They’ve made a permanent move from the garage, of course; Our Lady of the Circular Causality Dilemma sits in one corner of our backyard and the chickens have the run of the place all day long. They make good use of our small city plot, digging and scratching for all manner of small, delicious things in the dirt. Until the beginning of autumn, all three chickens—Trotsky (formerly known as Sister Who We Don’t Know What Her Name Is Yet), Sister Jezebel Turgenev, and The Edge—were laying an egg just about every day. Since October or so, it’s just been Trotsky, the Rhode Island Red. Until yesterday, we hadn’t bought eggs since August, when The Edge laid the very first one.

While the novelty of having three hens in the backyard has worn off, I still find their presence tremendously satisfying. Like any creature, each one has her habits. Having watched them all these months, I can tell you that Trostsky is the dominant hen and Sister Jezebel is on the lowest social rung. The Edge is the least aggressive. She is the last to arrive at the gate when I come with stale bread and veggie trimmings, but she will always get her share. Trotsky is the loudest and most vocal these days, singin’ and squawkin’ in the mornings when she lays her daily egg in the nest she’s made in the far corner of the yard, right next to the coiled green garden hose.

We’ve had rats this year. The Earth Machine we got from Metro first attracted them, and they stayed on when they discovered chicken feed and table scraps. Sometimes I tell myself that we have chickens and a compost pile because we are not 100% efficient and we use both to absorb and make use of leftovers from the house. I tell myself that we have rats now because the chickens aren’t at 100% either, inevitably leaving some nibbles behind for the backyard rodents. My feelings towards the rats change often. This week, perhaps in the spirit of Christmas, I am taking a break from wishing them dead.

We’ve had possums, too—or at least one possum, who caused quite a clatter a few weeks ago, just past midnight. After shooing the creature out of the yard and carrying the frightened hens through the dark and back to their coop, we determined that the possum must have been just passing through and curious about the hens and their food. In a city where chickens are regularly lost to raccoons and such, I count myself very lucky that all three of mine have made it thus far unharmed.

Chickens, I have learned recently, do not enjoy being cold. On the first day of this crazy snowstorm, when the flakes were small and the wind was fierce, I found my hens underneath the back porch, hopping from one foot to the other and making low, accusatory clucks. As the snow piled up around Our Lady of the Circular Causality Dilemma, the chickens grew increasingly bothered by the frozen world. They did not, as far as I know, venture beyond the shelter of the porch for more than a week. Their appetites for corn and fresh vegetables grew and, after four days of very cold weather, Trotsky finally stopped laying. Their water froze every day and every night; they huddled close together on their roost underneath a sixty-watt lightbulb we rigged up with a heavy duty extension cord that runs out the kitchen door. Uncomfortable and unaccustomed though they were, The Edge and her sisters were fine—inconvenienced more than anything.

Today the weather outside seems to be improving. The ice and snow began to thaw last night with drip and a trickle, and today all three hens are moving about in their full range, though no doubt with very cold feet. Judging by the racket heard during breakfast (Trostky’s usual egg-laying hour), I’d guess that there’s even an egg to be collected out there, when I get around to pulling my boots on and trudging through the slush.

An oven-roasted chicken is to my mind one of the most delicious things a person could eat at seven-thirty on a Tuesday night in December, at home, after a sort of long day out in the world. It isn’t part of a “30 minute” meal for sure, but active preparation time is minimal. Whole chickens are relatively inexpensive considering all that you get: bones and cartilage for chicken stock, livers to feed to your cats, and at least two meals’ worth of meat for you and a friend. Plus, a simple roasted chicken is darned tasty and goes with anything you might want to eat it with. I happen to prefer sautéed green beans with shallots, butter, and toasted almonds and lumpy mashed Yukon Gold potatoes, but you can serve just about anything with a chicken. That’s part of what makes them so great.

But here’s the thing about roasting a chicken: everyone, everywhere—in every blog, cookbook, and TV show—claims that cooking a chicken in the oven is the easiest thing in the world to do. They also usually claim that it takes about forty minutes. The first time I roasted a chicken, I accepted both of these premises without question. I rinsed the bird, patted it dry, salted and peppered it, stuffed it with a lemon, and stuck it in the oven. I waited fifty minutes (to be on the safe side) and then I pulled it out onto the counter, hacked into it, and was horrified to find it still pink near the breastbone.

