Showing Chicken Who's in Charge

I don't know if you've heard, but groceries have gotten a teensy bit more expensive than they used to be. How much more expensive? So much more expensive that I'm not sure if we're even going to notice that I've gone back to work.

I've been poking around looking for cheap recipe ideas, but I must admit so far I'm not on fire with the idea of eating a bunch of peasant food just as the weather starts to get really hot around here. If you just can't get enough of cabbage, beans, and potatoes, though, I highly recommend that you check out the Recession Cuisine thread on Chowhound. Depending on your palate, it will either inspire you or turn your stomach.

As for me, I've got to find a way to muddle through with meat, at least until the weather cools off. With that in mind, I looked for the cheapest chicken I could find today at Publix. As the food media has been telling me, chicken legs are dirt cheap -- 49 cents a pound. I don't really like them, of course, but my kids do, and if I serve food I find unappetizing maybe I'll just fill up on salad, or better yet, water. It will be like Weight Watchers, only free.

But I wanted some white meat, as well. And so, for what I'm embarrassed to admit was the first time in my life, I bought a whole chicken and brought it home to cut up myself.

Now I know why the already cut-up kind costs more. CUTTING UP A CHICKEN IS DISGUSTING. It's slimy and germ-ridden and cold, and when knife cuts through bone, it sounds like ... well, like knife cutting through bone. Thank God orthopedic surgeons put you out before they get busy.

I'm quite a talented chef if I do say so myself, but I destroyed that chicken in an effort to get eight edible pieces and a back. Little pieces of raw chicken were flying, not to mention raw chicken fat -- quite simply the grossest substance I've ever touched. But I save about 50 cents a pound, by God. Of course if we all end up with food poisoning the four co-pays will be about 200 times that amount, but at least I tried.

Since that won't be the last chicken I cut up, fortunately I found this nifty instructional video on YouTube. (What's not on YouTube, by the way? Any day now I fear I will find that someone has videoed me squirming into my Spanx, set it to some sort of rap music about big booties, and uploaded it.)

This woman clearly makes that chicken her bitch, and I learned a lot watching her. My only suggestion is that you might want to turn the sound real low. Between the bone-sawing and the slimy-squirty sound , you will totally not be in the mood to eat anything but a nice dry saltine for about a week. And I'm not sure whether they're on sale.

Really, Honey -- A Bowl of Cereal Sounds Faaaaabulous.

As soon as I got home from work this afternoon, I stuck a chicken in the oven.

It's not just dinner. It's a protective measure.

My new job means the Bird boys have been back in the kitchen. That's not nearly as good as it sounds.

Yes, it's extremely sweet, especially in light of the other sorts of places they could be and things they could be doing. But it's also one or more of these other things.

No. 1: IT'S MESSY.

Kids do not clean up as they go along. They use many utensils, at least one electric mixer, and all the bowls. Sometimes the floor gets involved. When they finish washing dishes, the dishes are still dirty.

No. 2: IT'S NOT WELL BALANCED.

Take, for example, the night Bob and I slipped out to a meeting. In less than two hours, Billy made floating island and Quiche Lorraine and Ben made brownies. I had trouble sleeping that night because I was terrified Bob would die of cardiac arrest.

No. 3: IT'S FATTENING AND/OR UNHEALTHY.

Chefs who do not eat fruit and/or vegetables tend to rely on meat, bacon, butter, cheese, white pasta, cream, chocolate, confectioners' sugar, and/or cake mix. (See No. 2.) These are not foods Weight Watchers or cardiologists endorse.

No. 4: IT IS QUITE POSSIBLY NOT EXACTLY WHAT YOU WERE CRAVING.

I've got four words for you: Soy Braised Gluten Puffs.

This is a Chinese dish that Billy, who never met an Asian food he didn't like, made once for Sunday night supper. It looks like a bunch of donut holes floating in barbeque sauce. It is scary.

But here's the catch. If I didn't try it, what could I say the next time Ben (not Billy -- he'll try anything) didn't want to try something? So I told Billy I would give it a whirl. I took one bite, put down my fork, and told him that, though I loved him very much, I would not be taking another one.

One night last week he made pork and cabbage in miso sauce with what appeared to be fried rice. It turned out that the little yellow bits in the rice were dried bonito, which is also called "goldfish food."

Whatever happened to scrambled eggs?

No. 5: IT'S EXPENSIVE.

