Would you like chicken with that?

It was a Chicken Saturday.

Mom bought 15 chickens from her friend Tassie at about $10 a chicken. Usually, Tassie sells the chickens live, and the buyer has to take care of slaughtering them. But Mom's a die-hard American and would rather pay extra to receive the chicken already dead, without its head and feet.

(Once, when I was 11, we went to a suya joint, where they grill meat kind of like kebabs. We ordered chicken suya because we'd never tried it. When we got home and sat down for dinner, the electricity went off (which was perfectly normal). One of us grabbed a piece of the suya, and when the lights came on right then, discovered she was holding the chicken head with its feet stuck in the beak!! After that, we never got chicken suya anymore.)

So Mom had these 15 chickens to butcher. David's a pro at cutting chickens, so we offered to come over and help. Together, Mom and David cut up ten chickens, which took several hours. Meanwhile, Mom cooked the leftover carcasses, and afterward, I pulled off the meat (joined in the end by David and Mom). You know I've been pretty sick, so I wasn't sure I could handle the procedure, but it wasn't so bad. David tried to give me a chicken anatomy lesson, but I pleaded out of it. It's so much easier to think of a chicken as “meat” than as a dead animal opened for dissection. I'd rather think of the kidneys and lungs and bottom as “Zoë scraps,” thank you very much.

By the end of the day, we'd finished all ten chickens. Mom packaged the butchered parts into Ziplocs and packed them into the freezer, and froze the other five chickens whole. The leftover bones and inside bits went into the dog food Mom was making. We played a game of Cities & Knights to relax and had supper of tuna salad to get our minds off chicken!