By Jean Ponzi
A Whole Chicken
“What can I bring you from out in the world?” I ask husband Dale, whenever I go to the grocery store.
Usually he has no special requests, but one fine summer day he declared, “I’d like a whole chicken.”
“Oh. . . . Huh.” Not what I’d expected, or what I assumed. “I’ll get the herb-roasted kind!”
Dale shook his head. “I’d like a plain, good quality whole chicken that we can cook here.” Italics are mine.
During breakfast we had listened on speaker phone to a chicken-keeping friend detail her latest strategy to repel racoons, and how heartbreak from predators snatching hens had her on the verge of surrender to store eggs, even at $7 a dozen. Could overhearing this have prompted from-scratch chicken cravings?
We don’t eat big meals, and Dale is not a big eater in general. I think about food in a single-meal context, unless we’re having friends over for dinner, which happily prompts the original fast-food: leftovers. I do my best to not waste food.
Also, while we do eat meat, I’m not a very skilled or confident meat cook. I know where meat comes from, but I don’t enjoy carcasses. So I chicken out on the live stuff, buying from the food pros. I focus on side dishes and arranging colorful cut-up things. To potlucks I always bring Hors d’ Oeuvres.
About this chicken request: we have just – JUST – completed a total kitchen overhaul. Dale did all – ALL – the work himself. He says he’d like to eat more, and better, and now we have amenities like food-preparing counter space.
I’ll gladly zip into midtown, anytime, for a carton of Straub’s World-Famous Chicken Salad, but I felt this situation was valid. Mostly. I still tried to fly this coop.
“How about I get the parts we like? I can bake us some nice organic chicken thighs!”
Fun Fact: there is an actual spousal look that says Whole Chicken.
If this were my idea, I’d plan around a Farmers’ Market Day, to support our local food pros and get the really best chicken possible. But this was after all the week’s markets. I drove to the supermarket, as I’d planned.
Back at the ranch, Dale rested on the sofa while I tackled the question of how to cook her.
“Will this be hard?” he thoughtfully inquired.
“Yes.”
“You have The Joy Of Cooking,” Dale pointed out. Sure do! Ole’ Erma Rombauer shares pointed opinions on roasting in aluminum foil, new-fangled in her mid-career editions, and she covers butchering fowl. No joy, complex.
Silver Palette New Basics led off their extensive list of chicken instructions with simmering, which seemed pretty workable to me: drop the bird and veg in water and monitor the heat. I could do this, but hungry hubby had another preference.
“What about broiling?”
“We don’t have a broiling pan.”
“Why not?”
“Because the broiler in the oven we just changed out stopped working 25 years ago.”
This first and only wing-clipped response in the whole exchange was kindly timed. Dale was asleep.
I swapped cookbooks for a laptop. Purdue, the notorious chicken-factory “farmer,” had what I needed: a simple table of bird weight cooking types, times and temps, and a short video. Just enough guidance.
“Hello, birdie – thanks!” I said, slicing through her plastic wrap. Though now minus head, feet, guts and feathers, this was clearly a recently living individual. Honor in my reluctant hands.
I laid her in our orange enamel casserole, patted her dry, spritzed her with olive oil and liberally sprinkled on herbs. I wreathed her in sliced organic carrots and mini gold potatoes and stuffed her cavity with celery and red onion. I jammed on whipping up a sauce: the dregs in a bottle of horseradish mustard, sloshed out with Sauvignon Blanc and (trusty, packaged) chicken broth.
I spaced out turning down the heat after 15 minutes of browning. Would a full half-hour at 450 dry this baby out? New stuff, no guarantees. A meat thermometer (turns out we had one) said both white and dark meat were close enough for jazz to Purdue’s specs. Slicing in, the meat looked done to me. Lucked out this time. Her wholeness would be a terrible waste.
“How is it?” I asked, as Dale and I tucked into our plates. “Is this different?”
“Very good, thank you,” he smiled between bites. “It’s not dry.”
Our week’s menu: Whole Chicken Salad, Chicken Pot Humble Pie, Appreciation.
Jean Ponzi has been a longtime local voice for Earth and Healthy Planet columnist since 1997.