Tastes Like Chicken?

This is our little Pink Lady apple tree in our front yard! It's been there for two years now, and for the first time, has real, credible, edible apples on it!

But this is no ordinary Pink Lady apple tree... It's FORTIFIED!!

Allow me to explain...

In Spring 2006, we got four baby chicks, because they're cute, and because the make eggs way fresher and tastier than anything you can get at the store. We had a much easier time naming them than we are having coming up with a name for NewBabyGirl who is coming in a few weeks... In fact, we were rather proud of the names we had come up with!

Two of them were named after chickens in the movie "Chicken Run", Babs & Ginger. One was named Marzipan, after the character on HomestarRunner.com. And for the 4th one, we got REALLY creative!! The first pet we ever got was a kitty, who we appropriately named Kitty. So naturally, if we had a cat named Kitty, we HAD to have a chicken named Chicken. So we did.

The chicks grew quickly, and before we knew it, they began to look like chickens. Chicken herself was leading the way developmentally, and was showing signs that she would soon start laying eggs. Then one August morning at about 4:00, my peaceful summer slumber was shattered by the most horrible sound I'd ever heard. It woke me up from a deep sleep the first time it went off, and I laid there wondering what it had been. Before I'd come up with any good answers, it went off again. It wasn't cats fighting, but it was definitely not human. After the third time, I heard a quiet "cluck" after the screechy noise, and immediately knew that something had gotten into the hen house.

Normally we lock the henhouse up every night to prevent such intrusions. But I'd gotten home late that night and forgot to check... So naturally that was also the night that a raccoon came prowling through our yard on the hunt for food. And it felt like Chicken Tonight. As soon as I heard that telltale cluck, I threw some clothes on and ran outside, with Cindy close behind, armed with a flashlight. It didn't take long to find our poor, now dead Chicken... And it was Chicken who had been grabbed. At first we weren't sure what had gotten her, but then a rustling in the bushes led us to a raccoon who was waiting (impatiently) for us to leave so it could take its kill off and eat it. I had other ideas... I told Cindy to shine the light right in its eyes, and just as I'd hoped, the 'coon froze, balanced on top of our fence. I looked around for something substantial to throw at it. I found a brick, wound up, and clocked it right on the side of its head, spinning it around and off the fence. Immediately, Kitty took off after it, and they disappeared into the night. We hears occasional fighting noises, but didn't see anything else from either of them for a while. About 15 minutes later, after we had fortified the chicken coop to where nothing could get in OR out, Kitty came prancing back into our yard, as if to proudly inform us that the raccoon had been dispatched to the demon portal from which it had come.

Oh yeah, one other thing. When we bought our house, there was a big, old apple tree in the front yard. About a week before the great Chicken massacre, one of our daycare kids had been running across the yard, and in a brilliant episode of slapstick humor, completely clothesline'd herself into one of the branches on the apple tree. She was okay, once she caught her breath again. But a couple days later, the tree just fell over. Roots came up out of the ground and everything.

Soooooo... here we are with a gaping hole in our front yard, and a dead Chicken. Cindy actually wanted to have Chicken cremated, but I wasn't having that... I pointed out that we would likely eat chicken for dinner that night, so no way was I paying to have a dead chicken - pet or not - cremated. Instead, we decided to bury her deep in the gaping hole in the front yard, and plant a new apple tree on top of her.

I had visions of plucking the first apple from the tree, taking a big bite, and saying in a very Timon way, "Tastes like Chicken!"

This week, I decided it HAD to be time to pick an apple from the tree... I picked the largest one and washed it off. Kaylee wanted to try it too, so we had an apple biting ceremony... And it tasted like...

...an apple... Seriously. No subtle chicken overtones, just apple. It wasn't even all the way ripe! In reality, I'm GLAD it didn't taste like Chicken... That would have impacted me in such a way that I wouldn't want to eat apples again for a VERY long time.

Now that the mystery of whether or not it would taste like Chicken has been solved, I'm hoping that next year it actually produces more than three apples... Like our egg-laying hens, I'd love to have apples that I don't need to buy from an outside source!