Carving the Bird

Tonight I am carving, if one can call it that, a rotisserie-cooked chicken that I bought on a trip to the store a couple days ago. It’s a treat I don’t often indulge in.

I love the taste of rotisserie-cooked chicken. Unfortunately, whole cooked birds are not a good bargain for me because I waste about half the bird. You see, I never learned how to carve a bird. I’ve seen people do it, of course, and I’ve watched it done on TV cooking shows. But when I’m standing, knife in hand, with the bird before me, my non-existent carving skills quickly become obvious.

At first, things go smoothly enough. I cut off the legs, right through the joint; I cut off the wings. I begin to carve the breast meat. But then everything goes haywire fast and I end up with what looks like an unidentifiable creature, possibly of alien origin, that exploded in some violent manner such as by being shot into the vacuum of outer space with no protective suit. Eventually I discard the all-but-useless knife and begin picking and tearing at little pieces of meat and stuffing the tiny morsels into my mouth. The little morsels are too small to do anything with, except make chicken salad, so why not nibble on them as I inflict further destruction on the carcass. Finally the entire procedure becomes too tedious and I throw the carcass into the garbage can.

I’ve actually seen garbage-pickup men jump back in horror, covering their mouths with their hands to muffle their screams, upon seeing the chicken carnage lying atop the other trash in my can. What happens to whole chickens in my kitchen is as bad as it gets.

As for turkeys, I wouldn’t even make an attempt. Well, if you paid me cash money and promised not to hold the results against me, I could get enough meat off a turkey for two or three people. The thing is, long before I finished with the bird, horror and disgust would drive you to intervene. You’d take the knife away from me, with a look of loathing and contempt that I already envisage on your face, and you would begin trying to restore some manner of organization to what was left of the bird, so that it might, in the end, be identifiable as once being some manner of flying creature and not a visiting extraterrestrial who was torn to shreds by wild dogs.

The carving is finished. I think I have enough meat for a sandwich. Let’s raise our glasses in a toast. “Bon appétit.”