Feral Little Things

I ran across a recipe that called for bacon to be cooked and then a line in the recipe made me clutch all my damn pearls….”discard the bacon grease.”

May it never be.

We are a zero waste kitchen. We use everything.

Even bacon grease.

And I’m not in the camp that you save bacon grease to cook with it later. Ew. I just can’t. But I do use lard and it’s close to the same thing. For whatever reason, it grosses me out. Can’t do it.

But! I absolutely do this! I add oatmeal to the bacon grease to soak up all that goodness and then my chickens get to enjoy a treat!

It’s been a hard year for our family this year and I’ve been absent from this page and my blog. I’m coming back, I promise.

But I thought I’d pop in here and answer a question I get pretty often. How do I get my chicken stock to be so dark?

Easy. This was made with the chickens we raised and butchered ourselves but store bought chicken will do the same thing. I make three to four whole chickens every time I made chicken. I like leftovers to use in soups for the week so I make extras.

I use my massive pressure canner and add all four carcasses and fill her up to the top with water. I also keep a ziplock in our freezer that I stick vegetable scraps and store them there until I make stock. Then i dump in a handful or two of the scraps and dump two quart bags of frozen carrots from the garden. Add your pressure to the highest and cook for three hours in your pressure canner. Your bones should crumble when pinched between two fingers which means it’s perfect. Strain and can in jars. I feed the carcass and veggies to my two dogs and nothing is wasted.

All our alpacas are pregnant and due in June. The little guy my daughter is hugging is Sprout and he was born last June and is the most amazing little thing with people.