ilultham

 In the last post I talk about processing a few of our Indian game hens for meat. One was a bantam and a respectable 1.3kg. But as they say the proof is in the eating - so on Sunday we had a little roast chicken for tea.  We spatchcocked the bird to reduce cooking time. This isn't the first bantam we've eaten this year, earlier in the summer we had six young bantam cockerels that were spending their days fighting and worse so we ended up having them for a BBQ. the lightest weighed in at 330g but we all had one each for our tea and it seemed far better than wasting them.  This bantam was on a different level - the others were more like eating a quail whereas this had some good meat on it. It fed all five of us, but the bones were picked clean by the end!  One thing I really love is the difference in leg meat and breast meat - the light and the dark. Unlike supermarket birds (or even home raised Ross Cobbs to a certain extent) you can really see the difference in two m...

##### This post contains pictures of dead animals ###### This year we've been using the incubator lots, it's hardly been off over the last few months. Now that means we've got a fair few birds running around the place. Unfortunately we've been a little unlucky with our hatch ratios - not the best rates, but also so many more cocks rather than hens. The first batch we ended up with 13 chickens and turns out that only two of them are hens - and bantams at that!  The group has been getting pretty "fighty" with each other as they've got bigger, big squabbles and birds not wanting to go into the coop at night.  And lets just say that the dawn chorus is basically a load of teenagers fighting over who can crow the loudest with squeaky voices!  So today we had to decide what to do with them. There isn't much meat on a bantam, some of these are crosses from Seabrights and Seramas so pretty much as small as chickens get. But I did think it would work well as a g...