Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Or, "How To Cook A Chicken"

I Cook A Chicken
Yesterday morning, I ran into a guy who told me that he was cooking some chicken somewhere. He brought me to the spot, which was a slab of concrete which used to be the foundation of a building, but which now was overgrown with vegetation and ocluded from view from all sides.
His "chicken" was sitting atop a pile of ashes, which had been his fire. He was burning plastic, amongst other things. The half burned, half raw chicken sat there, having snuffed the flames out when it fell on them. Flies had taken advantage of the situation, and needed to be shoed away, all two dozen of them.
He grabbed some more plastic bags and went to work relighting the fire. "These things burn like crazy," he said. Yeah, because they have petroleum in them. I cringed.
He soon had a roaring flame, which spewed black smoke, going. A lot of black smoke, in fact, enough to give meaning to every fire-truck siren which I heard in the distance.
Then, he rebalanced the chicken parts on a small piece of spring from a mattress, or something, and resumed "cooking" it.
He had some honey packets, probably from Serda's Coffee, and some other sauce, pilfered from some other venue, ready to go on the chicken. Plastic smoked honey and mustard chicken with fly droppings. Yum.
As I was walking away, after telling them that something had suddenly come up and that I needed to get going, it occured to me that, despite having to witness the pathetic spectacle (his "roommate" was laying prone on the concrete a few feet away from the "grill," using his hands as a pillow, while he was getting "breakfast" ready), I now had a place where I could cook on a fire.
I retrieved my cooking grate from the graveyard, collected up some white oak wood, bought some chicken breasts, retrieved my hot sauce, salt, pepper, sesame oil and vinegar from the Christ Church spot, and then went to the concrete slab.
Using cinder blocks to position the grate so it wouldn't fall into the fire, I soon had a nice "smokeless" fire going, using the technique of starting with extremely small kindling and gradually building up, so as to reduce the smoke output to a minimum.
I waited until the flames had died down and I could hold my hand 5 inches over the grate for 5 seconds, but no longer, placed the grate down by itself for a minute to sterilize it, sanitised my hands with some stuff that the Lidgleys sent from London (thank you, Lidgleys), and then put the chicken breasts on, letting them slowly heat up. I was planning upon taking a full half hour to cook them, this after letting them marinate in the vinegar from a jar of pickles for about 15 minutes.
They came out absolutely perfect.
I left a piece wrapped in plastic for those poor hapless souls to try, as soon as their hospitalizations for stomach viruses from the day before have ended. I also left a note: "There is nothing wrong with this chicken. I sanitized my hands and cooked it all the way. -Guitar Man."
Wow.

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