The Girl Scout Meeting

Self conscious is attending your daughter’s “Get to Know Girl Scouts” meeting in town, with a bunch of professional suburban moms, and surreptitiously taking a selfie to check to see if you have any chicken blood splatter on your person.

Today, in a matter of 75 minutes, my friend Melissa and I set up a chicken cleaning station from scratch, caught, dispatched, cleaned and packaged about a third of the meat birds in the barn. BOOM-we are women, hear us roar!

This rushed processing came into being early this morning when I realized a chicken cold was making its way through the flock and it was deal with weaker birds now or possibly be sorry by our scheduled weekend processing date. In the meantime, I had already agreed to take Evie to the Girl Scouts meeting, giving me a window of less that 90 minutes to setup, process and clean up enough for town.

Melissa, ever game for farm randomness, said she would meet me when I got off work and after getting the girls set up with an after school movie, we got to work. Neither of us had ever processed chickens from beginning to end, each having only participated in individual steps. But by god we got it done...albeit skinning rather than plucking this batch (which makes it crazy fast!)

But that left me maybe 4 minutes to clean up and get to town in time...so I arrived at the meeting not having totally surveyed my person for errant splatters or bits of feathers.

Nobody said anything but would they say anything to the crazy farm lady seated next to you with blood splatters in her hair?

Probably not...