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Chickens in the Back Garden

I have always wanted to raise chickens.  Ten years ago, when my daughters were in elementary school and the class hatched chicken eggs and begged parents to adopt the birds, I wanted to.  But of course there's a fifty-fifty chance you'll get cockerels (which are illegal here in my city), and I didn't have a particularly permanent abode anyway.  Now, for the first time in my life, I'm a homeowner.  A homeowner with a large, grassy backyard.  Within a couple of weeks of moving in, I ordered four chicks.  I warned Harman it was just the way it had to be.  I ordered them in late February, and they were slated to arrive in April.  

The company I ordered them from, MyPetChicken.com, warned that they couldn't guarantee an exact date of delivery, but the chickens would arrive in the US Mail, overnight.  I actually wanted only three chickens, but I was worried one would arrive dead, or would die during chickdom, so I ordered a spare.  

Meanwhile, I was unemployed.  The restaurant I had worked for went under about a week before we moved into the new house--which was great timing, since I had leisure to pack and organize.  But of course I needed a new job, and I applied to a culinary school as a chef-instructor.  I got the job, which was only part-time.  I applied for another job and got that too--a full-time gig at a trendy local eatery.  All of a sudden, I was dramatically over-employed.  As the chick arrival date drew near, I was terrified I would kill the birds through neglect.  

But the chicks arrived and I didn't kill them.  I got a call from the post office, telling me they were ready to be picked up.  I rushed from work to the post office.  

"Hi!  I'm here to pick up some baby chickens.  The box will probably be cheeping."  

The postal worker behind the counter demanded my address and zip code.  When I gave it, he breezily told me I was in the wrong post office.

"But I got a call from the post office telling me to come to this location."

"No, whoever told you that was wrong."

"But he gave me the address and everything..."

"Sorry, we don't service your zip code.  You need to go to the post office on Fair Oaks.  They're already closed for the day, though."

"But he called from this post office.   See?  Here's my phone, with the recent calls, and this was the number he called from."

"Well, that is the number from this post office, but we don't service your zip code.  You have to wait until tomorrow and go to the other post office."

"But he told me this address.  He said this branch was open until 7:00 p.m.  Why would he lie to me?  How could he have called me from this number if this isn't the right branch?"

"I don't know, but you have the wrong post office.  We don't service your zip code."

"Listen.  There is a package for me here, at this post office.  I was told to come pick it up before seven o'clock.  Why would he have told me that if he was working in a branch that closed at four?"

"I don't know, but I can't help you."

"THERE'S A BOX OF LIVE ANIMALS THAT WILL DIE IF YOU DON'T FIND THEM FOR ME RIGHT NOW!

Pause.

"Oh!  You mean the birds!  Yeah, I have them right here.  Ha-ha!  I didn't know you were picking up live birds."

"Maybe you should've listened to me."

I drove the cheeping box four blocks to my house and sat down with it on the couch.  I could tell that at least some of the chicks were alive, because there was really quite a lot of cheeping.  Lo and behold, all four were alive!  One, however, was noticeably smaller and weaker than the others.  She seemed unstable on her little feet, and kept falling over or hopping backwards where the others were hopping forwards.  

There were two yellow chicks (an Exchequer Leghorn--the tiny one--and an Ameraucana), a red one (a Rhode Island Red), and a gray (an Andalusian Blue.)

I took them up to their temporary home (a cardboard box in our shower) and introduced them to food and water.  The littlest one seemed dazed and confused, unable to eat or drink.  Harman and I fussed over them, and wondered what to call them.  Harman suggested Rummy for the tipsy one.  I had a sudden brainstorm. 

"How about Tippie?  Like Tippi Hedren from The Birds?" Harman is a big Alfred Hitchcock fan, so he agreed.  

"We can name them all after Hitchcock leading ladies.  Doris, Grace, Ingrid and Tippie," I said.  So it was done.  Tippie (I hate girls names that end in "i", so our bird got an "e" added on) recovered just fine, though she has remained significantly smaller than the others.  

The birds grew really fast.  By the end of the first week they seemed about twice as big.  Tippie, of course, trailed the others.  Every time I picked her up, it seemed as if there was nothing in my hand.  Holding her was like holding a piece of cotton candy.  It is important to handle the chicks plenty, so that they learn to trust you.  

After about five weeks, the chickens were ready to move into their coop.  We had ordered a coop from Amazon, and assembled it in under an hour.  But I realized we would need to reinforce it to keep out the wild beasts so surprisingly abundant in Southern California, so we hammered, tacked, screwed and bludgeoned some improvements onto the existing framework.  Spring locks to foil the clever fingers of raccoons, wide wire netting on the otherwise open bottom of the run area to prevent digging dogs, tiny shims to stabilize the roosting bars (just to make the chickens comfortable as they perched), screws here and there to tack down a shoddily attached roof, and long wooden runners with handles so we could pick up the coop and move it every few days (otherwise the grass under the coop would die from the nitrogen-heavy poop.)  I've heard terrible stories about coops with regular-sized chicken wire--apparently, raccoons will reach in through the relatively large holes of chicken wire fences, grab a chicken, and remove it from the coop, piece by gristly piece.  When you have only four hens, and you've named each one, and you are anxiously awaiting your first egg, such an idea is anathema.  Let's face it, these were pets.

