It is a rare occasion in this world when you can out do a "best you ever had" moment in your life.
So there I was, with my second chicken from Riverdog Farms, stuffed ever so lovingly into my small cooler and transported home on my two-wheel truck. The first bird from them the week earlier was nearly the best chicken I've ever had, so my expectations were running high you might say. I prepped and baked #2 in a similar fashion, and as before the results were awesome. After carving it up and enjoying it with a side of rice and carrots, I put it in the fridge to think about later. We still had much leftovers, because running around 8 pounds, this small turkey was more like 3 meals. After something like a minute and a half, I wanted chicken salad.
The next day, I got to work. My salad was composed of diced meat, pesto (last fall I planned well and still have about 4 cups in deep freeze), chopped olives and celery, with just a dollop or three of mayo to get the right consistency. I looked around for bread, and luckily (because I have the best wife in the world) there just happened to be some biscuits laying around. I sliced one and gave it a light toasting. I heaped on some saladic green hunkiness. It looked good. I ingested it in about 4 bites. Then, with drool streaming from my face like some large breed of dog, I made another. Tilting my head a touch for the second first bite, a thought tumbled off a shelf somewhere deep in my head and came to rest in a legible spot. This is the most chickeny chicken I have ever had! If it could stand up to all that pesto and such, and still cry out roasted chicken, then it just had to be true.
The next day, chasing the spector of reliving a "best of" moment, I made another chicken in a biscuit sandwich. Granted, it wasn't as good as the first, or second, but really, because the only remaining biscuit was another day older, there wasn't the same volume of salad, and because somehow, getting closer to the subject in a photo is not always a good thing.If you have access to the Berkeley Farmers' Markets, enjoy chicken, and don't mind hacking off the head of the tastiest bird you might ever eat, then do Trini and Tim a favor. Do our planet a favor. Support small farms and sustainability. Go buy yourself a Riverdog Farm chicken.
5 comments:
Gulp. Hack the head off? I almost fainted when I found legs in the cavity of a chicken I bought from the butcher once. I am a little frail about these things...
Man, that sounds like good chicken though. I hear that chicken is pretty tasty when it is allowed to ripen. At eight pounds your chicken must have lived a full and happy life and that's what you were tasting.
Mmmmmm. Pesto.
Does your wife make the biscuits with your sourdough?
The first thing I saw was the bisquit. It looks like filo. You are heck of lucky to have a wife to get you (make You?) bisquits like that. Pluck the Chicken!
Mimi: Somehow, I've grown to liking the chicken more complete. Like I feel I'm somehow honoring the critter a bit by using more of it. At this point, I have at least 3 heads and 6 or 8 feet in the freezer awaiting a huge round of stock making, so the more chicken included, the better.
Although this chicken may have indeed been "ripe," (I'll ask the farmer how old them big ones were, but I'm guessing 12-ish weeks) the chicken we had last night weighed in at 4.75 pounds and was equally tasty. My bet is diet and exercise has the most to do with it.
We haven't made biscuits with sourdough yet. But I'll report back when we do.
Chile: Mmmm, bisquits. Yeah, my wife is the soft floofy pastry master around here. In fact, despite the good looks of this bisquit, she said they were a bit tough. I couldn't tell, and a day later toasted and chickened, no one else could either.
Off to pluck the chicken......
志竹 : I hope to connect the bridge between life and death more......with other creatures I eat now, and with myself much, much later.
that biscuit looks soooo goood. have you shared the recipe?
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