Parrot Nation

Well, I told you I’d be calling this the “Chop Blog” if the hits and questions kept coming! I asked some of my Readers if they would be so kind to send me some of their photos and thoughts on their version of “Chop”, as well as how it’s going over for their birds. In the meantime, while they are responding, I’ll show you the last batch I made. I made a big batch of “Chop” on June ninth, and I still have about 18 meals left. I took some photos while I was making it:

This is a brown and wild rice mixture being cooked.

Choppin’Broccoli, I mean Collard Greens! I used the entire bag.

Some of the stuff I used in my chop this time around. It includes all the frozen vegetables you see, as well as cooked lentils, dry oatmeal, fresh radishes, quinoa, walnuts and dried apricots. There’s more stuff in there as well.

This is peeking into my big-ass stock pot as I am adding ingredients. You can see the fresh chopped collards, frozen chopped kale and broccoli, and diced green pepper, some frozen black eyed peas, hemp seed, rape seed, Flax seed, ground-up fresh carrots and sweet potato, walnuts, oatmeal and coconut. There’s other stuff in there, but I can’t remember what went into the pot at that stage.

Here I’ve added more frozen vegetables and frozen cranberries

I threw the dried “Higgins Snack Attack,” leafy herbs, twigs, weeds and leaves, (just kidding!) in.

The cooked and drained, hot quinoa, rice and spelt just got thrown in. As I was mixing it, it started steaming up because it was hitting the frozen vegetables.

Cooked lentils, broccoli slaw, chopped celery and radishes, and I think that black junk in the corner at two o’clock is the chopped up seaweed.

After mixing it all up, Parker is observing the “Bagging Festivities”. Making it was about an hour. I think it took me closer to two hours to bag it up. And as you can see he wasn’t beyond sampling a bit. Actually it was more like wolfing down a whole lot!

And here are 108 bags suitable for framing or freezing! There probably would have been more to freeze but the piglets were at it like the hogs they are. I loved it, because they were tails up and in their bowls forever. I used the half-bag, snack-sized zip-locs this time. And I’ve been washing them out to reuse. Each of those bags is one meal for three birds. So I use two of those bags a day, along with their other foods that they eat: sprouts, nuts and cooked beans. Off the hook for 54 days!

And here is the result: 108 bags of chop packed up in freezer bags. I can get about twenty meals in each freezer bag. There you have it. A step-by step story board on making chop.

All this free time! Gee, I wonder what I’m going to do with it…

I know! How about a quick trip to a French Grocery Store?