I did this three times with only minor adjustments.

A sort-of-pink-in-the-middle chicken isn’t the worst thing that ever happened to a gal. There’s enough fully cooked meat to have your meal, and the rest becomes stock. Still, my inability to properly roast a chicken grated.

After an indeterminate period of sulking, I resolved to learn how to do it right. I turned to three of the most-referenced cookbooks in my library: A New Way to Cook by Sally Schneider, The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters, and The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. Naturally, each had a different take on “perfect” and “foolproof” procedures. Waters and Schneider both advocate flipping the chicken from its back to its breast during cooking as a means to achieve more even cooking by mimicking rotisserie action. They disagree, however, about which position to start in and how many times to flip. All disagreed about oven temperature and seasoning methods. America’s Test Kitchen (ATK) offered the simplest procedure, of course, though they recommend one additional step—brining.

So I made them all, following the instructions as closely as I was able (perhaps you are familiar with my inability to follow directions), thinking critically about the chicken-baking odyssey unfolding in my very own kitchen. More than two months later (’cause how many chickens, no matter how divine, can you expect a girl and her squeeze to eat?), here is what I know:

• Chicken flipping, though awkward, is worth the effort.

Waters suggests starting the bird breast up, flipping it after twenty minutes, then flipping it again to finish. Schneider advocates flipping only once, starting the bird breast-side down. However you choose to flip, you’ll get a more evenly done bird—no more dried out white meat waiting for the dark to be done.

• Temperature is critical.

Removing the chicken from the refrigerator about two hours before putting it in the oven will also contribute to uniform doneness. Likewise, starting off with a cooler oven (350º) and then raising it mid-roast (to 400-450º) will ensure that the inside of the bird has time to cook through before the skin attains brown and crispy perfection.

• Chicken-roasting to an internal temperature of 170ºF (that’s 5 degrees above the official “safety zone,” even before carryover cooking) will take longer than you want it to.

This mental disconnection may be accounted for by the fact that in recent years we’ve come to equate simple with quick. This is flawed logic. The last bird I cooked, one weighing nearly four pounds, brined (more on this in a moment), and removed from the fridge two hours before insertion into a hot oven, took one hour and fifteen minutes to cook. My oven and yours are different, so don’t count on any chicken you cook to take as long, but you can count on at least an hour to cook, plus ten or twenty minutes to rest after removing the bird from the oven.

• Brining is cool!

To “dramatically improve the flavor and tenderness,” ATK recommends a brine of 2 quarts cold water, ½ cup table salt and ½ cup sugar for a 3½ – 4 pound chicken. Dissolve the salt and sugar in the water in a container large enough to accommodate the bird. Submerge completely, cover, and refrigerate for thirty minutes to an hour. Remove from the brine, rinse, and pat dry.

If brining’s not your thing, there are other ways to season and tenderize a bird, however.

So, here’s A Chicken, Roasted:

1. If possible, season your chicken a day or two before you are going to prepare it. Rinse it inside and out, pat it dry, and remove excess fat. Rub the chicken, again inside and out, with a mixture of 1½ teaspoons Kosher salt and ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper. At this time, you can also put slivers of garlic and sprigs of herbs (I like thyme) under the skin.
2. Wrap the chicken back up and refrigerate until at least one hour before putting it in the oven.
3. Preheat your oven to 350ºF.
4. Prepare your baking pan: Use a V-shaped rack if you have one. It’s good to elevate the bird from the bottom of the roasting pan. This allows air to circulate around the whole thing, which helps cook it more evenly. Having an appropriately sized pan is important, too. You want one about the size of your chicken. As Waters points out, if a too-large pan is used, the accumulated juices will burn and smoke.
5. If you’re planning to make chicken gravy, add roughly chopped carrots, onions, and celery to the bottom of the pan for a richer flavor in the finished sauce.
6. Stuff the interior cavity with lemon quarters, herbs, and garlic. The lemon will tenderize the meat, and impart a distinctly lemony flavor. If you are planning to use the carcass for stock, substitute onion or shallot for the lemon.
7. Truss the chicken. You can watch a how-to video here. If you’re not down with trussing, at least tuck the wings behind the bird. This will prevent them from burning during roasting.
8. Place the bird on the rack breast side up. Roast for fifteen minutes.
9. Remove the pan from the oven and carefully flip the bird (I’ve just grabbed it with pot holders, though bird-lifting gadgets are available). Return to oven and cook for fifteen minutes more.
10. Flip again, so that the breast is up. Return to oven and increase temperature to 425ºF.
11. Continue to cook until an instant-read thermometer registers 170ºF when inserted into the thickest part of the breast. Also, look for evenly browned skin. Remove from oven.
12. Tip the chicken so the juices run out of the cavity. Move the chicken to a carving board and let sit, uncovered, for fifteen minutes before carving.

