Cornish Cross Processing

**This post does contain some photos of chicken carcasses.  If that is disturbing to you . . . have you never cooked a chicken?**

As you may recall, last week I invited each of you to join us for Friday morning's backyard chicken processing.  Unsurprisingly, I didn't have any guests that morning.  ;)  Oh, well, your loss -- I'd planned to send any visitors home with their very own chicken for dinner.  ;)

Here, you can see that John has carefully positioned the awaiting chickens so that they cannot see the processing table (it's on the other side of the grill). 

This picture and the next one really crack me up.  We both look like we're pretty unsure about what we're holding.  As you may recall from this post, these chickens were such mutants that they hardly even seemed like chickens to us.  Also, I was just in shock regarding how heavy they were compared to the Buff Orpingtons we'd slaughtered earlier in the summer.  These were easily twice their weight and at only 7.5 weeks old, they were half the age.

There are always interesting, um, surprises when home processing chickens, but this one was the most interesting this time.

This is the chicken that I'd just skinned.  Can you see the wing bone poking out on the right side of the photo?  That's what a normal wing bone looks like when I'm done.  When I skin them, I cut the wing at that joint because the smaller part is too difficult to skin/defeather.  It has two little bumps on the end.

This chicken has one normal looking bone (on the left) and one strange looking one (on the right).  Apparently, when Dexter attacked the chicks, he broke and dislocated this one's wing.  The wing had continued to grow but it was only attached to the rest of the body by a skin flap.  This bone healed like this, in a more rounded way and became discolored.  I really found this interesting, and sad.  I was angry at Dexter all over again.

Here are all the chickens once they'd been cleaned up and moved into the chicken-- 11 in all.

All packaged up and labeled and ready for storage! (Our freezer is getting very full!)