Smoked Chicken: Easy, Affordable and Delicious!

My husband is an excellent smoker. Of meat that is. He's never been a "smoker" like the kind outlawed in Michigan's public places. But when he fires up the grill and smokes a few whole chickens, it tastes good enough to probably be outlawed.
You can pick up a fresh, whole young chicken from the store for about $4. They turn out so well and make such excellent leftovers in everything from quesadillas to salads, we usually pick up a few at a time and share one with the neighbors, too.

After you rinse the chicken and remove the giblets (if any), pat it dry with a paper towel. Use an apple and/or onion (we use both) each cut in half to fit, as an aromatic in the chicken cavity. Salt and pepper the skin. Put in the smoker at about 300-degrees for 1-3 hours, until internal temp reaches 180-degrees. We use apple wood chunks from a local orchard to smoke them with. It's mouthwatering meat that melts off the bone every time. Yum!

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Well, for our house, it was definitely the chickens. We've had our chickens for over three months now, and we just this week got our first eggs laid! Needless to say it was an exciting event over here.
Since we have Bantams, the eggs they lay are quite a bit smaller than regular size chickens, (2 bantams equal approximately 1 regular) which has also made for further science experiments as we measure, compare and contrast our fresh Bantam eggs with store-bought regular eggs.


In honor of our first eggs, we've done some fun chicken activities this week.

Grandma brought over the first two eggs! We got a total of 5 this week (and found out we have a lot more roosters than we thought- uh-oh!)


Borrowed chicken puppets from the library and just-for-fun books like "Henny Penny" and "Big Chickens Go to Town" (such a fun read, especially with the puppets!)



Here are some fun sites we used, Chicken and Hen Theme, also The Little Ren Hen is awesome on the Starfall site, and gave the kids some interactive phonics reading time on the computer.
Worksheets for the kids, my kindergartner reviewed "Ch" and my toddler had fun with Humpty Dumpty activities.



The most fun by far, was the egg experiments we did!! Along with measuring the differences between Bantam eggs and "regular" eggs, we also did a really great density experiment where we sank an egg in plain water, and added salt to the same amount of water to make the egg float! We did predictions for water and water & salt for both kinds of eggs and then tested our hypothesis for each. It was so much fun! We also examined the eggs with a magni-scope to see if we could see the pores on the shells. It was great.








Here are the two sites I used to guide us along for this: Egg Fun and Egg Magic.

And here are a few more pictures, of our coop and our chickens shortly after we got them.





After our egg experiments, my daugther wanted to continue exploring what foods she could float in water, starting with an orange and an apple, lol. Don't forget the lessons don't have to end when the pages do!


For more related adventures we've had in the last few months, see my Where Things Come From post.