By Jeanine Gurley of Local Sustainable Food Garden
Talk about the ‘eewww’ factor - I have early memories of watching one of my stepfather's friends sucking on chicken feet. He acted like it was manna from heaven and I thought it was about the grossest thing I had ever seen. Not something I ever had any intention of sticking in my mouth.
I have found other uses for chicken feet though. In some pet stores there are dried chicken feet in the doggie treat isle. I kept one on my desk for years to ward off evil spirits. There are those at work that think that I dabble in voodoo or am some sort of witch doctor. The presence of pretty beetle shells and dried up chicken feet on my desk scares the heck out of them and they stay very far away from me. Thus, the evil spirits are kept away J.
One of my less intimidated co-workers broke all of the toes on my chicken foot, except the middle one, and glued them back together in the Flipping-You-Off position. It was pretty cool looking and traveled around the world with me on a couple of deployments. Finally someone either stole the chicken foot or threw it away because they got tired of body parts in the office – don’t know which.
I have been raising and butchering my own chickens at home for a few years now and I have to admit that the chicken feet have been either buried in the garden or put in the burn barrel to be charred and then buried. I have read all about the beautiful yellow color that chicken feet impart to broth and how they are a great source of glucosamine and collagen. That’s great but I just couldn’t get past the little dirty feet that have so many little crevices full of sand and soil and chicken poo. No no no and not gonna happen.
Then I watched a video of Alexia Allen showing how she butchers chickens. There are two videos on Youtube featuring Alexia and her method for humane slaughtering chickens. I prefer Alexia’s method over any that I have seen yet. Obviously, it would not work for someone who needs to slaughter a large number of birds at a time but since we are very small scale here at the farmlet I can afford to give each bird individual consideration when it is time for them to turn into food.
Anyway – back to the feet. Alexia shows how the feet are tossed into boiling water for a few seconds and then the outside layer will easily peel right off. Today’s turkey harvest left me with 6 fairly large turkey feet that I really didn’t want to go to waste so I decided to give the boiling water trick a try. Worked like a charm! Clean as a whistle (are whistles clean? I never use anyone else’s whistle – what if they spit in it?). Sorry, I’m easily distracted.
The clean-as-a-whistle turkey feet went into the crock pot and the next morning the resulting broth cooled to a gel like I haven’t seen in almost 40 years. Instant aspic. You don’t hear much about aspic these days and I have to wonder if the factory farmed condition of grocery store birds is to blame. When I was a little girl aspics were common at the dinner table – usually more festive occasions – jeweled creations containing colorful vegetables and eggs encased in the clear natural gelatin of the meat broth from which they came.
After draining that pot I put them back in with fresh water from the well and stuffed the pot with fresh rosemary, oregano, celtic sea salt and dried tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic and a little homemade Mexican mole ‘cookie’ that I keep around for seasoning. Un-Real. Sorry Grandma, this is the best soup I have ever eaten.
So now I understand: little ugly bird feet really are manna from heaven and there will be a LOT more where that came from. With all of that natural collagen in it I’m thinking of smearing some on my face while I’m at it.
To see more of wilderness instructor Alexia Allen: http://youtu.be/ExGRrwlhldA
Excellent stuff Jeanine!
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