Our
dog Lucy has been trying to tell us for years that blood is a
super-food.  Whenever we butcher a deer or chicken, she’s waiting
in the wings until we give her the word that she’s allowed to come
close.  Then she licks at the dirt and grass trying to catch every
last drop of the red liquid.



Even though I haven’t
been able to talk myself into cooking with blood (yet), humans also
enjoy this nutritious substance in all kinds of dishes.  One
classic is blood sausage, in which blood is cooked with a grain, fat, or
meat.  Liquid blood can be used as broth in soups and as a
thickener in puddings, or you can wait until the blood coagulates into blood tofu, then cook with the solid.



While I’m getting up my courage to try this nutritious food, Mark and I have cleaned up our acts by putting a dish under our kill bucket
to capture the blood for Lucy.  She was highly appreciative of the
blood-catching station, and told us there’s no hurry at all to move
blood into the human kitchen.

I thought you might enjoy the video above, showing how to use a hand-cranked corn sheller.  A friend gave us all of his year-old, Hickory King corn a couple of weeks ago because weevils had gotten into the grain. 
He uses this sheller to quickly remove the kernels from the cob, then
(if he’s not giving it away) takes the kernels to a mill to be ground
into corn meal.



This winter, our chickens will enjoy the corn in their supplementary carb feeder.  I’ve read that you can provide whole kernels to chickens, but I’ll keep you posted if they seem reluctant to eat such big pieces and we need to crack it.