This morning I used a towel that had been hung out to dry on my laundry line some weeks ago. It smelled a bit like dirt, but in a good way, and a bit like the ancient and monstrous walnut tree that dominates our yard. Later today the laundry line is scheduled to come down as cooler, wetter weather settles down on us here in Portland. I’ll miss the earthy towels.

From here, the walnut tree will drop leaves and nuts until sometime in December, and then it will drop branches until springtime. I love that tree, though, as much as I fear being squashed in my bed in the middle of the night by an old, dead part of it. I like the way it makes the laundry smell when it’s warm enough to dry our clothes outdoors.

The season — heck, the whole year — has been so packed that it should hardly surprise me that fall was swung back around; but it does. As usual. This year the chicks turned into pullets and then into egg-laying hens — one egg from each every day, in fact. Having the hens around isn’t as quiet and idyllic as I imagined it would be, but I am glad they are here. I like those gals, even if they are chickens.

Though we were away from home quite a bit this summer, the garden still managed to produce some food for us — which is impressive since there was no pest control to speak of, very little fertilizer, and both flood and drought conditions. I’ve got onions hung up in braids in the basement (I was inspired after reading a forty-nine-cent Goodwill copy of Little House on the Prairie) and quite a stockpile of homemade pizza sauce made with our tomatoes and our garlic. There is jam too, of course, and three new batches of berry wine going through a secondary ferment. I’ll bottle them early in the new year.

I think somedays that these practices are baby steps toward self-sufficiency, but mostly I brew and sew and put up preserves because I enjoy these activities and because I am very picky. Making my own jam, for example, means that I can control exactly what is in it. Plus, I like having what I need here in the pantry. A cache of indispensable, basic items like chicken stock and yellow onions and black thread makes me feel somehow safe. Call me old fashioned if you must.

I am looking forward to the natural slowing that begins in the fall, and to the rich squash soups and baked fruit desserts that just don’t taste as good in the summertime. I swear, I write about squash soup every year, don’t I? I like it loaded with ginger and garlic, served next to a big salad and toasted slices of fresh baguette from the bakery down the street. I’m looking forward to spiced cider as well, and to wild-fermenting my own apple juice again. Last year the Squeeze said it tasted like model airplane glue, but I thought it was delicious. But maybe I shouldn’t admit that, or you won’t stick around for the ’09 version of this post.

The Edge is the first of the gang of hens to make an egg. I’ve been on the lookout for weeks, worried that the chickens would begin to lay and that I’d fail to notice, letting the precious eggs rot in the sunshine or be carried off my vermin. No chicken of mine, I reasoned, would be conformist enough to lay in her nesting box, no matter the pains her keepers have gone to to make it the sort of place that a chicken would want to be. So I’m out in the backyard a lot these days, bringing the ladies my leftover broccoli stems, stale bread, and corn cobs, and nosing around the yard in the hopes of discovering a warm little item, its shape somewhere between a sphere and an ellipsoid.

About a week ago, The Edge took to squatting, her wings lifted away from her body, head tucked. “That chicken wants you to know,” a friend told me as we watched The Edge take two steps, squat, get up, and squat again, “that she’s got an egg in her.” Since the first, there have been two more, right in a row, right like clockwork. She left the second egg in the same place as the first, in a little depression beneath the raspberries. The third – wonder of wonders – was left in her freshly-newspapered nesting box.

