Winner winner chicken dinner!

This evening I have the task of cooking a chicken. A whole chicken. Ok, I admit it – the last two times (and only times) that there’s been a chicken on the table; it was the cleaner who cooked it. Tonight it’s just me. And one chicken. La poulet et moi. I am attempting to cook the chicken. It’s not even like I buy the things – I swear to God I’ll beat the person who does with the wishbone! Nahh well, it’s not like I can eat the thing anyway so it’s Caroline's fault this time if it goes horribly wrong. The thing that bugs me the most with this monstrous mound of meat is the MESS it makes. And I have no plastic gloves to touch it with... So I’ll be settling with either a plastic bag on each hand or kitchen roll. Do you have to baste these things? I don’t enough know what basting is other than you do it with Turkeys! Is it when people stuff stuffing up it’s ass? Seriously, I know more about cars than cooking a chicken. I made the huge mistake of searching for chicken-cooking on YouTube, and came across a perfectly ‘safe’ video with nothing bad or horrifying intended from it, but almost resulted in a panic attack and nose bleeds from the first 30 seconds of it. In a normal kitchen is the chef, with another chicken – almost identical - pale, flabby and presumably cold. He then instructs to remove the wish bone, and ‘peeling the flaps apart scrape inside on the breast bone’. Erm, I think I’ll stop it right here thanks! I am now scarred for life of the haunting image of this chef scraping up a chicken’s butt with a sharp knife. 

So here goes.

Step one. Removal of packaging. In my books, the hardest task. I’ve scrapped the idea completely of touching it – even with kitchen roll or bagging in between me and the chicken. It’s cold, flabby and pale. It looks horrendous. I gingerly cut around the cellophane whilst holding it still with the edge of a knife, and peel it back from the chicken. I attempt to lever the chicken up by sliding the knife blade underneath *shivers from images of the video* and hook the scissor blades under a drumstick bit. It’s like a science experiment. This is WORSE than when I had to dissect a pig’s heart. At least there were boys in the classroom to take over and poke and prod it like it was a sprout they didn’t want to eat. I have fearful scenarios in my head of the chicken slipping off the knife and onto me... Or it’s gooey covering getting ANYWHERE. I manage to safely and mess-free get it into the assigned dish and throw it in the oven. The hard bit over, and actually, I guess it wasn’t SO bad. Things can only get easier from now on... right?

 

An hour later I return to the kitchen and cautiously open the oven door. The chicken has morphed in some oil-spitting monster and hisses a spray of goo-juice at my face. *Slam door closed* I throw some rice into a pot and chop up carrots which seem determined to fly all over the place and NOT go into the saucepan. Soon everything’s boiling, and I can still hear the bird madly spitting at me from inside the oven. I’m trying not to think of all the oil that is now coating the oven.

Another hour later, and most of the chicken seems to have been eaten! No one’s sick (yet), and I have to add it looked like a perfectly normal roast chicken! I’m very proud of myself. I also had a go at ‘carving’, although I think ‘hacking’ describes it better. I even cut off parts! Which is actually gross as you can feel/hear the knife scraping through bone and cartilage. Yummy! The kitchen doesn’t look to bad either, and when I took the chicken out of the oven it was still acting violently, so I left it under a sheet of tin foil whilst I washed up all the pans I’d used. The girls seem to have enjoyed it, and Jean-pronounced-JOHN and Sabine also joined, so it can’t have been that bad! I can now honestly add ‘cooking a chicken’ to my resume, because really, it should be definitely be considered a ‘skill’.