Today I feel the edge of what it would be like if I had OCD about kitchen cleanliness. I'm already pretty clean in the kitchen, not crazy, but cleaner than most, and today I had to part out a chicken. I made the mistake (last night as we were brushing our teeth and we realized John hadn't parted-out the chicken for the soup I'm making) of saying, yeah, I could probably figure out how to take apart a raw chicken. Officially, no, I do not know how to do this. Today I taught myself how to hack one to bits, but it cannot be as hard as it was. People do this all the time. In many (most?) parts of the world chicken does not come in little pre-parted packages. My mistakes were many. First, I made a bad knife decision, but I was so disgusting with chicken goo that I didn't want to open any drawers to get a sharper one. Second, the giblets, which are gross to begin with, were really really gross. I think there was something included that normally isn't included. It was green. I won't say more. Third, I was trying to get the skin off also (so the soup isn't greasy) and that's not as easy as I thought it would be. There was a lot of pulling, some tearing sounds, fingernails were used. Fourth, a raw chicken is really slippery and I hadn't bothered to put a dish towel under my cutting board (and I couldn't exactly open a drawer of towels in the state I was in) so I was chasing the thing around the counter trying not to cut my finger off.
I could go on, but the point was that it made me a little crazy because when I was finally done (I had to throw away the wings, they were just too much) and needed to clean up I couldn't get rid of the little pieces of fat and membrane that were embedded in the cutting board, stuck in the drain trap, under my fingernails. I felt, for sure, the edge of what it would be like to have a cleaning compulsion. I found myself thinking, if only I had an old toothbrush, I could really get rid of this stuff once and for all...
Why I was parting out a chicken at 7:30 in the morning?
1. We don't have real blinds in the (east-facing) bedroom yet, so I was up.
2. Chicken soup tastes better if you use bone-in chicken, simmer it all day in the slow cooker, then remove the chicken, take off the meat and put that back into the soup. It's just better.
3. Normally, I would have used breasts with the bones in, but the grocery stores around our new house are lame. It's one of two things that I'm not happy with in my new house (the other thing is the long commute to work). How is it possible that neither of the 2 big stores by our house carry bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts? How is it possible that a Safeway on the edge of Seattle's biggest (I'm pretty sure) Hispanic neighborhood only carries one kind of salsa. I had to think for a second, am I just (bad) stereotyping by thinking that a Hispanic neighborhood would have more salsa selection? NO! It's a staple of their cuisine. We need to go a little deeper into our neighborhood. I bet Safeway only needs one kind of salsa because only white people shop there. Probably, everyone who needs salsa around here knows a better place to go. I need salsa. In our fridge growing up there was often only salsa, cheese, and tortillas in the fridge.
I am the closest I have ever come to being a vegetarian. And that includes when I used to be (in college, of course) a vegetarian.
Here is a picture of our kitchen, where this all occurred (except there's stuff in it now):
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