chicken dinner

I’ve just attempted to dismember a chicken for the first time ever and GOD it’s hard!

At first I tried to wing it – you know, I eat chicken all the time so it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out where the drumstick is and how to break it off, but jeez, the skin is so slippery and those bones just stick together, and I didn’t have the guts to get a chopper out because I was afraid I’d chop my fingers off as well. So I lugged out this massive cook book I bought years ago which had step by step instructions and pictures for pulling apart a whole chicken. It was all going really well until it told me to snap the backbone at the halfway point.

1. I know the chicken is already dead, but breaking a backbone in half, even if it is a dead chicken, just seems so cruel! Even as I was pulling the wings off, the sound of the joints cracking was enough to make me flinch.

2. Once the wings and the drumsticks were off, I got confused – I couldn’t tell which part was the back of the chicken and which part was the front.

So in the end I got the Penguin to finish it off, heehee.

It was traumatic but now its roasting in the oven with some garlic, lemon, white wine and thyme – yummmmmm.