According to Barbara Kilarksi, a fellow-Portlander, author of Keep Chickens!, and my main source of chicken-keeping information, chicken eggs should be brushed off when you bring them in – not washed or rinsed – in order to preserve the protective anti-bacterial coating that is so thoughtfully provided by a hen as she ejects the eggs from her rearside. I read that after I brought in the first egg and, yes, rinsed it off before snuggling it into my waiting carton. I rinsed it not because it was dirty, but because – geez – it had just come out of a chicken’s rearside. Barbara had other good advice for me as well: give the egg’s giggly insides a few days to set up before hard-boiling it, for example. She also said that I should leave a plastic Easter egg or a golf ball in the hen’s nesting box if she continues to lay outside of the coop.

Yesterday morning, as I set to make another batch of those spectacular blueberry muffins, I pulled from the fridge two store-bought eggs and The Edge’s first egg. I put The Edge’s egg back in the fridge and grabbed a third that I’d bought at the Cherry Sprout. I put the third store-bought egg back in the fridge and put The Edge’s back on the counter. Resolutely, I at last cracked The Edge’s egg into a bowl, and then cracked a store-bought specimen in with it. I should note that my “store-bought” eggs came from a local farm, from reportedly pampered hens who eat a fine, organic diet. I’d describe my hens in the very same way. I was, therefore, surprised at the difference in appearance between the two samples. The egg on the right came out of my chicken. The yolk was so orange and so firm, and the albumen (white) was much less runny than that of the Cherry Sprout egg. I guess you just can’t compete with an egg that’s only sixteen hours old, or one that came from a chicken who’s better fed than your average hobo.

1. Squawking and clucking and the clicking of sharp beaks.
2. Flight, especially the reckless kind.
3. Free nitrogen-rich fertilizer.
4. Watching the Girls stalk and eat each others’ feathers. Probably not a very healthy practice, but hilarious all the same.

Fowl Displeasure

1. Poop on the picnic table.
2. Unexpected decimation of area plant life.
3. Rats.
4. Flies.

P.S. No eggs yet.

Food is about farmer’s markets and a floppy hat to keep the sun off my face and hybrid cars and the chickens roosting on my back steps. It’s understanding some chemistry, and being able to manipulate a recipe so it comes out how I think it ought to – it’s making six batches, if that’s what it takes, to get it right. According to me, food has everything to do with politics and environmentalism and ethics. I use food for calories, for pleasure, for stress-relief, and, occasionally, for triggering emotional breakdowns.

According to me, food is about preserving biodiversity. It’s about affection and passion and communication. I can’t tell you what I was wearing when something significant happened, but I can tell you what I ate that day. Maybe I am obsessed – it certainly does appear that my life moves around this central theme. But I assure you, it is not so tragic as that. Food is self-care; food is compost.

I fantasize about self-sufficiency, about being more in command of my food supply. I make my own jam and haven’t eaten the store-bought stuff in more than a year. I’m into preservation, storage, and utilization. Dan – er, The Squeeze – bought me a chest freezer for summer berries and raw pizza dough and trout and anything else we can figure out how to make a lot of and keep in suspended animation. I am learning how to make wine; soon we will do beer, too. One evening last summer, we sat on the porch, eating a salad (for we are very in to salads), and he said to me, “Wouldn’t it be great to sit here next year and eat a salad full of things that we grew ourselves?” Everything about that question lit me up. So this year we have a garden – three gorgeous raised beds filled with dark, loamy dirt. I’ve stuck seeds and starts in all of the places I think a plant has a prayer of growing. There are strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, figs, pomegranate, nasturtium, basil, cilantro, thyme, lavender, sage, rosemary, parsley, mint, sweet corn, sugar peas, lettuces, carrots, one surprise radish, bush beans, onions, garlic, tomatoes, watermelon, kabocha, pumpkin, zucchini, tomatillo, artichoke, hot peppers, and sweet peppers.

Did I go overboard? Absolutely. Does it make me feel a little drunk just looking at them? Goodness, does it ever. I grew up in Salinas, California, the daughter of farmers. I didn’t pay much attention until years after I moved away. Now my grandmother says that it’s something that’s in me, this need to sink my fingers in the dirt.

