Cauliflower, butter and dead baby chickens

We planted 15 cauliflower plants last spring and only five made it through the winter. By this February, we were sure the ones that survived were not going to even make a head of cauliflower.  They were just mammoth green foliage with no inklings of making fruit.  I was tempted to yank them out of the beds the first of March so I could get busy planting this year’s garden, but then it never stopped raining, and I just ignored them.  The slugs ate away at the lower leaves, but you could hardly notice as they just kept putting out more giant leaves.  At least they gave the appearance that something was happening in the garden.

Then, one morning in April, on the way to feed the chickens, I noticed something different.  A roundish-mass of leaves.  Almost holding my breath, I rummaged through the folds and found the tiniest little peak of white.  CAULIFLOWER!!!  Within a week, they all had formed snow-white heads.  But still, five heads of cauliflower seemed minuscule after waiting a whole year.  After the second week, though, we realized these were monster vegetables.  By the third week of head growth, we started harvesting them.

This morning, I cut out the last head and it must have weighed five pounds!

I made a giant pot of soup, vac-packed six family servings for the freezer and left some fresh for stir-fry tonight.  With the other four plants stored for this coming winter, we are set.  What a surprise! 

While I was making the pot of soup this morning, and whipping up some coconut custard, I decided to make butter. Why not?  We have more milk than a family of three, (two of which don’t drink milk,) could possibly need (unless we start bathing in it.)

I love butter.  I am sure I am the poster child for the AHA but I don’t fall for those fear tactics.  Nope.  I love butter too much to believe in all that hogwash.  This being my first attempt at making butter, I wasn’t really sure how much I could make from my four gallons of milk in the fridge, but the joy I felt about endless homemade butter spurred me on in my thorough mess-making of my kitchen.  After skimming off the thick cream from the jugs and adding a touch of sea salt, I set my food processor to whipping it up.  Within a very short time, the whipped cream began to separate and the butter-fat started clumping together like magic.  Beautiful butter magic.  Bright yellow like the flowers in our back field carrying the same name.  But, wait!  How could this be?  All that cream was just now a mere ¾ cup of butter?!.  How was I going to properly coat my toast, slather my veggies, and brown a heart-stopping blob for my pasta with this petite love?  It just seemed so little.  Daisy and I stuck our fingers in it and decided it was heavenly, and especially now that we knew it wasn’t flowing like Costco’s stock we usually filled our fridge with. 

After Daisy settled into an episode of Scooby Doo, I went out to check on the baby chickens.  I thought I’d find another couple of hatchlings as Mamma chicken was still sitting on a clutch of six eggs last night, even though her chicks had hatched two days ago. 

When I got to the coop, I saw all her chicks were out from under her and making their little tweets & chirps, but our hen had obviously abandoned the last eggs as they were cold to the touch and she was now nesting in a hole carved in the dirt. I moved the eggs out of the straw nesting box and decided to take them to the garbage can so the critters wouldn’t end up sniffing them out.  Just as I was about to put them in the garbage can, I began to wonder if the eggs I was going to toss were just unfertilized or if there was a half-developed chick in them. I stared at them for a bit.  Shook a couple.  Tried to see if any “felt” like they carried a chick inside.  Then I decided to crack one and find out.  I know - creepy.  Whew, just a runny yolk.  So, I cracked another, and another and they were just whites and yolks.  Interesting – those were just unfertilized eggs that sat there with the others for three weeks, getting all toasty and rotated but holding no potential for life.  Then the fourth one. The shell didn’t snap open when I hit it on the rock, like the others had.  It sort of just crushed in.  And then I saw it.  Little feathers, little feet, a little beak.  Curled up so tightly with its eyes closed.  Maybe a day away from hatching but now just cold and limp, and the size of a mouse.  I felt horrible, as if I was the one who solidifying its doom.  Maybe I should have stuck it under a heat lamp?   No, it was too late.  I decided to just put the last two in the garbage can as I knew they were too cold to survive, even with my help.  As I was getting ready to toss them in, I had another sense of morbid curiosity.  I wonder how many of the six eggs were going to be chickens and the hen had just given up too soon? So, I went back to the rock, cracked open number five.  Another chick.  This one still had a portion of yoke it was using to form the last of its chicken-ness and it looked like it had about two days left before it was fully developed.  Now I felt like one of the weird boys in biology that really got into dissecting the frogs.  There was one more egg to crack open and see if a lump of wet feathers was inside.  Nope - just a regular egg like the ones I crack and eat for breakfast.  1/3 dead baby chickens.  2/3 wasted scrambled eggs.  As I sat with a bunch of egg shells around me, I felt fragile and simultaneously gross over my investigation. 

I decided to shut that out, not sit any longer pondering the existentialism, and instead I went back to look at the nine baby chickens, fluffy and sweet and watched their Mamma cluck and peck and herd them around.