Chicken?

I cooked a chicken yesterday. I’ve never cooked a chicken.

Take, for example, the first time I ever cooked a meal. Barely 18, I had just moved in for the first time with my boyfriend at the time. He was at work and I thought I’d cook supper, you know, housewifey shit. So I find all the stuff, veggies, rice, and this hunk of meat I found in the fridge. And, like everything else I don’t know how to cook, I follow the directions on the packaging.

It was not a good meal. Surprise! He was very nice about it though, and when he asked how I cooked the flesh, I said, “I followed the directions on the outside.” He thought that was funniest thing he had ever heard, apparently.

Every time I have to cook something fleshy, in all my years of cooking, all I’ve ever had to do was follow the directions. And if there were none, I’d internet it.

So when I grabbed the chicken out of the freezer the other day, I immediately looked at the packaging so I could figure out how to cook this sucker.

Except the chicken came from the church food pantry. Which is run on donations. Someone had donated a bird, and put it in another bag for convenience. And the bag was reused from a loaf of rye bread. This is not rye bread. This is a bird. I don’t even know what kind or how heavy bc I was raised a vegetarian.

I can’t just eyeball this shit. My eyeballs have never even seen this shit before. I left the bird in the bag bread in the freezer for another day.

So, I cooked what I think is a chicken yesterday. I asked the kids for help. I didn’t tell them I didn’t know if it was a chicken. I just said I wasn’t sure how much this bird weighed and could they tell me. They took it and each held it in their arms and agreed that it weighed about as much as one of their childhood pets, and handed it back.

Ohhkaayy, I’ll go prepare this hunk of flesh for fire with thoughts of beloved family pets in my head.

It took a lot longer to cook than anticipated. But I laid that bird on a bed of onions with some water in a roasting pan, and put it in the oven.

Or tried to. The pan wouldn’t fit! I already had oven mitts on, the roasting pan was heavy, and I didn’t want to undo literally all of those things just to move a dumb oven rack. So. What (shove) is (shove) the! (Shove!) PROBLEM!!? (SHOVE!) There’s something catching on the bottom…

Y’all. The entire roasting pan was upside down. The handle was catching on the edge of the rack… Did I mention that I’m brand, spanking new? Feeling so dumb, I fish the roasting pan from the bottom of the top of the whole contraption, somehow managing not to spill onion or bird everywhere, and put it in the right spot. Okay. Now we can pretend to be a functioning adult who can cook chicken, right? Right.

An hour later, I take this chicken out to check it and add some veggies. And as I gaze as this delicious smelling carcass, it becomes clearer and clearer… It’s on its side. It’s completely sideways. How!? It’s one wing is in the air, waving for help, the other tucked under itself like a child napping. Perfect. Absolutely perfect.

To recap: mystery bird in a bag cast a confuse spell on me yesterday, and probably all my descendants, bc it knew I didn’t even want it to begin with.

I cooked what I think is a chicken yesterday. It took longer than necessary. I had to flip the pan right side up. I had to save the bird from its fallen state.

I don’t even eat meat. Now I have a whole cooked carcass. Good thing the kids could use it for quesadillas. The rest is chilling in the freezer for another day, when I want to be reminded of how delicious a thousand stupid mistakes can be.