In March, Dan built a coop and we put three chicks in it. Now they are pullets, young adult hens that look awfully mature, but who have not yet begun laying eggs. I believe I can say with some degree of certainty that they are all indeed hens, and that I won’t have to learn how to kill a rooster. The chickens began as a way for me to look like an eccentric neighborhood kook, but soon they became part of the system around here:
        We buy and grow food, but we don’t consume all of it. The humans are not 100% efficient. The chickens, in turn, eat our weeds and our table scraps. Their feet scratch at the soil; their poops enrich it. When they are older and begin to lay eggs, I’ll bake with them, give them away to friends, and make Dan eat omelets for breakfast five mornings a week. We’ll put the egg shells into our compost bin. Next season, we’ll spread the compost in the garden.

Would it surprise you if I said that the laundry line strung between the backyard fence and my eighty-year-old walnut tree has to do with food, too? It shouldn’t. When it is warm, I can save electricity on drying clothes and use it for the food dehydrator, or to offset the extra fuel the stove uses during the midsummer frenzy of jam-making. Plus, the chickens look particularly picturesque walking around under flapping sheets and pillowcases.

I’ve got some strong feelings about how I think commercially-produced food should happen. If, after reading this, you have lingering curiosities about the nature and scope of these feelings, send me an e-mail or pick up a copy of Peter Singer’s The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. Or both. As a liberal arts sort of gal, I’ve taken more than my share of environmental science courses, and anyway it doesn’t take that big of a geek to see that our farming practices are unsustainable and dangerous. If I were in charge, we’d all have time – and space – to grow our own food. Many of us are already sure that we cannot responsibly do otherwise.

So, here is my confession: I’m sort of an urban hippy-type.

And here’s another one: I break my little rules every day.

According to Dr. Weber, my very first Philosophy professor at Monterey Peninsula College and the dude responsible for settling me on this ethics kick, the most powerful objection leveled against John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism is that – get this – it’s too demanding.

But the objection isn’t about laziness. This construction of Utilitarianism calls for behavior that always maximizes The Good. The Good can be defined in any number of ways, but let’s just say for now that The Good is Zero Environmental Harm. We may do things that cause Some Environmental Harm, but we must always keep in mind our moral duty to cause Zero Environmental Harm and do everything we are able to get as close to living a harm-free life as we can – that’s the rule.

Imagine you need to get to work. You certainly can’t drive your car alone. You could carpool, but the bus is a better choice – and the MAX train, better still. Preferable to motorized transport, you could ride your bicycle, but biking generates more waste heat than walking does. It’s awfully efficient though.

So maybe you choose to walk to work. Now let’s think about which shoes you should wear : what materials they are made from, how far away they were produced, what they’ll do to any plant life you should happen to step on as you walk.

It might be better to stay home and telecommute – but what environmental impact does your personal computer have? It’s made from all sorts of hazardous stuff. And in your home office space, are the light bulbs compact florescent, or incandescent? Do you pay a little extra for electricity generated by wind or water? Does your employer? It gets worse, this Utilitarianism-business. It is crazy-making to constantly think of the ways you can do better, because you can always do better. I can, anyway.

I take my responsibilities as a consumer, a cook, and an eater very seriously. The things I do these days in the name of our little blue planet would have seemed very unlikely to me as recently as four years ago. I arrived here incrementally; but here I am, saving chicken shit, walking miles to school, collecting old CDs until the pile is big enough to justify a trip to the recycling center. I’ve tried to think of something that I do that’s outlandish and I can’t. Collecting gray water is normal. Washing out plastic bags for infinite reuse just makes sense.

Back to my confession: As much as I am tryin’ to live and eat in ways that feel right to me, I fall short. Often. Some days, Panda Express just pushes my buttons, and I am pretty sure that everything they sell came off of a Sysco truck. Conventional (read: factory farmed) eggs are a lot less expensive than the eggs from hens fed organic meal and allowed, supposedly, to roam free and cluck in the sunshine. There’s an economic premium to this lifestyle, and times can get rough. I’m not often motivated to drive even twenty minutes out of my way to get the Draper Valley organic chicken meat. I should, though. Actually, I should ride my bike out to get the Draper Valley stuff. Or, I should give up eating meat altogether. See how it can get out of hand quickly?

