The other night I decided to roast a chicken. I dutifully washed and patted it dry (which always strikes me as such a tender and sweet thing to do to a dead chicken). Whenever I roast poultry, I always have a dilemma. Which side goes up? In my conversations with people, I seem to be the only person with this issue. But I stand there, patted dry chicken in my hands, contemplating how the legs look in cookbook pictures of Thanksgiving turkey. Usually in these situations, I imagine myself in the object's situation. As in, if I were my shoes - where would I be? If I were a chicken - what position would I be roasted in? But imagining myself as a dead chicken just takes me down a weird road. So I make my best guess and put the chicken in the oven. I sigh in relief as it goes in. Being a naked chicken getting ready for cooking strikes me as a very undignified thing to be. It seems so humiliating. I'm happy when the chicken is in the more respectable position of being roasted.
Soon the aroma of rosemary and lemon filled the air. It looked good, too. All nice and brown and crispy on top. I cut in and see the meat is...dark. Gosh darn it - I did it again! Roasted a bird upside down. The embarrassing thing is, I've never gotten it right. Quite a few chickens and once a 17lb turkey have ended up this way. The bottom is nice and cooked, the top (which is on the bottom) is all pale and slippery, having sat in its own juices for an hour and a half. If I were a better blogger, I would've taken a picture of my idiocy.
So I pulled the perfectly cooked drumsticks off and fed them to the kids and turned the bird upside down (you'd think I'd have a system for it by now but it's always a rushed job of potholders and salad tongs, often taking a few tries) and finished cooking it, right side up. The kids were all "We want some more chicken!" and I have to pretend that this is just part of the process. Chickens are always flipped over halfway through. Culinary masterpieces are quirky like that.
Not long after the chicken fiasco, I notice a box outside the door. It's Amazon - hooray! I'm not sure I'll ever be able to convey my joy at seeing one of those boxes. I eagerly rip it open and stare at the contents, blinking vacantly. For a good few seconds, I can't remember ordering these books.
The worst part is - it's Prime shipping! Which means I ordered these books just two days ago - two days!
Just a few minutes ago, I joined Matt and the kids outside to witness the very exciting ceremony of filling up our pond. It's not really a pond, just a cement lined hole in the ground. But it has an attractive stone waterfall thing around it. Matt had the hose filling it up. Jack was explaining that the hose wasn't quite long enough so Matt rigged up a system of rocks and angles and the hose was filling the pond up at a nice steady arc. I told Matt I wouldn't have thought of that. He said "No, you'd be filling this up one cup at a time."
Water in the trunk, chicken in the oven, books in the mail. Matt's just racking 'em up these days.
These are just the sorts of things that are red flags for patients at work. We ask orientation questions such as "What's today's date? Who's the president?" and so on. If someone asked me what side goes up when roasting a turkey or what the sound of water sloshing in a car means, I'd be in trouble. The nurse would raise her eyebrows at a co-worker over my head and they would start speaking in low, calming tones so as not to alarm me while injecting a sedative.
The chicken? The books? Whatever this means for my brain, it's not good.
Not good at all.
funny...and I kind of want to read that last book in the picture lol
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