The Chicken Whisperer

This weekend was a good one; no errands to run and we managed to stay home every day of it except to head to church.  Of course I call any weekend good when I get to bake and even better when the I manage to keep the dishes from taking over the kitchen at the end of that weekend.  I swear I’m not that domestic, really, lol. 

To be honest my weekend actually started a bit early as I took off Friday.  In my defense it wasn’t for selfish reasons, we actually had work to do and most of the day was spent doing just that.

You see we got the surprise gift of a rock through the back door of our old house, which we still own and plan to keep for awhile longer until the which time we can do some remodeling of it.  The house for all intensive purposes, at the moment, is serving as storage for stuff we’ve yet to move or just don’t have room for.  We visit regularly, keep the yard mowed but hadn’t given a lot of thought to it until last week when Dennis stopped to check on it and found that the place had been pretty much ransacked.  I doubt the thieves left with much a feeling of accomplishment because, as I said, mostly it's storage.  Toys and totes of clothes don’t make for much of a haul I guess.

I suppose that should have left me feeling a bit more upset than I was but I think the fact that we weren’t living there and that no one had gotten hurt left me feeling better about the whole ordeal.  Despite that, it was still a mess so we spent Friday cleaning up glass and dumped clothes and such.

Friday night I made meringues, which if you’ve never made them are incredibly easy and go really well with strawberries, that have been on sale the past few weeks and that we’ve ate around six pounds of because of it.  They’re also fat free and pretty good when on a diet.  Dennis loves them so I’ve got the recipe memorized at this point. Let me break here for a recipe interruption:

Meringues

Pre-heat your oven to 250 degrees

3 egg whites room temperature (if you’re lucky enough to have covert chickens you have an abundance of these)

¾ cup of sugar 

1 tsp vanilla (you can use other extracts in place of this for flavor variety)

½ tsp cream of tarter 

Beat the egg whites with a mixer until slightly frothy then add the cream of tarter and vanilla.  Continue beating until they begin to form soft peaks.  At the soft peak stage keep beating and slowly add in the sugar.  Keep on beating them until the peaks are stiff and shiny.  Note:  You beat these a bit longer than you would for a pie meringue 

Fill a cake decorating bag with the fluff, prepared with whatever type tip you want to use, and pipe the mixture onto parchment paper lined cookie sheets or silpat if you have it.  If you don’t have a decorating bag you can use a gallon sized zipper bag with the tip of one corner cut out.  I usually make several meringue shells by first making a flat filled circle and then piping a few more lines of meringue around the edge of that circle, like a little bowl.  I also make several smaller kiss shaped cookies. 

Put the sheets into the oven and bake for an hour.  Turn the oven off and leave the meringues inside for another two hours or up to overnight.  This allows them to become dry and hard to the touch.  These will store up to a week in a sealed container or lidded cookie jar. 

Back to the blog:

Saturday I decided to try my hand at marshmallows.  I’ll give the recipe for these another time.  While they turned out pretty good I’d like to try them again and hopefully add some pictures, call it food vanity I guess.

While I was in the kitchen Dennis spent the weekend building a woven trellis for the peas out of river reeds.  The plan was for me to have any extra reeds to eventually build a garden tent for the girls, or garden sculpture but mother-nature and the fact that we seem to live on the windiest hill in Marion County has slowly dwindled the reed supply down.  He ended up moving from the peas onto the broccoli plants that keep getting tipped over with each new storm.

From my vantage point out the kitchen window it’s really fun to watch him with the plants and equally as entertaining to watch the girls travelling back and forth from the garden to the house because the chickens have taken to following us all like ducks.  That brings me to the reason for this blog which came about because of an interesting chicken occurrence this weekend.   

One of the chickens is eating the eggs.  Yes I can hear several people gasping now but no it’s not a case of a chicken cannibalism.  

