Dinner - or our adventures with a 16$ chicken.

At our little Tuesday farmstand there are two local farms that have meat. One is lamb, poultry and beef, the other is just chicken. I have always wanted to try one of these - organic, free range, yard bird sort of chickens, so this last market, I just bought one.

On sale for four bucks a pound! He or she was a little over four pounds but he just charged me the 16 bucks. It was frozen - I think they may have to be, because the only ones I have ever seen were.... but I really have no idea

 Looked and felt very different from your normal Wegmans fryer - odd thing to say about a dead chicken, but it looked much healthier - skin looked uniform.  And it was very heavy for its size - a solid muscular chicken! Was not as clean on the inside, but that is to be expected. I spatchcocked the bird and marinated it in olive oil, lemon, garlic and thyme, all day long.

 Our good pal Jeffery came over for a bit, they are sadly moving away on Tuesday, and be brought us over a few things they didn't want to move, including some grass fed free range ground beef from his family's farm - It was a surprise theme day!  Had a few beers and chatted , was nice being outside.

 later on that evening, Koda and I grilled 

 I got the grill really hot and the plunked the bird skin side down on the hot rack right above the fire, to get some color on the " front " , then moved it to the higher rack and turned the heat down a bit... and just let it cook. I did do some basting with a lemon thyme mix i made up.

 Tossed on some not local corn about half way through. And I do this the way lazy mans way when I dont do the full Martha treatment. Just trim off about the top inch of the ear, only to remove the little silks which will burn easily, but you dont even really need to do that, and just onto the grill - none of this soaking businesses - they get nice and charred on the outside and lovely and sweet/tender inside.

 so

organic, free range yard bird chicken

w thyme and lemon

Summer Corn 

w/ loads of butter

Little Salad

Very different little beasty that you are accustomed to eating that is for sure. If you had only had this your whole life and were giving a nice plump Wegmans roasting chicken, you would have no idea it was the same animal. The flavor was nice - it tasted like chicken ( I'm guessing ) not like the herbs and flavorings that you must use on a modern factory chicken. The texture is much more dense - hard to describe - nothing in the least mushy about it.

Would I do it again - probably not. I like what I get from the store, but happy that I gave it a shot. We are going to try the lamb at some point and will get back to you on that.

ALSO! in keeping with our theme, some more of those perfect freshly picked strawberries!

with angle food cake and yogurt