If this ethical eating business is such a huge and important part of my life, then why do I still shop in places I know I ought to avoid? Why do I ever use my car? Why can’t I resist the mangoes from South America? Well, all I have in answer is that I’m doing my best, and my best isn’t perfect. We all hide twinkies – in some form or another – in our desk drawers. As much as I’d love to believe that I can save the world, I know that I am just one girl: one girl who loves mangoes and, occasionally, greasy steam-table chow mein. I won’t feel guilty about my food. My food doesn’t deserve that.

According to me, food is about more than what’s for dinner. According to me, food is about craft and about dirt and about making choices true to oneself and to the rest of the planet. Food is about honesty, and about love. It’s about acknowledging that butter makes it taste better, but not going crazy with the saturated fats.

According to me food isn’t worth much if it doesn’t feel good, if it can’t keep you alive and healthy, if you can’t share it with friends. Food, you see, will soak up all the meaning and the heft you want to give it. And if you don’t want it to mean anything, then just eat it already –– Bon appétit.

My reaction to her story then was very similar to what I’ve been hearing lately from other people – Chickens? In the city? It was my understanding that barnyard fowl, whether Chicken Little or Robot Chicken, belonged a bit further away from the CBD, for all our sakes. But no, I overheard her saying later, it is indeed quite legal to keep chickens in the city and yes, the eggs are fantastically delicious.

Fast forward through our final exam, a very unpleasant August heat wave, and a couple of years where a bunch of totally unrelated things happened — I’ve just brought home three chicks. They’ll live in the garage until they’re older and heartier, then they’ll have the range of our backyard. The Squeeze was generous enough to build a coop for them, which we’ve named “Our Lady of the Circular Causality Dilemma.” Two of our residents are proper Sisters – Sister Jezebel Turgenev (she doesn’t give a cluck) and Sister We Don’t Yet Know Her Name. The third is a cultural refugee, just looking to escape the grind and retire in peace: The Edge. We picked them up at Livingscape Nursery, along with all of their gear: feeders, food, heat lamp. The folks at Livingscape were quite helpful and friendly.

The chicks are probably gallinas. The process of determining the sex of newly hatched chicks is, I have read, imperfect; and the folks at the nursery said that we can be around 90 percent sure that ours will grow up to be hens. If there is a gallo in our coop, he’ll be awfully gender-confused by time we know for sure, what with being treated just like one of the girls for so many weeks. We’ve already had some talks about surprise-rooster contingency plans, and while I don’t know if I could kill a chicken, I am quite sure that I could eat one, even one that’s currently peeping away downstairs. If we do have to deal with it, however, you can bet there will be a “free rooster to loving home” ad posted on Craigslist before I set out to sharpen the hatchet.

For most of my family and friends, the arrival of these chickens to my little home has cemented my reputation as an eccentric person, perhaps even a naive one. Before there was any real action, when I was just talkin’ chicken, they tried to warn me: chickens are stinky; chickens will attract rats and gophers and wildebeests. Chickens are noisy; chickens don’t cuddle. I know that chickens don’t cuddle (which, I’ll admit, is usually one of the first things I think about when considering new pets), but they do four other things which I find very exciting. One: Chickens eat food scraps. Right now, some of my food waste goes down the garbage disposal and some into the very slow-moving compost pile. In addition to their normal feed and scratch, chickens eat all manner of household compostables, thus eliminating my need for the frequent garbage disposal-ing and diverting scraps from the compost heap. Then, chickens do the second thing that I am interested in: they poop. Chicken guano is great fertilizer for the garden and I will have an inexpensive and consistent supply of it. Third, chickens eat bugs, and while they are eating bugs they also scratch around aerate the soil – two more good things for my garden. Finally, chickens lay eggs. Though I am not an egg-in-the-morning kind of a person, I am a bake-lots-of-cookies person and also a give-eggs-away-to-friends person, both of which I am eager to do with their very fresh, drug-free eggs.

On the day we got the chicks, I was very tempted to try to cuddle them. They were so tiny and so fluffy and so cute. I’m over that now, though. Mostly, I am eager for them to grow up, move the heck out of my garage, and start pooping in the yard. These Sisters and The Edge, I think of them mostly as employees, though I know that sounds strange. Of course I want them to be comfortable, well-fed, and emotionally secure, but they are still chickens and, well, folks spoke the truth when they tried to warn me: chickens are stinky.