The market turned out
to be a bit overhyped, I actually prefer Kitchener's farmer's market,
it's less obviously trendy-and-bourgeoise. But I bought a chicken!
From people wearing slightly-more-traditional-clothing! Plus some
sausage, from a woman wearing a bonnet! When in Rome...
Preparing to cut up the
chicken. The steel bowl is for good parts as they come off, the prune
yogurt container for garbage (in this case, mostly skin and fat; the
spine and ribs went directly into the garbage can. I have no need,
and no space, for more broth at this time).
I was happy to go to
the farmer's market and buy a whole chicken because I feel like I'll
never gain skills like "cutting up a whole chicken" if I
don't practice them often enough; too long an interval between such
attempts and I'll have to start over.
I think the bird I
bought was considerably heavier than the 3- to 3 1/2-lb chicken this
recipe calls for. A long time ago, I read a kind of write-in
trivia-answers thing that I remember mentioned trends in chickens.
Apparently, many (American) cookbooks were originally written in the
middle of the 20th century, when typical whole chickens at local
butchers were under 4 pounds (about 2kg). By the end of the century,
average whole chickens for sale had increased in weight, leading to a
mismatch between recipes and real-world experience. I experienced
that mismatch, this took a really long time to cook!
The basic idea is to
"shallow-fry" (my own term; a continuous layer of oil
boiling in a hot pan, insufficient to submerge the food) the cut-up chicken pieces, first for 10 minutes
skin-side down, then 20 more minutes skin-side up. My chicken didn't
fit in the pan, I only managed to get about 2/3 of it in for the
first round. And that took around an hour to fully cook! The
remaining 1/3 took less time, but still more than the 30 minutes the
recipe suggests.
In the end, though,
very tasty bird and the cutting-up process went pretty smoothly.
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