Fabulous Showgirls

Yes, this is still an urban homesteading blog, and yes, sometimes it's about fabulous showgirls.

As you might have noticed in previous articles, I have an affinity for the Showgirl bantam breed of chickens. A conglomeration of part Turken and Silkie genes bestows a look that makes them seem at home in a Lady Ga-Ga video.

They are also equally at home in a backyard, mine in particular. I love my Showgirls:  Idgie, Gudris and Dauphin. They are curiously fabulous.

So is my taste in friends lately. This farm girl has found herself a kindred spirit, both as a new addition to the BBC and a personal comrade. Kristi is like a big ball of fabulous energy, and a lot of it. Together we have hatched some grand ideas (sorry for the terrible pun) and now stand at the precipice of taking flight with a beautifully feathered new adventure (somebody stop me!).

I try to hide my dorkish tendency to gush when I attempt to describe, with enough fervency, just how I feel about Showgirls. I don't think I did a good job with Kristi, as I began to describe their attributes as a small, docile, cold-hearty bird that also lays a high amount of eggs. Equally as cool is their Las Vegas-ready looks.  I heard Sigfried and Roy considered the birds as a main attraction in their show before they fatefully decided on the whole white tiger thing.

The very of nature of a Showgirl hen is to be the perfect urban chicken. They do well in smaller spaces and their bantam small size allow for more than one hen. What's not bantam is the quantity of eggs: high in Omega-3's with usually blazing orange yolks. They usually produce about 5-6 eggs a week.


Thus, with these facts perched squarely in my brain (he, he), Kristi and I have begun incubating a new flock of bantam Showgirls. While it will be many months before our new gaggle (damn, that's geese, right?) are able to provide us with eggs, we don't plan on eating them. We plan on hatching them and someday making these fabulous birds available to the local public.

36 show quality eggs.

In part, this decision has to do with the inordinate amount of trouble I had acquiring my Showgirls. I had to call in a favor to a Showgirl breeder, and go broody on a three month waiting list in order to be able to finally get some straight run birds.
Both Kristi and me are all about urban homesteading, self-sustainability and being fabulous. Not necessarily in that order. But we are both committed to finding better ways to live in this quickly changing world that sometimes offers little stability.
I put forth that keeping chickens is one of the most agrarian cost effective ways to start on the path to a more sustainable lifestyle.

Going Local has now become important for different reasons that are important for the Urban Farm and Backyard Chicken's movement. (More on that to come in future posts.)

I simply believe that Nature contains both the ability to be utilitarian, agrarian, and utterly fabulous all at the same time. Or so the fabulous birds in my backyard coop tell me.

So, when they're ready, who wants a Showgirl?   

Meditations on a wheat grinder

A rare weekend morning I awoke to a silent house. Everything in the day screamed,  "This is Yard Sale season!" A quick perusal of Craigslist and I found a yard sale within a mile. I grabbed my bag and was out the door. As most readers probably have experience with, yard-sailing can yield either wonderful treasures or more junk for my husband to cringe at and call me adorable. As the late, great George Carlin riffed, "You ever notice how your stuff is your stuff, but everyone else's stuff is s---?!" You take your chances.

Purchases made by women (specifically this woman) don't always make city sense or even, at times, country sense. But in my head it makes common sense. One of my favorite activities is making bread, specifically challah bread. My recipe calls for large amounts of eggs and flour...so, it made perfectly "countryfied", romantic sense to grind my own flour in a beautiful, almost new, flour grinder. Just like Grandma had!
Literally. This particularly sleek model was made in the 1960's, and weighs a shoulder aching twenty-five plus pounds. I picked it up for about twenty bucks and was sure I would later be channeling the spirits of both my abuela and Caroline Ingalls to my kitchen.

This is what I call my Farm Wife High. Feelings of euphoria over feeding my Urban Homesteading obsession. One of the best places for a good bargain/farm wife high is a vintage sale. Anyone else felt that? I thought so...

Setting up grinder was fairly self explanatory. Secure base to table. Insert grains. Grind grains. Live happily and sustainably ever after.

I needed a little help securing the base.. I used the Nixon Family Paper doll book from our library because realistically no one will ever play with it and it deserves little respect. (Whoa, 40 year old political reference...Zap!)


Trying to be graceful and mindful, I finished the setup of the grinder. The little one helped by carefully dropping a small handful of wheat berries into the marble bowl.
 They dropped down into the milling area  and told him what a good job he had done.



Again, gracefully, I positioned the arm to turn it clockwise- per the 1960's, hand-drawn instructions.  Pushing gently I tried to start a good strong turn. Turns out I was not strong enough so I emptied out the hopper area and started over with less grains...like five grains. That seemed to work but only grudgingly. At this pace it took me 45 sweaty minutes to turn out about a quarter cup of gritty wheat berry flour.


I think it's important to say at this point that my level of respect for former and current farm-wives, as well as the magic of electricity seemed like an overwhelming gift. Suddenly that wet basket of laundry waiting for the clothesline seemed like a mini vacation. Arduous would be an understatement.

Since I've embarked on this journey of urban farming and self-sustainability my respect for such humble things as homestead chores such as hanging clean laundry on a line, cleaning the coop, and even clipping the occasional flighty-winged chicken have a renewed sense of nobility. I said nobility...not romance. That novelty wore off long ago, and rightly so.

So now my grinder will hold a place of honor in my thoughts. Revealing a lesson about appreciating the mundane zen  in care taking for an urban homestead. And the lesser know lesson that my farm wife euphoria is no match for a bulky stone wheat grinder sitting in it's box in the closet.