Superfluous Roosters

One problem about hatching your own poultry: you are going to end up with too many roosters. The one pictured above was a "keeper." He's doing his work, watching out for his girlfriends so they get to eat and nothing sneaks up to eat them.

But what if you have to eat a rooster?

Next year, a slightly higher temperature on the incubator should result in fewer males, but this year, we had six roosters. Four were mean birds, that charged you and pecked at you, no matter what. Their fate?

Butchered and eaten, or in the euphemistic sense, "sent to freezer camp."

I'd never done this before, so I enlisted the help of a theoretical physicist and his architect wife.

Yes, on paper that sounds very unqualified, but they both grew up in Romania under Communism. One advantage of that otherwise dreadful system was that city kids often learned rural skills, and my friends are no exception. Of course, our grandmothers were all laughing at us for the grand production we made of "processing" the birds.

Except for the first rooster, I did the worst part: the quick dispatch.

No, there are no photos here. Yes, we tried mightily to get the extra roosters adopted. If you belong to any lists about poultry, you'll find lots of handsome males up for adoption. Nearly all are listed as "sweet tempered."

We were lucky to have two roosters survive. Both are defensive of their harems when it comes to predators, but they let me pet them and their ladies. They eat out of my hand and come up to talk to me.

That's the only thing better than eating a rooster. Coq au Vin is, however, excellent.

So, if you are faced with no other options, here are some excellent resources I used:

• how to humanely butcher and clean a chicken.
• an excellent Coq au Vin recipe from New York Times.
• how to clean chicken feet.