In mid-September, Ingrid laid the first egg.  It was tiny but perfect.  Bigger than a quail egg, but smaller than the smallest chicken egg you could buy, it had a lovely vivid yellow yolk, and fried up perfectly.  Within a day or two, Doris laid an almost normal-sized brown egg, and proceeded to lay an egg a day since.  It wasn't a week before Grace laid her lovely green egg.  Laying went along like that, with between two and three eggs a day.  I eat a fabulous scrambled egg each morning, and I scramble one for Harman, too.  Tippie showed no sign of laying anything until today.  I can't be sure the little egg I found today was hers, but when I got home from work, Harman said she had been making some noise in the vicinity of the coop, and I found a slightly smaller, more ivory-colored egg than Ingrid usually lays, and it was smeared with traces of blood.  Doris lays brown eggs, Grace lays green eggs, but Tippie's breed is supposed to lay white eggs, as does Ingrid.  I guess time will tell.

All in all, I am besotted with my birds.  They are funny and pretty (I never realized how beautiful chickens are), and I have never tasted such delicious eggs.  When I whisk the eggs in the bowl for our breakfast, it looks as if I had whisked together a bowl of yolks, rather than whole eggs--the yolks are such a dark yellow-orange color.  Recently we went out for breakfast to--of all places--Bob's Big Boy.  I ordered eggs (big mistake) as did Harman.  I could barely choke them down.  I'm sure they buy cartons of frozen, chemical-augmented eggs, but I was not prepared for the crappy flavor.  I might be permanently spoiled.  I guess I'm OK with that.

Making Camembert-style cheese for fun

I bought a book called "Make the Bread, Buy the Butter," by Jennifer Reese few weeks ago after hearing about it from my sister-in-law.  This crazy lady (read: kindred spirit) decided to try making a bunch of different things from scratch to see if the hassle outweighed the benefit (she also compared cost, but often this was secondary to the other benefits/detriments of her projects.)  Hotdog buns, home-cured prosciutto, granola, vinegar, yogurt, and camembert cheese.  She recommends making your own cheese.  I have made my own ketchup, brewed my own liqueurs, nurtured a natural yeast starter for a dozen years, built my own outdoor pizza oven, raised laying hens in my urban backyard.  Why have I never tried to make cheese?  That sounded right up my alley.

To make Camembert cheese, you take two gallons of milk and barely heat it (85 degrees), then add four things that you need to buy on a cheese making website: sodium chloride, mesophilic culture, penicillin candidum, and rennet.  Stir gently and leave for an hour and a half.  Come back and ladle the resulting curd into cheese molds (or, in my case, quart-sized deli cups with the bottoms cut off and holes poked in the sides), then let the cheese make itself, aided by the occasional flipping of the molds to aid in the oozing out of the whey.

I have Thursdays off.  I usually spend some significant part of it with my dad, who suffers from Parkinson's disease and recently had brain surgery for it.  We run his errands and chat.  This particular Thursday we went to his barber and a few other places.  Then I went to Trader Joe's to buy the milk for the cheese.  You see, the cheese making ingredients had arrived on my doorstep as I was walking out of the house in the morning, and I couldn't wait to start turning milk into curds and whey.  

At Trader Joe's I bought their Cream Top milk.  I know that Camembert is supposed to be a raw-milk cheese, but c'mon.  It's my first time making cheese.  I don't know how to safely deal with raw milk.  The recipe in my lovely book calls for "milk," and I decided to not bankrupt myself and potentially poison my family buying farmers' market raw milk.  My first time, I'd buy pasteurized.  But for a dollar more per gallon, I could get that cool un-homogenized milk with the cream floating on top.  That had to be better, right?  One step closer to its natural state?

I brought it home and opened it up, gazing at the thick cream plug that stoppered each half-gallon.  I squeezed the container and the cream plug popped up over the top a little, then retreated back into the carton when I let go.  I got a little engrossed in this and squeezed a little too enthusiastically, popping a sploosh of underlying milk out from under the cream, all over my brand new iPhone 4S, handily tucked into my brassiere.  Un-homogenized milk dribbling down my legs, I rushed to dry off my phone.  It seemed OK.  I commenced cheese making.  Using my big canning pot, I heated the milk and added the tiny pinches of those various stuffs called for in Jennifer's recipe.  

My husband called.  The phone rang, but I couldn't hear him speaking.  I dismissed this as a bad connection.  He called back.  I still couldn't hear him and became rather concerned.  I texted him.  I noticed that the phone wasn't making any clicking sounds when I texted, either.  

Me: "My phone isn't making sounds!  I had a minor milk splashing incident.  Help."

Harman: "I could hear you.  Be home shortly."

I began to fear that this might turn out to be very, very expensive cheese.

