in the box, I started freaking out.  First off, that’s a LOT of food.  And WTF am I going to make with radishes?!  Then I googled “Kabocha Squash” and started to freak out even more.  No recipes for a freakin’ Kabocha Squash.  Hell, I couldn’t even figure out what a kabocha squash is.  After a half-hour of googling and entering ingredients into allrecipes.com, however, I started to feel a little better.  My friend Lisa sent me a recipe she found for the Squash (which, as it turns out, is more like a pumpkin…?  I could go on about why they don’t just call it a pumpkin, but I’ll refrain), and I found a recipe for radish soup.  Three of the recipes I’ll be making this week are soups.  I’ll also be making a lasagna with chard.

I’m not really worried about eating the oranges or the apples–I’m sure we can handle that.  So that leaves me with: 2 very large leeks, .5 lbs buttom mushrooms, .5 lbs mixed baby lettuce and 1 treviso radicchio.  That sounds like something I might be able to handle…
But could someone please tell me what the hell a “Treviso Radicchio” is?!