Sunday, September 6, 2009

Chicks!!!

My chicken, Ophelia, is supposed to be a good layer...a chicken who has been highly bred for egg production and therefore has little maternal instinct and rarely becomes broody. Yeah, right...she has become broody TWICE in one year! The first time was this spring, and Theresa and I decided that the next time it happened, we would get her a chick and let her raise it.

So...today we got two new chicks at the Urban Farm Store! We tried to get just one, but she started making such pathetic lonely sounds that we had to get a second one. We chose a Delaware and a buff Brahma. The Brahma is going to be enormous, I'm a little scared. Well, if she lives long enough. It is possible that tomorrow morning our little babies will be pecked to death or suffocated, although I am hoping for a better outcome!

We slipped the chicks under Ophelia tonight while she was half asleep, and a little while later they seemed to be alive and happily peeping under there, and we are hoping that tomorrow morning when Ophelia wakes up she will believe that these chicks are her very own little darlings. If this works, she will do all the work of raising them, including keeping them warm and making sure they are safe and well fed.

And by the way, the food at Biwa was very good last night. Really nice presentation and most of the dishes were great. Surprise fantastic item: kimchi kara-age...battered and deep fried pieces of radish and napa cabbage kimchi! They were highly reminiscent of spicy fried calamari, which is one of my favorite forbidden foods. The udon though...not so good. Noodles were obviously handmade, but tough and not supple, without much flavor, and the broth was flavorless too! The bowl of noodles was pretty, with grated radish on top and hot pepper flakes on the side, just like you'd want it, but it just didn't taste like anything. The ramen was much better. And the tsukemono plate was beautiful. Lots of kinds of pickled vegetables--carrot, paper-thin radish slices, tiny radish cubes with red shiso, eggplant, lotus root, takuwan, and one big juicy umeboshi.

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