A chicken in every pot, and such like

This is a wretched tale with a happy ending, and it’s all rooted in my love of food. Good food, I mean. I spend a lot of time making that happen. For me, good doesn’t involve extravagant ingredients or complicated recipes, though there’s probably a place for those every now and again. My primary gauge for goodness is provenance. I seek ingredients from folks I know, producers who have infused their offerings with sweat-integrity, people who prioritize doing right both by the product and the land. To borrow from a friend, I like to think that my food comes from people who care about me, at least a little.

Which is why my recent kitchen disaster was particularly hideous.

It all began with a run-of-the-mill chicken. On impulse, while grocery shopping, I decided I wanted something warm and comforting for dinner. Chicken soup, chicken and dumplings, maybe my mother’s version of white chili – I wasn’t sure. But, I added a whole, organic bird to my cart and continued on my way.

Note: This recipe card is missing half the shebang, so best not to cook from it.

You need to understand that such a purchase is atypical for me. I can’t remember the last time I came home with a store-bought chicken. I buy from farmers markets and farms. I benefit from homesteaders who bring me fresh birds in return for some favor or other. Friends devoted to conscientious consumption clean out their freezers before moving to Florida and leave me with their bounty. It’s astonishing, really, how many resources I have cultivated in my community, and how much abundance they provide. But, like a lot of life’s little compromises, I stepped outside my boundaries that day to meet the needs of the moment. A chicken in every pot, and such like.

A short time later, taking care to first remove the plastic pouch of giblets from its empty insides, I put my 3.86-pound bird and some water in my digital pressure cooker, along with the usual aromatics. Twenty-five minutes was all that would be required to give me a fully cooked, fall off the bone chicken.

I continued to dither about which recipe to prepare, but I figured I’d figure out the finer details of my meal plan as the chicken cooled. As soon as the pressure cooker ran down its clock, I was on it. With a quick release of residual steam, the house now smelling like sunshine and mom-hugs, I twisted off the lid. Et voilà!

Herbs and carrots bobbed around in golden liquid as I reached in with a long-handled spoon and gave everything a gentle stir. What rose to the surface was a 3”x5” sheet of white plastic. The juice diaper. I had totally overlooked the damn juice diaper! I remembered having the conscious thought to deal with it right around the same time I was extracting the cavity-baggie. How could…? I mean, where…? What the actual…?! I still don’t know how I missed it. Like frog eggs in a shallow pond, my future soup was impregnated with beads of silica gel and my comfort food had become horribly uncomfortable! Maybe not on par with the boiled rabbit scene from Fatal Attraction, but getting there.

My kitchen ego needed a defibrillator, I’d killed our dinner, and I was in a quandary over how to dispose of the remains. Ordinarily, ruined food would be sent straight to the compost heap (yes, even meat and bones, well buried), but I didn’t want the contamination to find its way back into my gardens or the belly of some unsuspecting, scavenging critter. The FDA can say what it wants about the lack of toxicity in a meat nappy, I’m not buying it. Or, more correctly, I’m not eating it!  Transferring everything into a landfill-bound plastic bag was almost as dreadful as the carnage itself, but that’s where I ended up. Throughout the experience, I kept thinking, “Small-farm birds don’t come with absorbent pads. If I’d stood firm in my convictions, I wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place!” Such a disappointment.

Not surprisingly, the incident got me thinking about my many kitchen failures over the years. There was the time in high school when I thought it would be nice to make breakfast for my dad but misjudged the intensity of the egg whack and sent the slippery glob down the edge of the skillet and below the hot burner, where it solidified into scrambled cement. There was my newlywed, waterlogged lentil curry that very much resembled something you might discover at the south end of a baby. There was the birthday bundt soldered together with icing, after most of its top stuck to the pan. And, there were the hand-harvested, meticulously prepped chestnuts which were magically transformed into charcoal briquettes after boiling dry on the stove.

I’ve had more than a few insect-related misadventures, like when the milk-frothing mechanism on our fancy coffeemaker stopped working until it finally spat out the June beetle that had crawled inside. One spring, I learned that an aphid infestation on a huge harvest of lettuce can, in fact, be remedied by running the loose leaves through the delicate cycle on the washer. Look ma, no bugs! Oh, but gosh. Look. Pulped lettuce, everywhere. And in the vein of salad greens, I can’t forget the cabbage worm crawling happily around the edge of my dinner guest’s plate. Better than a partial critter, I suppose.

One Easter, I cooked a pot of lamb shanks, low and slow, for most of the morning. They’d smelled a little gamey when I started them off, but as they burbled away, the aroma turned to something akin to the inside of a pubescent boy’s sneaker. My kids hid in their rooms, with ceiling fans running, until it was time for dinner. My mother, who loves lamb, was delighted and ate heartily, to no ill effect. The rest of us couldn’t tolerate more than a few bites. As with the recent chicken, we discarded the whole shebang. (Why are there never half shebangs?)

Miraculously, a day or two after the diaper disaster, I happened upon a gem of a clip from one of Julia Child’s episodes on The French Chef. The award-winning show, which launched in the early 60s and ran for a decade, made French cuisine accessible to average homemakers. With each installment, Julia taught us how to cook, but we loved her and her show because they delivered so much more. Into our American melting pot, which lacks a unifying food culture, Julia poured her enthusiasm for connection. She seemed to truly care about us by inviting us into her love affair with delicious food. She taught us to believe in ourselves as we discovered how to eat, a pairing that nourished body and soul.

The live-taped series also captured many a blunder, which Julia laughed off and turned into imitable, teachable moments. In this particular installment, as if speaking directly to me and my ruined soup, she addressed failure, reminding me that mistakes are the only way to learn.

I know we have some die-hard foodies here and at least a few chefs. Let’s cook up some fun in the comments, friends. Please, share your most memorable kitchen bungles below. I shall enjoy reading them with the white chili I’m having for dinner this week.  

~Elizabeth