Buying Chickens

The last time I bought a chicken at the supermarket I wasn’t very observant and made a big mistake.

It was whole — head, feet, you know, a WHOLE chicken — hanging by its neck on a hook in the meat department. I took it down (yes, you have to touch the thing with your bare hands), put it in a bag with its legs hanging out because the bags are always too small, and had it weighed.

When I washed it to put on to boil for chicken and dumplings, I thought, “Hmmm.. this chicken looks odd. What is odd about it?” Then I realized that it had not been gutted. Groan! It still had all the innards. It was plucked and dead, but that’s as far as it had gone.

I couldn’t throw it away. So I decided to steel myself and think of the pioneers (shoot, just think of my own grandmother!).  It was gross, gross, gross, but I cleaned that chicken. And the dumplings turned out good.

Several weeks went by after that without my buying a chicken. (The memory of the guts probably did something for my appetite for chicken meat.) But Sprite has been sick, and  I wanted to make her some chicken soup.

I found two chickens because Chinese chickens are tiny, and it takes two of them to get a good amount of meat. (By the way, the entire supermarket – biggest in our city — had only THREE total.)

I was “smart” this time. I asked, “Do these have the guts inside?” Yes, was the answer. “Can you clean them for me? I want these two. And I don’t want the head or the feet. I know I have to pay for them. But throw them away.” The man agreed. I didn’t want to wait, so I went on to the veggie department and told him I’d be back later for the chickens.

When I passed by to get my chickens, the bag did not look like a bag with two chickens in it. It was a big blob. The meat man had not only gutted them but also chopped them up into TINY pieces. Raw, tiny, practically bite-size pieces of chicken, chicken skin, chicken fat. What a disgusting mess. I told him, “I didn’t ask you to chop it up!” He just laughed at me.

So I paid for it, brought it home, washed it, and put it all into the crockpot. It was quite bit harder to debone, and there were lots of tiny bone particles, but at least I didn’t have to gut two chickens.  Sigh.

Live and learn. Next time I’ll be even MORE specific or stand and watch my chickens being prepared.

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1. Buying Flour
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4. Chicken Feet

Tagged as: chickens, cooking, shopping