How to make chicken soup

First, live in a town with a no rooster ordinance.  Second, buy sexed chickens from the feed store.  Third, realize that someone messed up and you have a rooster.  Fourth, have  your husband, who is home on vacation for a week and sick with a severe lung infection, get woken up for the third day at 5:30 a.m. by a stupid rooster that can't keep it's beak shut.  You all knew this day was coming.  I warned far in advance.  Well, today was the day.  Jay had had enough of the 5:30 a.m. wake up calls.  I'm pretty sure most of my neighbors have too, but have been too nice to say anything....yet.  I was waiting for this rooster to get big enough to eat, and Jay determined that today he was big enough to eat.  So, at 5:30 this morning.  I was running around the chicken pen trying to catch an anxious rooster who seemed to be able to tell that something was up.  In the slide show attached to this blog, there will be no pictures of that particular scene.  It's bad enough that I am in hair curlers and sweatpants, which are now splattered with blood.  The sweat pants, not the curlers, it wasn't that messy.  So, here goes the tale.  I caught Mr. Loud Beak and stuffed him in a large dog crate.  Jay and I then set to discussing how to do the deed.  At first, he had planned to just take his .22 out and pop him off, but then decided that might be traumatic to the neighborhood not to mention that discharging a weapon in city limits is quite illegal.  So, then we decided to take him to the foothills and pop him off.  But, that seemed like an awful lot of work.  I just knew there had to be an easier way to get him from dog crate to pot.  As I've always said, you can find anything on Google. So I googled, "how to kill a chicken" and found a really fun and lively little blog that described the best way to kill, pluck, and clean a chicken.  Now, mind you, I have performed this task before, but it was probably 20 years ago and my memory is not that long.  So, I read the blog and it instilled great courage in me.  (all you people who think your blogs don't matter....guess again)  I looked at Jay and stated that I was going to do this and he was going to document it.  And then, as if the Shaw's aren't weird enough, at 6:00 a.m. I set up my "work" table in the backyard.  Assembled my tools of mass chicken destruction.  I donned my favorite apron and sweatpants (which will now need a good washing in chlorine bleach), put on my farmer hat, (to cover my curlers....because cutting off a chicken's head and gutting it in my backyard while showing my hair curlers would certainly not be socially acceptable), and was ready to go.  I woke my sister and told her I was going to kill the rooster, did she want to watch.  After all, he has woken her up every morning since she's been here too.  Her response was an overwhelming, "NO! I most certainly do not want to watch!"  Hmmm, okay then.  So, out to the back yard where I snatched Mr. Loud Beak from the large dog kennel in the barn.  I held him upside down by his feet, because according to the blog I read, this makes him docile.  Hmmm, not so much. He squawked pretty loud.  I then employed the Amish method of chicken termination which entails placing the chicken's neck under a broom handle, standing on the handle with one foot on either side of his head and then yanking him quickly by his feet until his head is removed.  This method worked well, it was simple and kept the blood splatter to a minimum.  With the vocal chords now separated from the body I heard the entire neighborhood breath a collective sigh of relief.  Now I bungeed his feet together and hung him upside down from my table to let him bleed out while I cooked link sausage, raisin toast, and fried eggs for Jay's breakfast.  (Yes, I did wash my hands first).  At the same time, I set a large pot to boil on the stove.  After breakfast I carried my large pot of near boiling water to my work table and carefully dipped Mr. Rooster in and out of the hot water.  I was pleasantly surprised at how easily his feathers came right out and in just minutes he was plucked clean.  Then with a few swift cuts of my filet knife I opened him up, removed the gooey inedible parts, separated out the heart, gizzard and livers (because they are my favorite), cut him up into parts, scrubbed him clean and vacuum sealed him for the freezer.  Wham, bam....ya, you get it.  It's too hot today for that chicken soup, but the day will come when I will stew him up, throw in some of my homemade noodles with carrots and onions from my little garden and sit with satisfaction knowing that I am truly eating by the sweat of my own brow.

Slide show below.  Disclaimer....it's 6 a.m, I'm in my backyard, my neighbors have seen worse, and.....since when does Calamity Jane care what people think.