Fresh Free Range Chicken- Fisher Hill Farm

So here I am after a long absence.

I feel like I just took a long slow breath to collect my thoughts. (maybe it's all the vitimn D I've been getting outside lately. ) But rather than tell you those thoughts, I'm going to tell you about something else.

Free Range Chicken.

This weekend, in an attempt to start substituting  the vegetable garden I didn't plant this year (save, potatoes, broccoli, cabbage and a host of various alliums and herbs) by consistantly going to the farmers market (Something we are hit and miss about when the garden is full) we headed out to the Webster Village farmer's market.

It turned out to be a poor excuse for any kind of market. It was terrible, interspersed right on main street in Webster.  The vendors were sparse, placed between cars parked on the street. There were TONS of signs for this thing, parking signs, market signs. There were more signs than vendors....One vendor told me there were not a lot of vendors because the farmers don't have that much food yet??? There was one woman with a compelling booth of handmade soaps and lotions but she had an overbearing customer who was bugging me so I couldn't stick around. We won't be back to that place.

This is a trip that could have certainly ended in disaster without the graceful pivot that my family was able to make. (I mention this only because this is NOT a skill any of us possess in large quantities.)

But pivot we did as I looked up the Pittsford farmer's market on my phone. We also decided to eat by the Canal in Pittsford because it was a gorgeous day.

Apparetly the farmers in Pittsford had more food avalible to them than the ones in Webster, because, while this was still a fairly small market, it had everything you'd need to eat well this week. We bought strawberries, lettuce, garlic scapes, some kind of strawberry juice for my girl, a large onion, free range eggs and A FREE RANGE CHICKEN from Fisher Hill Farm.

Not only was the chicken free-range, it was.... I don't know how to say this any other way..... butchered the day before. And never frozen. It was $4 a lb, which is a lot for chicken, but not as much as Wegmans charges for a free range bird.

I have a complicated relationship with Organic chicken. I look at those little tiny Organic chickens from Wegmans and it's hard for me to pay $15 for them. It really is. This chicken weighed in at a respectable 4lbs, which equaled $16. It was a larger chicken though, though not huge like a factory farmed roaster.

Today was chicken day! When I opened up the wrapper on this chicken was beautifully prepared, with nary a stray feather on it. It was free of any remnant of the butchering process if you know what I mean (though the neck was a little long for my asthetic taste.) It just seemed like it was really well handled.

I tossed it in the oven this afternoon using the BEST ROAST CHICKEN RECIPE EVER. And tonight we feasted on AMAZING CHICKEN LOVLINESS. Jeannine told me once that the chickens she had in Italy tasted different. Like real food. I bet they tasted like this chicken. I don't know if it was the fresh part of it, or the organic or the free range, but I'm betting it's a combination of all three.

This evening my husband was the one making stock out of it, I would have but he beat me to it. We're not wasting an ounce of that delicious (expensive) chicken!