Particularly when Chef Billy is at the stove, cost apparently is no object. The night he made the Quiche Lorraine, he bought the ham, the cheese, the cream, and the French butter(!) at Whole Foods. Last week, Ben made breakfast for our 20th wedding anniversary, and Billy did the shopping. He came home with organic strawberries and blueberries (apparently picked by philosophy Ph.Ds who charged by the berry), organic English muffins, organic jam, and more French butter. And here I'm concerned about the cost of rice going up.

Obviously, given the choice between kids who cook for me and kids who don't because they hate me -- or because they're out plotting to blow up their school -- I'd choose the former. And I love that my kids aren't Spaghetti-o addicts who are daunted by the prospect of cooking from a French or Asian cookbook, or sexist piglets who think meals are not their job. Someday they're going to make wonderful, weight-carrying husbands who say "Honey, put your feet up -- it's my turn to cook."

Which means somewhere out there are two lovely girls who owe me big-time.

Meet the Birds

Call me Betsy. It's not my real name, but it protects the innocent. I’m under 50, but not for much longer; the mother of two boys, ages 14 and 17; a gratefully retired lawyer; the author of an unfinished-but-pretty-damn-funny-and-full-of-potential novel; a so-so wife (it’s the thought that counts, right?); a tragically bad housekeeper; and an ambivalent Southerner. I spend an amazing amount of time on what I like to think of as “child maintenance” –- carpools and college planning and co-chairing school events that I’m really not all that interested in attending. Sometimes –- oh okay, lots of times –- I have snarky and unkind-but-true stories to tell about the people I encounter in my daily life (myself included). You may think “she shouldn’t say that,” but in your heart-of-hearts I know some of you’ll be whispering “I’m glad she did.”

As for the rest of my brood, there’s my husband, Bob, who hasn’t bailed out on the law yet. I am forever indebted to him for saving me from a life of billable hours and advance sheets. He works for a big corporation, loves not to spend money, “fixes” lots of things around the house, and fortunately for us all is quite receptive to my fashion advice. Billy is our 17-year-old. He’s involved in the maximum number of extracurricular activities allowed by law and is determined to live at least 12 time zones away from us as soon as is legally possible. And then there’s Ben, 14, who never met a Simpsons episode he couldn’t quote chapter and verse and has the hots for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

We live in a suburb –- let’s call it Fox Valley –- of a mid-size Southern city. Citizens of this community tend to be well off, conservative, gregarious, thin, and blonde –- in other words, pretty much the antithesis of me. Yet I call many of them my friends. I’m watching their children grow up and they’re watching mine. I doubt I'll ever be "from here," and yet sometimes, this place feels like home.

For much of the last 17+ years, I’ve been first and foremost a mom. Like many of my peers who earned expensive graduate degrees and then decided not to use them, I’ve treated child-rearing as rocket science rather than something that women have been doing since the beginning of time, including some mothers who were certifiable bumps on pickles but managed to raise productive citizens nonetheless. Now my children are getting older. They need less of me – still the best part of me, but not all of me. And I welcome and resist that change in equal measure. Sometimes eagerly, sometimes with a breaking heart, I’m emptying my nest. That's a lot of what I'll write about.

I've also entered what even the kindest of folks would have to describe as middle age. That means things hurt: my feet, my back, my hips, and sometimes, even now, my feelings. Sometimes I'll write about that, as well as wrinkles, gray hair, my neck, my memory (or lack thereof), and various forms of puffiness.

I'm a girly girl from way back, so sometimes I'll talk about clothes and makeup and shoes and how I look. I love to cook so I'll talk about recipes. I have 20 to 30 pounds that continue to return home to me like the prodigal son, so I'll talk about losing weight. It probably won't take you long to notice there's an inherent conflict between the recipes and the weight loss. To quote then 4-year-old Billy, when I nagged at him about something he kept doing, "That's just the way God made me. You'll just have to get used to it."

I'll talk about housekeeping, and it won't be pretty. Apparently, I am constitutionally incapable of keeping a house either clean or orderly, despite the fact that nothing would make me happier. (A nicer gal would say something here about world peace, but I warned you, I'm not that kind of girl.) If I found out I had six months to live, I'd ask those Magic Moments people to get me a full-time maid.

And sometimes, I'll just talk about what's going on, in my household, my neighborhood, my city, my state, my region, my country, and/or my world. I was raised in the South, so I'll try to be sweet, but I'm not making any promises.