The Way To A Man's Heart . . .

There are many excellent food blogs on the web, too many to mention by name here. There are many bloggers of a more general nature who occasionally treat us to a tried and tested recipe of their own and the comments are always appreciative, the commentators promising to try it out for themselves. I don’t keep track of how many do.

Tales of cookery disasters are less frequent.

I like cooking, not so much the daily catering aspect of it, rather more the entertaining aspect, the playing around with recipes aspect. When I had to stop paid employment for health reasons and Beloved took over as my main private breadwinner, cooking became one of my hobbies. In other words, I learned to cook in middle age.

Until then, right from the very beginning, in various of my incarnations, for many meals we made do with the deep freeze aisle in supermarkets. Which is where I bought my first ever chicken, frozen and, no doubt, not free-range, something not to be thought of nowadays.

So there I was, a new housewife, planning to cook a proper meal; roast chicken with all the trimmings, a "proper Sunday dinner". The chicken needed unwrapping, I could do that. It needed defrosting, I hadn’t reckoned on that; I’d just give it a bit extra time in the oven. The trimmings were easy to do, all of it oven-ready, vegetables from the freezer and potatoes. I could do potatoes.

When it came to dishing up, the chicken actually looked nicely brown, the potatoes were a bit soggy, having sat in the liquid from the frozen chicken, but at least they were cooked.

It was while the man in my life in those far off days carved the chicken that the surprise came: poking his fingers into the cavity, a look of utter disgust spread across his face. “What on earth is this”, he said, as he pulled out a small package: the chicken giblets, still neatly tucked inside their plastic bag,
uncooked.

How was I to know, nobody told me.

Photo Tjalf Sparnaay

"Supermarket Chicken"