Let me throw in a small chicken lesson here.  If by chance you ever find yourself on one of those survival game shows and if by chance you are rewarded with a rooster and chicken for managing to carry seven hundred tiki statues over a creek and through the jungle all the while keeping your game show emblazoned bandana pristine enough to proclaim said game shows name for advertising purposes.  

If by chance that happens and you say to yourself, “self, I’m hungry and fried chicken would be awfully good right now but I can’t kill the rooster because then we won’t have any eggs.”  If all that happens then please think back to these words of wisdom.  

You do not need the rooster to get the eggs.  

You only need the rooster if you want baby chicks and the likelihood that you’ll be on that island long enough for those chicks to mature into roasted chicken is not very good.  So kill the rooster!  And if there is not a rooster around and your hen is of laying age you’ll still have eggs and, now this is important, if one of those chickens eats an egg they don’t have mad chicken disease and won’t start wearing a necklace of shrunken chicken heads either.  Without the presence of a rooster those eggs aren’t baby chickens.  It’s more likely there’s something lacking in their diet or they just got curious one day when an egg cracked and liked what they found. 

Okay, back to my story, so the large white hen has been eating the eggs.  Dennis found this out after a weekend long stakeout of the chicken coop.  You see it’s been several days since we’ve had a good egg from the coop because of the egg eating culprit. You’d hear the chickens laying an egg and then by the time you’d go to gather them you’d find that they were cracked open at the bottom of the laying box.  After this happened a few times Dennis began to notice that the culprit was hanging near the nest and not following her sisters out round the yard to hunt for worms.  Sure enough he heard the distinctive call of a hen laying and then ran quickly to find that the egg thief was just about to do it again.

At this point he was pretty much irate and decided that the chicken needed a time out.  So he picked up the chicken, placed her in a dog kennel that we have left from our run away rat terrier Gizmo, put it in the shed and then went back to gardening for around an hour or so.  Not before proclaiming however that he was seriously considering inviting friends over for chicken and dumplings.

After a cooling off period he decided to hit the web and research how to remedy the problem, beyond reprimanding the chicken.  He found a way to allow the eggs to roll just out of reach of the chickens after they were laid and thus made it impossible for it to happen again.  I don’t think there’s much to worry about though.  The white hen, after being pardoned, has been reformed I think.  She’s out in the yard again scratching with the others, following right along with them as they roam the field beside the house.

Funny enough, on Monday, the chickens ventured all the way to the road and seemed to be contemplating either crossing or skirting round the fence to visit our neighbors before we noticed them and Dennis headed over to herd them back.  

I don’t think I’ll ever forget watching my husband, “the chicken whisperer”, walking down the hillside shaking an old plastic coffee container of cracked corn to lure them back to the cage.  Tori and Gabby of course thought it was great and wanted chicken whispering cans too, although Tori swears up and down that Dennis stole his from her and that it was actually the drum she decorated in music class a few weeks ago.

Because the chickens had grown so bold Dennis thought perhaps it was best to lock them up for the night, we had been leaving their cage open so that they could….err catch the early worms.  We’ve been pretty lucky so far in that no other animal has tried to hurt them.

Imagine my surprise this morning however when I looked out at the shed and see that three chickens, all but the white one, are roosting on a tree that was blown over in the storm and awaiting us burning it with some other brush.  If you remember we had a bit of a storm Monday night.

My first thought and comment is, “where’s the white chicken?”  Dennis upon heading out to check finds that the cage is still locked and the white chicken is sitting disgruntled on its roosting post, alone.  He still can’t figure out how the other three got out but however they did it we’re pretty certain they learned a lesson having been trapped in the storm with nothing put a dead tree for a roosting spot.  Each of them went happily back into the cage this morning and you know honestly I’m thinking that the white chicken probably could have made it outside too but after her “time out” I have a feeling she told the others, “you go right ahead, I know what happens when you act up ‘round here.”  I guess the chicken whisperer has tamed at least one of them.

Amy Morgeson-Undercover Chickens