I continually find myself approaching recipes that appear simple, yet turn out to be emergency tutorials on how to perform intricate surgery or engineering of some sort. Last night’s adventure was the whole chicken.

The recipe was clear and concise: take a 3-4 pound chicken, remove the neck and giblets, rinse chicken in cold water, baste with olive oil, rub on a few seasonings, and roast in the oven. I allotted about fifteen minutes to complete the task. I’m educated, I thought. I have a degree. Surely I can handle this. What began as a fifteen minute sprint became an hour long battle with the chicken.

Step 1: “Remove the neck and giblets.” Easy enough. I’ve seen my mother do this three hundred times when preparing a turkey for Thanksgiving. Everything comes packed nicely in a little baggy as if Boo Radley himself was awaiting the treat of seeing a look of joyful surprise at the unsuspecting consumer. So, I take the chicken from the cellophane wrap, pick it up under the armpits, and locate the neck. Aha! I’m brave, so I reach in with my bare hands, grab the neck, and pull. It didn’t budge. Why? BECAUSE IT WAS STILL ATTACHED! Immediately, I do what any sane woman would do: I called my mother. I have chicken juice all over my hands, and I have a feeling I need both for removing this thing, so my husband calls my mother and puts her on speaker phone. The conversation that ensues becomes an inadvertant shouting match:

“Hello?”
“Mom, I need help.”
“What?”
“I need help.”
“With what?”
“How do you remove a neck from a chicken?”
“What! Why?!”
“Because I’m going to eat it and the recipe says to remove the neck.”
“Well, just pull it out”
“It’s not coming. It’s still attached.”
“What?”
“It’s STILL attached!”
“Oh, well, it shouldn’t be. There should be a little baggy inside.”
“I know, ma, but there isn’t a baggy.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Thanks, I’ll call you in about two minutes.”

No help. Thankfully, I have my Pampered Chef kitchen shears which I discovered do a wonderful job at cutting through chicken necks. I removed what I could. This is gross.

Step 2: “Remove the giblets.” Ok, no baggy in sight. Are there giblets? Oh, yes…there are. I proceeded to look up the chicken’s butt and noticed two Barbie sized kidneys and liver still attached! I majored in English so I would not have to dissect animals any more, and yet here I am, performing exploratory surgery. Once again, with my kitchen shears, I attempt to remove the organs. This was not so clean or pretty. Like an eight-year-old boy, I cut the organs out, botching up the job, and wreaking havoc inside the chicken cavity. Meanwhile, fifteen minutes have already passed, and I haven’t even begun getting close to actually COOKING anything!

While my face is a little too close to the chicken’s butt for my comfort, I notice a disturbing new aspect about this chicken I have chosen to prepare. Remnants of feathers, looking like over-grown wirey hairs from an old man’s chin, are poking out from near the chicken’s butt! Upon further inspection, I notice the “hairs” are not simply adorning the rear of the chicken; they are on the ankles, elbows, and collar as well! Suddenly, I’m taking back to my novels about turn of the century women working in chicken houses, sweating while plucking chickens for only enough wages to eat a meal for that day. Now what? I immediately think to grab my tweezers to extract the wet feather remains, but I was really hesitant to use a human grooming tool for food that already resembled the body of a small child anyway. It was a little too macabre for my liking. So, I grab my trusty kitchen shears for the third round of surgery. I start trimming the skin in the problem areas, trying not to think of how much chicken juice and salmonella I was spreading.

Step 3: “Rinse in cold water.” Once again, I lift the bird from underneath the armpits, but this time, I give it a colonics treatment. As I was holding it, I was disturbingly aware of Peter Gabriel’s music video with the dancing chickens, afraid that at any moment it was going to break out into song. Then my mind, which is perhaps coping with the shock of having to perform emergency surgery, begins magically transforming the chicken into a newborn infant. Its fat belly and little arms and legs somehow prevent my ability to see this as a future meal. I feel like I should put a dress on it or something. I take a moment to think about when I might start having children. . . and the moment is gone.

Another fifteen minutes have passed. I can finally finish the recipe.

Ultimately, we ended up eating a pretty good chicken, but I’m so marred by the experience, that I’m swearing off any food that still has a body.