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Cooking Chicken: Recipe for Disaster !

Thursday, March 6, 2008

My parents, started their married life on the farm as tenant farmers. At the time, my mother would say she was the worst cook ever, almost poisoning my father with her neophyte attempts at cooking for the both of them. One of those first mornings of farm life, she had high hopes for a hearty breakfast to include biscuits (no Bisquick in those days). Apparently the batter was

not successful for some reason and she was drawn to tears, for some of the previous meals had not gone well either. Soooo . . she decided that, rather than throwing the batter into the garbage, she'd just give it to the chickens out in the barnyard (waste not, want not?). 


This was in the heat of Illinois summer and the heat and humidity was at it's usual extremes. As the story goes, later in the afternoon, Dad came in from the fields and found all the chickens dead. It would seem that the unbaked biscuit dough the chickens had eaten, like all bread dough, has yeast in it. In the heat of summer, the dough began to "rise" in their stomachs, so much so, that it shut down their whole system. 


What to do? What to do? Well, they got to work plucking a whole lotta' feathers, etc. and eventually got around to frying up a whole lot of chicken and shared it with relatives and neighbors and anyone willing to take some. My Dad, in his unique sense of humor, said that it was the first chicken he'd ever had that was "breaded" from the inside, rather than the other way around. Mom said she was completely embarrassed at being such an inept cook at the time, but,actually, she eventually became one of the best cooks in the entire family.