When Harman got home, he set up an elaborate dishtowel sling for the iPhone, suspended it in front of a space heater, and attempted to dry it out.  He was feeling particularly fraught over the incident, because, the week before, when I had been standing in the Apple store trying to decide whether to buy the breathtakingly expensive Apple Care package they were pushing on me, I had called Harman for his input.  I have always bought the warranty packages in the past, but this one was half the price of the phone.  I've never broken my previous phones, nor immersed them in water, so after a hurried conversation, he had convinced me that I should forego the warranty--the first one they have ever offered that covered such iPhone-detrimental incidents as smashing its glass face, dropping it in the toilet, or, presumably, liberally spraying it with dairy.

Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, the milk had coagulated into what looked like yogurt.  I cut it into rough cubes and filled the makeshift molds with the soft curd.  I was almost finished when I accidentally knocked over one of the molds.  I called out for help, since for a moment it looked like all the curds were going to tumble slowly to the floor.  Harman rushed in and found me splayed on the floor next to a puddle of curds.  His only comment was, "You have to take responsibility for your own projects."  My response, "Go away, please."  It wasn't too bad.  They had all kind of fallen over in tandem, some of the curds falling on my kitchen floor, but most of them saved by the clean, rimmed sheet pan I had wisely assembled them on.  I saved what didn't hit the floor, packing it back into the molds, skidding on the slick floor the whole while.  (I salvaged the floor curds in a little container to be given to the chickens the next day, which they loved.)

I got all the cheese curds tucked away into the molds, which were full to the top.  The molds were tall, maybe seven or eight inches high, far too high for a camembert, but the cheese shrinks down dramatically as it ages.  

Finally sitting down in front of the TV, where Harman had been this whole time like a regular person, I tested my phone.  It seems to have suffered no lasting damage, though I have no idea what will happen if the particles of milk inside its speakers coagulate into their own form of deviant camembert.

So now all three cheeses are sitting in a dutch oven waiting to age.  One of the four esoteric ingredients I added to the milk was that penicillin mold, meant to form the soft white rind that bries and camemberts have.  You can spray it on the outside of the cheeses or add it to the milk to express itself on the outside later.  I added it in.  I'm looking forward to it appearing.  

One question is where to store the aging cheeses.  They are supposed to stay at about 50 degrees fahrenheit, which strikes me as a particularly tricky temperature.  It's way cooler than any spot in my basement-less house, and significantly warmer than my fridge.  Hmm.  For now, I'm transferring it in and out of the fridge--during the day, it's in, during the night, it's out, which may or may not approximate the correct temperature.

Musings from my current life of leisure

Here is a pop quiz: What's the difference between "comfort food" and "junk food"?

I say comfort food is meatloaf, pot roast, cobblers, spaghetti and meatballs, banana bread. Comfort food is what Mom--or more likely Grandma--made back in the day when she had neither a microwave nor a job. She did probably have a frugal budget, and quite a few hours to spend in the kitchen every day making braises and roasts, peeling apples and puttering around with pie crusts.

Junk food is processed and convenient. Pop Tarts and Ding-Dongs, chips and dips and Slim Jims are all junk food. Junk food is mostly a post-World War II, post-feminism phenomenon. I'm sure my dad could dredge up memories of a few "junk foods" that were around in his childhood, but not the tiniest fraction of a percent of what inundates us at every gas station convenience store today.

My own childhood comfort foods were made mostly by my dad. He still makes the best spaghetti and meatballs in the world, and his veal cutlets are to die for. My mom used to make a simple tuna sandwich that I loved, and sometimes for breakfast she'd make a hot cereal out of rice and raisins.

But I grew up in the seventies and eighties, and my mother couldn't be bothered to cook much. She bought canned or frozen vegetables and powdered mashed potatoes. There was no fresh milk in the house throughout my entire childhood. My parents bought powdered nonfat milk and mixed it up with water. It was gross. My mom made a horrible meatloaf and greasy, flaccid chicken cacciatore.

Aside from the accompanying emotional trauma, the best thing to happen to me was my parents' divorce, at least culinarily speaking. My mom let me do the shopping (fresh milk! bagels and cream cheese!) and my dad started cooking more than ever. (My mom quickly gave up cooking for good, handing over the responsibility to me, at my request, when I was fifteen.) My dad sent lunches to school with me and my sister. They were fabulous. Usually leftovers from dinner, a nice thick slab of sourdough bread and butter, a thermos of his famous iced tea, a little belgian chocolate bar he bought at Trader Joe's, an orange from Grand Central Market, with a slit of rind removed to help us peel it.

But back to comfort food. Every culture has its own favorites, but I think comfort food, to merit the name, must be homemade. A perfect example of something teetering in the balance is macaroni and cheese. Did your mom make it from scratch? Or was it Kraft? If it was Kraft, did she tart it up with extra cheese or onion powder or breadcrumbs or anything? Hmm. Tricky. I recognize the essential comforting nature of Kraft macaroni and cheese, but I hesitate to honor it as true comfort food.

All kids today watch the same TV shows, eat the same fast food, play the same video games. In my generation most kids ate Kraft mac and cheese, but maybe each mom made it a little bit differently. The kids of today may very well remember the Costco pumpkin pie their parents bought at Thanksgiving, and it will all be exactly the same.