Cooking old chickens seems to be a nearly lost art --- or at least, the people who know how to cook old chickens don't use the internet.  We roasted the young chicken we killed last month, with great success, but old chickens are too tough to roast.

Last time we had an old chicken, we stewed it, which was tasty but stringy.  (I also didn't take out the carcass before the connective tissue deteriorated, so we had to pick out tiny bits of spine, which didn't seem very safe.)

This time, I vowed to do better --- and I did!  I remembered that sausages are the old-fashioned way to use up old meat and scraps, so I decided to turn our mean old rooster into potstickers (which are basically sausage inside pasta.)

First, I cut the meat off the bones (which were destined to be turned into stock), then whirred the meat in the food processor until it had the consistency of hamburger meat.  I had to pick out a few bits of connective tissue, but then moved on to my usual potsticker recipe. 

The result?  Mark and I deemed it delicious!  The meat had a few chewy bits, unlike the store-bought ground chicken and more like bratwurst, but none was tough and all was delicious.  Turning old chickens into sausage seems to be a winning proposition!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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