Vommage

Happy Sunday.

I made a chicken today. Jan and I went to Costco, and the general routine is to get one of those rotisserie chickens to have on-hand for meals in the coming week. Salads, my kick-ass chicken noodle soup, stir-fry-- that chicken has even ended up in a few quesadillas. Imagine our disappointment when they were all out! Over Christmas, Bro-Joe roasted two chickens for a family dinner, and I watch enough Food Network to be convinced that I, too, could make a delicious chicken, industrial rotisseries be damned. For whole-chicken novices, let me share a few notes from the battlefield.

1. The whole chickens available at Costco [I think we bought Perdue chickens] still have pin feathers stuck in them in places.
2. Chicken cavities smell like SHIT.
3. Chicken cavities have all sorts of weird organs in them. I didn't want to look too closely, but it is not a clean slate. No, sir.
4. If you try to manipulate the wings, they rebound like functioning joints. Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, does something with the wings...I think she tucks them under the bird. I tried to do that and sort of yelped because the connective tissue or whatever makes the wings spring back to their neutral position. It is 100% fucked up.
5. Most recipes for roasted chicken, like recipes for a Thanksgiving turkey or traditional Cornish hens, call for different foodstuffs to be pushed into the cavity. I mean...yeesh...THERE ARE SO MANY AVENUES TO TAKE WITH THIS. I don't like having to shove anything up into anything else in the harsh light of my parents' kitchen, thankyouverymuch. I don't like having my hand INSIDE of any kind of dead body, avian or otherwise. And, ha-ha, another added feature: when you shove things into the chicken, the natural musculature or elasticity or WHATEVER sometimes kind of pushes back! It was like the chicken was birthing orange segments and pearl onions!!
6. Once the chicken has been roasted (which took f-ing forever, and I'm pretty sure parts of it were not cooked to the FDA's recommended temperature), if you let it sit in the pan juices, it gets SLIMY on the bottom.
7. I forgot something about the prep stage-- pushing compound butter between the skin and the muscle of the chicken is just disturbing. To put a personal spin on it: during my PT, one of the trainers suspected that the muscles in my upper back were constricted by the fascia above them. The fascia is between the skin and the muscle. So, the trainer would do this pinching/rolling technique all over my back, and it hurt like a motherfucker every time. When lifting the skin of the chicken to push the seasoning or butter or whatever beneath it, the resistance comes from the fascia of the chicken. I understand that a chicken will have some analogous organs to me, but this pushes it a little too far.
8. Cooled chicken fat is like Jell-O. I think most people know that, but it doesn't make it any more pleasant.

Ok, I'm not going any further. I will make at least one more attempt at this, but for right now, I am not at all impressed. NOT AT ALL.

I was going to write a bit more about that genealogy show on NBC, but I am overwhelmed by the desire to puke. BTW, I am laying off wheat and dairy for a while. I want to see what effect it has. I love sandwiches almost as much as Liz Lemon, but as my boss would say, they don't love me. I'll keep you posted. OMG, for real, I might vomit.