City Girl Plays Farmer for a Day by Katie O, Executive Assistant and Marketing
About a month and a half ago, I was invited on an educational food excursion at Dog Mountain Farm in Carnation. I like to call this experience: “City Girl Plays Farmer for a Day.”
Myself, Becky Selengut, private chef known in the twitter world as @chefreinvented, Amy Pennington of GoGoGreenGarden, and Angela Garbes, contributor for the Seattle Weekly’s Voracious column, set out to learn the process of how to take a live chicken/duck and turn it into something that could be cooked in our kitchens at home.
I won’t go into the process and minutia of the killing and butchering, but suffice it to say that the experience was incredibly fascinating/eye-opening (and a touch messy)- and if you’ve never done it, there’s certainly a value in doing it at least once.
There is no shortage of sights, sounds, and smells to take in when doing this for the first time. I’d like to think that I’m not sentimental when it comes to eating things that were once living, breathing critters, but having killed a live chicken at 1pm, to have to roast it and have it sitting on my table by 8pm was definitely a mind trip which left me uncertain as to how sentimental I really am. It is one hell of a process to make a chicken edible- and not only was the chicken fresh that evening, but so were my memories of it a mere few hours earlier.
I ate all my sides that night: heirloom tomato salad, roasted carrots, fennel, and parsnips. I drank my glass of red wine. And then another. And I ate a single measly chicken wing. It was all I could muster up to do. At that moment, I believe the only thing I said about the chicken was “too soon,” feeling like it was a little too “farm to table” for me for one day. Never has such an exclamation point been put on the fact that I am, and have been, a city girl disconnected from her edibles.
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