What? ....CHICKEN BUTT!!!!
Posted by Heidi McDonald on Sun, Sep 12, 2010 @ 11:02 AM
The kids in my family play a game where they try to get an adult to say, or end a sentence with, the word, “what.” They do this for no other reason than to loudly yell, “CHICKEN BUTT!” My 10-year-old niece is so adept at this game, in fact, that my father-in-law permanently banned the game from our annual family beach trip.
At Top Chef University right now, it’s time to roast. The first lesson is a roast chicken, which you stuff with various herbs and spices before roasting. And nothing, I mean…NOTHING…is more hilarious to a 6-year-old boy than the fact that you are putting things up a chicken’s butt.
Chef Spike very professionally calls the orifice “the cavity” when he is giving you the lesson about how to prepare the chicken before roasting it. My little guy laughed, “He’s talking about the chicken’s butt!” I had a little observer, standing on his step-stool beside me at the counter, watching me stuff the bird and laughing his little chicken butt off.
I have to say, had he not been joking around in that manner, I would have been able to stuff that chicken without feeling just a little bit dirty. On some level you KNOW the function of the “cavity,” but it isn’t something you focus on in the kitchen until you have a giggling 6-year-old at your side, reminding you constantly, and making “alarmed chicken noises” every time you put another sprig of rosemary in there.
“Why do you have to stick plants up the chicken’s butt?” he chuckled.
“So it smells and tastes better.”
“When I was a baby did you put plants up my butt so I’d smell better?”
“Maybe I should have…”
The entire time the chicken was roasting (nearly two hours), my little guy tried as hard as he could to get us to fall for the “Chicken Butt” game, and ran around making jokes about chickens and their butts. He also, at some point, learned alternate lyrics to “The Chicken Dance”: “I don’t wanna be a chicken, I don’t wanna be a duck, so I’ll shake my butt!” (Then the dancers shake their butts at the measure break.) So he was doing some of that, too.
By the time the chicken had finished roasting, which took longer for my chicken than for Chef Spike’s chicken, the children had eaten something else and gone to bed. So my husband and I had the juiciest, most flavorful chicken, ever. It was comparable to Boston Market, but juicier and with more unique flavors. Most surprising was how simple kosher salt and black pepper on top had made such a nice crust.
After all his hilarity, the poor kid didn’t even get to have any of the chicken because Mommy and Daddy devoured the whole thing. I saved the gravy at the bottom (no pun intended) to use later in the week with the boneless chicken breasts I have in the fridge.
I am supposed to roast a rack of beef ribs, but, there wasn’t one at the store, so bought rump roast, instead. I guess we’re about to see whether cow butt is as amusing as chicken butt.
Hungrily yours,
Heidi in Pittsburgh