I love Chicken & Dumplings. I have fond memories from my childhood of poking around the fat, gooey dumpling until it became many small gooey dumplings, equally distributed among bites of carrot I didn't really want to eat. Tuesday, I decided, via my loving mother drafting me as head cook for that night's meal, to make Dumplings.
I will begin with a disclaimer: my first experience with chicken was not so good. When I was 16, mom enrolled me in a serious cooking crash-course. Read: The You- can't live- on- sweets- and -rice- for- the- rest -of- your- life course. My first project, with her instructing, was to roast a chicken. The day of this endeavor was a toasty 100 degrees. All fine and good and HOT until I dropped the chicken on the floor. Yes, you read that right: I dropped the entire chicken on the floor. Let's just say my family have strong immune systems.
On to Thursday's chicken endeavor! I stared down into the sink with a whole chicken in the colander below me. I hate whole chickens. Foster Farms boneless and skinless are my forte, and, in my mind, the only sort of chicken they should produce. Here's why: whole chickens entail things such as chicken hearts, chicken livers, chicken guts. Disembowling a chicken is not my idea of a pleasant morning-time activity. It's not as if Foster Farm's is lazy and doesn't take the time to remove the unwanted detritus. No, they take the guts out and then put them back in. I am still mystified as to why exactly they do this. At the very least, they could have the chickens with hearts in tact for those who want them, and the gut-less ones for squeamish people like me.
Enough with that. I gutted the chicken and stuck it in the pot, happy to know the worst was over. Right. Time comes to remove the chicken from the pot and shred it. No big deal. As soon as I manage to lift the ungainly thing out, it splits. Lying their in the sink it looks like something of the cover of "Chicken Undead: Editor's cut, Unrated." Or maybe some sort of rotting zombie head. I shredded the thing and pondered how familiar I was becoming with chicken anatomy.
The rest was easy as pie, and I got my dumplings. I even made new fond memories in my adulthood of cooking the undead chicken and then enjoying it during a Once Upon A Time marathon with my corny-tv-watching-Partner-in-Crime. Here's to happy memories and slices of life and Christmas break!
