We interrupt the travelogue that hasn’t yet begun, to accommodate the pêche and his warped concept of a contest worthy of the #IACPPP (that is, the International Association of Culinary Professionals Pity Party… I think). This is for a prize, y’all. We don’t even know what the prize is, and yet, we are willing to humble ourselves and reveal our darkest secrets. For a prize. Yes, we are pathetic. And just when did I adopt this royal “we” thing, anyway? But I digress…

Once upon a time, many, many, many years ago, I lived in a then-modest city in southwest Ohio. It was just large enough that, sure, we had plenty of grocery stores, but just small enough that it was a short drive to the “country” and actual farms.

Very early one morning – oh, around o’dark-thirty – when I was just a wee, impressionable five year old, my dad woke up with the idea of going out to the “country” to an actual farm to buy some chickens.

His grand plan was to go buy the chickens, come back home, pick me up to take me to school, then to go have the chickens killed and dressed at our friendly neighborhood kosher butcher. Of course, he didn’t think to inform me or my mother, for that matter, that he was going to do this. It was a surprise.

Along about the time that I needed to leave for school, Dad pulled up in front of the house and called me out to get in the car. I didn’t realize that there were burlap bags and old wooden crates filled with LIVE chickens in the back seat until it was too late.

We were half-way to school, when the soft clucking turned, first into panicked screeching, then into a full-scale poultry riot. One of the chickens had worked its way loose from a burlap bag, releasing a couple of the others, as well, and flapped wildly to the back of the bench seat in Dad’s old 1956 Buick Special, pulling at my hair, and shrieking at me what I could only interpret as chicken-speak for “I’m not going that easy, kid! You’ll not have ME for supper!” while the others flapped and “flew” around the back seat, hurling themselves at the windows in attempted escape, and echoing her sentiment at the tops of their lungs.



And so, I didn’t. I was so traumatized by the experience, that I refused to eat chicken in any way, shape, or form, in my own home, for a solid year and a half, until I was 100% sure that all of the chickens that I had shared the car with on that Hitchcockian ride to school, were gone.

To this day, I can’t even conceive of eating anyone (anything?) that I’ve known personally – even peripherally. Look at that face. ->Shiver<-

* All chicken photos in this post are used with permission of Beth Compton Ayotte of You Know What You Oughta Do Thanks, Bethie!