day 15
Chicken. Chicken is probably the one food I would happily die for. Fried chicken. Roast chicken. Itty little bits of chicken battered in KFC’s finest. My favourite meal as a kid was chicken, potatoes and beans. I’m a cheap date, what can I tell ya. There’s something so satisfying about ripping the meat off the bones, eating it with your hands, fighting over who gets the wings in your family and the little nubbin at the back of the chicken’s body, which is somehow so crispy and so rich in smoky skin flavour, but so thoroughly underrated. It’s completely intoxicating.
My mother loves us, but honestly if my brother demolished the chicken before she had the chance to have a wing, I have no doubt that I would have rapidly, and readily accepted becoming an only child. I have a group chat with two of my best friends simply called #Meats. We dedicate it to all things meaty: restaurants with nice meats we would like to frequent, recipes of nice meats we would like to cook and nice meats images that we simply like to look at.
Dirty delicious is my favourite kind. This week for lunch after slow cooking a batch of brown onions, turning their tendrils golden brown to have with hot fresh bread and goats cheese (heaven), I’d stopped off at the local jerk chicken shop and picked up some of their battered fried chicken. To make it extra decadent, I’d warmed it in the oven and sprinkled it with some oil to really crank up the crispy factor. While it warmed up and I danced around listening to Aretha Franklin I anticipated the first bite into the moist (only time this word is allowed), plush chicken meat and tried not to think about how little exercise I’d done this week.
Dirty delicious is my favourite kind… and sometimes? It feels real good to be bad.
It’s nice to think of the possibility that food can just be enjoyed, revelled in without any sense of guilt. Can you imagination how goddamn free you would feel if you just decided to stop feeling guilty about things that you either can’t control or quite simply just decided to enjoy guilt free? Imagine how much time you would save. Forgot to text my friend on her birthday. Whoops. Ate a family size packet of maltesers, AH WELL. Or even just reframed the guilty into the grateful? I may have forgot to text her, but I actually ended up giving her a ring and heard about her life/ horrific hinge dates and now feel actually connected to her.
Or, I LOVE maltesers and what a goddamn gift to have the luxury of eating a pack all to myself. The “sharing bag” blazoned across the front, is frankly just passive aggressive power move. Feck the guilt. No one is lying on their death bed wishing they ate one less piece of fried chicken…. unless you’re one of those people who has somehow become so obese that you need to be levered out of bed with a machine… NO actually even then. I bet that individual got the most out of life and sucked the marrow from the bones of every conversation, meal and sweet human connection.
So, the chicken came out of the oven… wafting waves of chickeny goodness into the sun lit air. The anticipation was almost too much. The spread of chicken casually sitting there on an overfilled oven dish, the caramelised onions paling in comparison to the “main event”. Once we’d made our selection of the chicken pieces, we ceremonially sat down. As soon as we began, it was virtually a frenzy. All sense of propriety gone, paper towels sloppily tucked into t shirts, with already greasy hands, having forgotten to do so until it was too late, we were already mid chicken. A blessing, the afternoon light made us feel far more cinematically aesthetic than I’m sure we looked. It was decadent.
Sitting in the aftermath, enjoying the moment and having absolutely demolished both the vast dinosauric chicken thigh and multiple wings, I looked across at my companion in dirty chicken goodness and said “I feel so greasy”. Like a big baby who had temporarily blacked out, eaten all the crayons and was looking for some reassurance. And then, wing still in hand he looked over, smiled and said “hmm it feels good”. And just like that, my guilt evaporated, because damn was he right. And sometimes, it feels real good to be bad.