Pluckin' Your Own Chickens or KFC
Friday noon. ..lunch, $1.57! And it was delicious! A
cheeseburger and an ice cream cone; what else could one possibly want!? If I'm
going to drop upward of $10 for a meal there had better be some pink juice under
the meat
with a foil-wrapped potato sitting beside it. Unless, of course, I get to go to
Mitchell for chicken.
Grandma Black raised me to eat chicken on Sunday. What
would she think if she knew people now eat chicken
any day of the week they want to?
A couple of months ago I called this friend of mine to go to
Mitchell for chicken. "Well, I'd like to, but I'm too busy." Ok ... no problem.
When I told her how much those of us who went enjoyed our chicken she cried for
three days. Next time she will meet me at the end of the drive to see whether or
not I'm joking. I do not joke about fried
chicken!
Did you ever get to pluck a chicken? Lots of you did, I know.
Grandma Black was a whiz. She could pluck four or five to my one. I never saw
anything like it! She would grab two chickens by the head and with a flip of the
wrist the heads went one way and the bodies the other. Next thing I knew we'd
have a dozen or so chicken bodies
flopping all over the place and the tubs would be filled with boiling water for
dipping and plucking. UGH! By noon, we'd have the coop cleaned out and the
cleaned and wrapped chickens in the locker at Hank's Market, downtown Reliance.
Before running water yet.
Many years later we found ourselves living "in the country" about one mile from downtown Duchesne, Utah. On a little five acre area surrounded with trees and hidden from the main road. I decided to do the "Mrs. Farmer" thing and got baby chicks and five baby turkeys (but that's another story). When they were ready I had an old-fashioned chicken pluckin' day assisted by my not-afraid-of-anything sister-in-law, Ella Weinberg. She killed the chickens by putting their heads on the ground and placing a board on top. Then she stepped onto the board and jerked ... voila ... no head. We had quite an assembly line going until I squeezed (this one chicken I was plucking) in the wrong place and he pooped onto a stack of chicken livers I thought I was protecting with my life. Needless to say, we quit early and goodbye to the chicken livers!
Ed absolutely cannot understand how anyone will eat
crisply-fried chicken fat. What is wrong with that man? I believe the
conversation at our house the other night was something about the next thing
we'd be doing is peeling
chicken feet, cooking them and then eating them. I don't think so
..................