Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for May 21, 2024

Got to love life on a farm.

Coq au Vin is NOT a simple dish, at least for most of us.

Man, That kinda drives the meaning home. Probably a good thing it wasn’t a burger.

In Britain there’s a very tasty beer, a bitter, called Old Speckled Hen. This won’t put me off drinking it.

Looks like Janis became too attached to their chickens when Meg put her in charge of taking care of them.

Time to go home.

I love to watch the calves at play on my hubbys farm but I know not to get too attached as one day they will be food on someones plate. Glad its not my plate.

I know it’s a technical thing, but coq au vin is made from a rooster. If you use a hen, then (to a French cooking purist) you have made a (possibly delicious) different dish.

Eleanor would have been better extra crispy.

I’m more coq avec vin.

We don’t cull our hens. I and every other retired person wouldn’t be here if you offed a creature because they were no longer economically producing.

No LIKE

Meg is going to be a hen magnate.

Can’t beat fresh meat :)

That’s taking ‘earn your keep’ to a new level.

Not into pearl onions, but I may try using Egyptian Walking Onions. Not quite as invasive as mint.

I’m not sure I need my supper’s back story.

NEVER name your food.

My wife serves tomatoes from her garden. I don’t know how she can be so heartless.

Coq au Vin can be complicated to make.

As usual, kids should be seen and not heard……

I’m not going to eat anything my kids have named. Or that I have to kill myself.

I am a lifelong city dweller (St. Louis/Chicago) and we have friends in New Orleans. A few years ago we visited them and went to a crawfish boil, a first for me. I was about to eat one when our friend [who had grown up on a farm] said, “How do you like your bugs?” I never found out, because I was put off by his example of Too Much Information. Same thing for food with names.

I could probably make it as long as the recipe isn’t in French

Carnivores get a different take on food when it has a name.

One of the most poignant observations the Scots author R. L. Stevenson ever made was that we are not more horrified by cannibals than Buddhists and other vegetarians are horrified by us. For we, too, eat babies, though not our own.

Nice, dinner and a guilt trip.

And… Bon appetite.

There’s a grandkid? Do they have a treehouse and a playhouse, and one friend vacating the treehouse for the playhouse so another friend can move into the treehouse?

When we visited my sister on the dairy farm they owned, her children would always tell us the names of whichever cow we were dining on the day.

They ate Eleanor?? And just because she wasn’t productive anymore. Good thing that doesn’t apply to people.

Guess, if you don’t lay, you pay.

Chicken with wine? Does the chicken drink it or do the diners?

My cousin’s husband always asked if we were eating anybody we knew.

A woman I worked with years ago kept chickens, and named them…after people who annoyed her at work. After a particularly bad day with the boss, she remarked “I feel like having roast chicken for dinner.” Half of her flock must have been named for the boss. I asked her if she had one named after me, and she replied with her best psycho smile and creepy sweet voice, “Of course not…you’re my buddy.” For a moment I knew how a Hitchcock or Stephen King character must feel…

I hope no chickens suffered because of my transgressions…

PERFORM OR DIE!!

Wine will do that to chicks.

Do not name the food.

Go VEG!