I’ve had a lot to learn about
growing our own meat chickens, especially once I brought our heirloom
birds to the kitchen.  If your recipes are based on storebought
meat, chances are they start with a line like “Take two chicken breasts
and….”  Here are some tips and recipes I’ve developed over the
last two years that help you enjoy and respect your homegrown chickens’
meat.



The easiest way to make
use of the whole bird is to roast your chicken, then stew up the
bones.  One of our small layer-breed broilers (less than two
pounds) can turn into four to six meals if we first roast the chicken
with vegetables, then use the carcass as the base for a delicious
soup.  You can read my in depth description of roasting a chicken
in my
99 cent ebook, or
can see the recipe I
developed mine from here.



Heirloom chickens have a
lot more leg than breast, so it’s useful to know some recipes just for
the legs.  If you’re buying storebought meat on a budget, chicken
leg recipes are even more helpful since legs are often one of the
cheapest cuts of meat.  This garlic
and thyme chicken leg recipe is my new easy and delicious
way to use up chicken legs.



Finally, if you’re serious
about making your flock self-sufficient, you’ll often end up with old
layers who are too tough to chew.  Traditional chefs love these
chickens for their richer flavor, which can be stewed out by cooking
for a long time at low heat.  The resultant soup is
phenomenal!



How have you found
cooking with real chickens to be different from cooking with
storebought meat?  Do you have any heirloom chicken recipes to
share?

I begged
for some photos of chicken coops and tractors and several of our readers
complied.  Here are some of our favorite tractor designs, starting
with the simple and moving up to the complex.

Neil Brooks built the
four foot by eight foot chicken tractor above
based on Joel Salatin’s model.  The 2″X2″ construction, low
profile,
and open sides give a lot of chicken living area for very little
weight.  Judicious cross-bracing will allow you to build even
larger
tractors while still using thin, light lumber.

RDG from WeekendHomestead.net built a simple chicken
tractor to house
his extra roosters while they were growing up to broiler size.  He
wrote, “The chicken tractor I built is made from 2X6 pressure treated
lumber for the frame.  The frame is 12 feet by 4 feet.  Half
inch EMT metal electrical conduit is used for the hoops.  Chicken
wire is used to enclose the structure.  The ends are made from
half inch (1/2 in.) pressure treated plywood.  I have hung a
feeder and automatic watering bucket from the conduit.  I used the
only 4 foot tarp I could find to keep rain off the broilers.” 
RDG’s design could be made with lighter framing components (a 2X4
bottom and PVC pipe hoops) for an easier to pull tractor that’s just as
simple to build.

Brian Cooper’s chicken
tractor would fit into any neighborhood, no
matter how nice.  He built his tractor using the Catawba
coop
plans available
online.  The tractor is an A-frame structure, with
an open-bottomed “downstairs” and a wood-floored upstairs. 
Chickens hang out on the ground, but head up a ramp to lay eggs or
roost for the night.

Finally, I thought I’d
throw in a photo of our first chicken tractor, built for next to no
money from mostly found materials.  It was light, lasted about
three years before the found wood rotted out, and provided hours of
entertainment for our cat.