Salmonella occurs in about 1 out of every 25,000 eggs due to improper washing procedures at the plant. The chance of this happening to any of your veggies is 0, so long as you rinse them. If you don't clean your produce, well, you've got other things to worry about like the bacteria that naturally occur in soil, like staph, clostridium, and botulism. Now... having chickens eat your peppers and tomatoes is much more likely. Birds don't have as many taste buds as other mammals and won't care whose food it is. Yes, you can give chickens whole weeds. They'll break then apart with their beak. And again, yes, chickens will eat almost all table scraps and compost material including meat. I've found that my chickens won't eat onions or potato peels, so don't bother with those (or coffee grounds, since you bring up compost). Chickens instinctively know what may not be good for them. You can sprout any grain for them. But the ones with the most nutrition are Black oil sunflower seeds and barley. Google search 'growing fodder for chickens' for the details. Unfortunately I have no experience with feeds other than Nutrena and cannot help with your last question, sorry. Good luck with your chicken raising! :)

Fori, I very rarely have boil overs, but they're sure a lot easier to clean up on my induction cooktop. I do the same as you -- just quickly lift up the pot, wipe up the stuff on the cooktop, and wipe off the bottom of the pot -- and then back to cooking. Usually I can get it all done before the burner automatically turns itself off. It's so much easier than dealing with my old electric coils or my old gas burner grates. I also love the easy after-dinner cleanup -- just a spray of Windex on a paper towel and a quick swipe. If I'm particularly ambitious and feeling the need to impress someone, I may polish the top with a microfiber cloth. But usually I don't' bother.

I will only buy organic chicken livers anymore. I like to dredge them in a mix of flour and sesame seeds and either grace with some oil and put into the oven or fry in a bit of butter. Add in some onions somewhere Wanna' hear what I like that sounds gross? I will add in some full fat yogurt and make a sauce around them. Yougurt and liver? Gross worthy, on the mention, of course. You could use a sour cream if the thought of yougurt seems repulsive. The yogurt breaks out into a thinner sauce as it cooks just a bit. A friend introduced me to this many years ago and it has been a favorite of ours for a long time. We like it with brown rice. I know. It sounds highly suspect on the surface of being cringe worthy. Liver----you either love it or hate it, like cilantro. I love both of those things. Haven't bought other types of liver in many decades. But, chichken livers do get high marks at my table. I used to work at a medical facility a long time ago and the ladies back in the kitchen did some real old school cooking for the residents------- real, real old school!!! They made the best chicken fried liver! Not chicken liver----chicken fried liver. Darned that was good!

Lars, chickens aren't all that smart anyway. I keep telling the kids that's where "bird brain" came from, LOL. Like Artemis, how I cook chicken depends on the chicken. If I'm culling old laying hens they will either become stock or I'll grind them and make sausage. Younger (like a year or two) can do a couple of hours in the oven and become edible. If I raise birds specifically for meat, they are young and tender enough to withstand frying, less than a year old If I'm going to roast one, I'll either brine it overnight or I'll pre-salt it, but it's usually one of the "under a year" birds. My family prefers the brined chickens, but they aren't already treated to a saline solution like commercial chickens, that's their first bath in brine. I think an already treated commercial bird would be far too salty. All my chickens are raised outdoors, with access to fresh air, bugs, garden vegetables, seeds, etc. They are not technically "free range" because when I let them wander about they become dinner for the resident Bald Eagles, hawks, coyotes, raccoons, bobcats, feral cats and the neighbors' dogs. That's if they don't get hit by cars when wandering across the road. Now they have their very own fenced enclosure, with netting on the top to deter the barn owls. We made it big enough that they can all scratch, have their dust baths, and find both sun in the morning and shade from the hot afternoon sun. In return they give me a couple dozen eggs a day which I sell to the B&B and some really good chicken dinners. I do not find that "low and slow" benefits the young chickens, or the really old ones, only those "middle aged" chickens that are over a year old, but not old enough to be good only for stock or sausage. Nothing will make an old stewing hen anything except tough and stringy, and that includes the InstaPot and the CrockPot. The young chickens become overcooked and rubbery if cooked for lengthy periods of time. I can't tell you about grilling or smoking them because I don't do either of those things and Elery has decided that he's tired of doing it. (shrug) I like grilled chicken, but not enough to mess with a grill to prepare it. So, my answer is, it depends on the chicken. In my world, low and slow is only good for middle aged birds. Annie