Yes, judging from my doodles, apparently I am obsessed with whole roast chickens. If asked what is my favorite food, I wouldn't have thought the whole chicken would have necessarily even made the top ten. So what is this all about?
If I think really hard, my earliest preoccupation with chickens dates back to the third grade when I read C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. I know, you're thinking, I don't remember any chickens in The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe?
You are not mistaken.
For those of you who do not recall, the story centers around four siblings -- Peter, Susan, Lucy and Edmund -- who crawl through a closet full of fur coats into the fantastical land of Narnia. Although it has been nearly three decades since I read this book, I still remember one thing very clearly:
Turkish Delight.
You see, somewhere along this adventure, Edmund got tangled up with the villain in the story, the White Witch, queen of Narnia. For purposes here today, suffice it to say, she was a pretty lady who lured Edmund to the Dark Side using tins of some magical food called Turkish Delight.
In the third grade, I was still mastering the idiosyncrasies of America and so it could not be expected that I would understand anything of a place as remote and exotic as Turkey. All I knew about Turkish Delight was that it was kept in a tin and that it was so damn delicious that Edmund readily betrayed his brother and sisters with nary a thought.
Of course, the abstract deliciousness of Turkish Delight piqued the curiosity of my belly, but my mind was engaged in an altogether different subject -- what ethereal food was this that one could so easily trade his own flesh and blood for a mere taste? In this way, Turkish Delight seemed to share a power that I had only otherwise observed in Stovetop Stuffing.
In the 1980s, there were a lot of commercials on TV depicting young boys deserting dinners cooked by their mothers in pursuit of something called Stovetop Stuffing. The plot was usually the same: little boy Timmy would rush home and realize that Bobby's mother was making Stovetop Stuffing. Timmy would make some lame-ass excuse to escape his own family dinner and then hightail it to Bobby's house, where Bobby's young and beautiful mother would be shaking a box of something unbelievably irresistible -- something called Stovetop Stuffing.
The thing is, the commercials never really clearly showed the viewer what Stovetop Stuffing was. Maybe this was deliberate or maybe it was assumed that any red-blooded American would intuitively know what stuffing was, but for a little Chinese girl growing up in Kentucky, Stovetop Stuffing was as mysterious as can be. We Chinese had no equivalent to chopped up pieces of bread covered in spices. The two words Stovetop Stuffing offered some clues (clearly, it was to be prepared on the stovetop), but there, the trail went cold. At least for me.
Stovetop Stuffing and Turkish Delight thus became symbols of those things in life that we find cloyingly irresistible even without knowing all the details, things so wonderful that we don't even feel guilty about our total lack of willpower. The path to Stovetop Stuffing and Turkish Delight is that of a happy, delirious moth diving headfirst into a blaze of glory. It is where we go willingly, happily, and blissfully without thinking.
And that is why, naturally, at the age of eight, I decided that the White Witch's tins of Turkish Delight must have contained delicate pieces of THE MOST SUCCULENT CHICKEN ONE COULD EVER IMAGINE.
I mean, why else would Edmund have turned to the dark side?
If what lay within the mystery box of Turkish Delight were a Rorschach test, I daresay I failed ... but rather blissfully. Turns out that those tins of Turkish Delight would have contained pieces of overly sweet, super sticky candy. Bleh.
Edmund was a fool.
So Answer Number One to why I am obsessed with roast chickens: nostalgia ... and an active imagination.
Answer Number Two would probably be a question of genetic inheritance. Once during a family vacation in Europe, after eating a perfectly roasted chicken in Paris, my mother asked us to leave her behind in the middle of the trip so she could become a rotisserie apprentice and learn the secrets of perfect chicken. We said no and made her come home with us. What I learned from that experience was that my own mother could exhibit the same telltale symptoms as Edmund -- a willingness to abandon one's family in pursuit of something unbelievably transcendentally delicious, in her case, a perfect roast chicken.
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| Mom Wanted To Be A Rotisserie Spy |
Should it be such a surprise that I might be similarly weak in the knees for such poultry given that the woman who birthed me also had this tragic flaw?
The other reason why I might be obsessed with roast chickens is because when I'm really hungry, and I mean TERRIBLY HUNGRY, sometimes in my mind people's heads turn into whole chickens. Now I didn't invent this -- cartoons depicting this very phenomenon can be found everywhere in pop culture -- so don't judge me. Just don't get too close to me when I'm hungry.
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| Don't Let This Happen To You |
Finally, the whole roasted fowl makes an ideal everyday accessory because it is very easy to carry and run off with it. In fact, the thing even comes with built-in handles -- two very handy drumsticks that can be waved in the air at sporting events or that can keep your awkward hands otherwise occupied at cocktail parties.
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