The Perplexities of Naked Chicken

I called my mom tonight, as I sometimes do in the throes of a chaotic cooking attempt. She knows the basics of how to cook most anything in that instinctual way that someone who has spent thirty years feeding a family develops. I still look everything up - how long, what temperature, how do I know it's ripe? There's no way I could pick out a cantaloupe at the store, but she does it by smell. She knows how much meat to buy for ten people, whereas I have to step away from the meat counter and overthink a calculation that often ends up in way too much or slightly too little. I glance at a recipe a dozen times to check temperatures and cook times, but with my mom, everytime my dad answers her that whatever he just put on the grill will take "about ten minutes", she knows which meats will really show up at the table in fifteen. Along with my own mom, it is probably an unsung trait of mothers everywhere that she is the one person in the house that everyone goes to to ask "How long should I heat this in the microwave?".

I think I took her off guard with the intro to my question tonight, when I told her "I'm always perplexed by the naked chicken." But I am. Tonight was the third time I worked with a whole chicken and couldn't for the life of me figure out which end goes up. I've looked it up in the past, and was reminded again tonight that my Betty Crocker cookbook is disappointing in it's lack of an anatomical poultry illustration. There's one for beef - each part of the cow carved into little steaks with the label of what cut they are. Apparently no one needs this detailed guide for the chicken, other than me.

Having to ask for help on the phone, I described the chicken to my mother the way you would give directions: "If you're on the street, looking at the entrance to the mall, Old Navy is to the left". I described the chicken as if the poor bird wasn't currently beheaded and featherless on my counter: "So if the chicken is walking around like a chicken, with his little legs under him and his wings on his sides, is the breast the part that's on his back, or what's under him facing the ground?" My mom lovingly ignored the ridiculousness of my question and answered with the respect all reference librarians give to finding the correct answer, and let me know that the breast was what I was describing as the chicken's back. She tried to help me further by getting me to picture the Thanksgiving turkey, but I lamely had to admit that while the turkey seems obvious, this little roaster chicken's proportions didn't make a top and bottom obvious to me. It's not surprising I couldn't figure out top and bottom, since I mixed up front and back as well when I grabbed onto the neck bone and tugged, thinking I was pulling on the giblets that were actually stuffed in the other end.

I thanked my mom for her help, knowing she was going to get off the phone and turn to her husband to share something along the lines of "Our brilliant daughter just called because she can't figure out which side of the chicken goes up", inviting my dad to join her in disbelief of how I couldn't know that. Chicken anatomy aside, I felt pretty confident about my recipe endeavor tonight. Knowing now, at least, not to try to stuff the neck bone, I filled the chicken with lemon, garlic, rosemary and thyme, mentally thanking Bob's old chef roommate for planting all of these great herbs. The chicken went in a pot on top of some Dutch potatoes, a sliced onion (a rarity for me, being an onion hater), and a carrot.

An hour and a half later, the chicken was gorgeous. I sent a cell phone photo with pride to family members, shouting "Roast Chicken!!", exuberantly and unabashedly typing two exclamation points in the text portion of the message. I picked up a sharp knife, cut into the golden roasted skin, and my heart sank. It was pink. I got a little further and was dismayed that it wasn't just pink, it was brown. I had a disgusting, rotten, undercooked chicken.

And then I realized I had cooked the damn thing upside down.

What I was cutting into was not the white expanse of breastmeat, but the multi-hued dark meat of the thigh. I sighed and flipped the bird over, rolling the beautiful buttery-golden and crispy skin into the collected liquid on the platter and exposing the flacid, soggy, pale-as-if-raw skin hanging over the breast. Before I cut into this unseasoned sheet of disappointment, I made Bob come in and look at the chicken's beautiful backside, sent back into the darkness in the name of traditional carvery.

One would think this gaffe means I will definitely get it right next time, with such a vivid picture of the wrong way, but I turned the wrong way down the same street dozens of times before figuring out how to get to the taco place where we eat at least once a month. I fear that "chicken anatomy" may permenantly sit next to "sense of direction" on the list of my weaknesses.

It was, however, a deliciously tasty bird.