the butcher, the baker

    My co-worker slaughtered a couple of her own geese recently and I took a couple of pictures. After the break is a bit of gore and discussion.





    She had been trying to figure out how to personally slaughter the geese for a week or two before getting the advice she needed from a farmer. He said to cut a hole in the corner of a burlap sack, and then throw the goose inside, feeding its head through the hole. Caught in the sack as it will be, it will be unable to flap around and its throat can be cut without a huge fight. That is what she did and it worked well enough.

neck

    It could have been a cleaner job but it's not bad for the first time. After slaughter she began to remove the feathers which was hard to do manually. A very large pot of boiling water to blanch the bird would probably have made things easier. Even better than that would be the machine we saw on our field trip around the corner to Griggstown Farm:

a bowl full of big black dildos

.... in which the birds are whacked uniformly with small rubber sticks which catch the small and difficult-to-remove feathers and pull them from the skin. Here was her slow-and-steady manual method.

maybe even save the down and make a pillow

    After this is all done, it's pretty much the same process as I've documented previously with some ducks to remove the guts and get to butchering.

    Now cooking the bird is another matter entirely...