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Chickenade

05.18.05   /   Comments.04   /   Filed Under: A Series of Writings That May or May Not Have Anything to do With Art

My mother is of strong Wyoming stock. As the daughter of Depression Era parents, and the granddaughter of rugged pioneers, she never wastes anything (every scrap of tissue paper from a Christmas present is carefully flattened, refolded and saved for next year) and her recipes are hearty and basic. A staple food of our household growing up was boiled chicken. Some diced onions, celery, salt, and chicken parts were seemingly always steaming on the stove. The boiled chicken could then be used for sandwiches, salads, enchiladas, or a myriad of other dishes. The remaining chicken stock would then be stored in the refrigerator to be used for soups and stews. When there are a couple quarts of chicken stock to store, a normal tupperware is usually too small and causes spills when pouring liquid back out. So my mom would opt to store the stock — laden with onions, celery, chicken pulp, and fat — in a drink pitcher.

Many a time, I or my siblings would go to the fridge in search of a nice cold beverage. We would scan the milk jugs and pitchers filled with various types of juice and settle on the lemonade. We would pour ourselves a nice tall glass of the golden pulpy liquid, take a gulp, pause for a second while the flavor registered, and then spew it over the counter top. You see, expecting a frosty, sweet/tart citrus flavor, we would find ourselves swigging chilled chicken fat.

Comments

emily
no. 1 / posted 05.18.05 / 8:33 PM

ha ha! My dad has told me similar stories of various boiled chicken parts. However, I haven’t had the pleasure of hearing the encounter with chickenade.

ames
no. 2 / posted 05.19.05 / 5:22 PM 
                    It's genetic: It took Sam weeks to recover when I stored leftover taco soup in a pitcher. My favorite, though, was when he was just about to ice a cupcake with "cream cheese frosting" (aka leftover mashed potatoes) in a rubbermaid container. Isabel laughed for days.
Kate
no. 3 / posted 05.21.05 / 12:23 AM

You win. I thought my growing-up beverage scenario was bad, but you win.

We always had at least two of those Rubbermaid pitchers in the fridge. One of them would contain skim, powdered milk (reconstituted, of course). We always drank powdered milk. How ghetto. The other pitcher, USUALLY shorter, would contain orange juice (from those frozen orange juice contentrate tubes). Once in a while, because she felt like making extra orange juice or because the shorter pitchers were dirty, my Mom made orange juice in one of the TALL pitchers (I should mention that they were all opaque). Woah to the unsuspecting, sleepy-eyed person who didn’t CHECK the pitcher just to make sure and - horror of horrors - drowned their breakfast cereal in ORANGE JUICE! And if one or the other of my parents was in a bad mood and didn’t want to be wasteful, you had to EAT IT THAT WAY.

But it still ain’t “Chickenade.”

Chris
no. 4 / posted 06.06.05 / 5:08 PM

Kate, that’s still not worse than Charles accidentally swigging down some of Shirleen’s breast milk from the fridge. You have to admit that breast milk is worse than OJ.

/.. Comments are Closed ../

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