Our kids were all born in Fredericton, NB when we lived on a farm in Canada. We kept a few chickens so that we could have fresh eggs, and I milked Rosie our Guernsey cow so we could have fresh milk. We had a huge garden, and since we raised cattle, there was always plenty of beef in the freezers. Chicken was expensive in Canada but it was something we ate regularly.
Some time between that existence on the farm that ended in 1984 and when our kids started leaving home in the mid-nineties, some thing to happened to their relationship with chicken. I cannot for the life of me figure out exactly what happened.
We lived in Halifax, NS for a while but the most unusual chicken thing there is the Chicken Burger, which is exactly what its name implies, a place where you can get chopped chicken on a burger bun.
Somehow I think the chicken changing situation must have happened in our short stay in Columbia, MD from 1987-89.
Whatever the trauma was, we now have two of our three kids who have an aversion to "Chicken with bones."
Chicken with bones would be any piece chicken that has a bone in it.
My wife, Glenda, and I have a hard time understanding this since we grew up in North Carolina in the fifties and sixties where the odds of having fried chicken for Sunday lunch were well over fifty percent. In my case since my mother was one of the greatest chicken fryers ever, odds were closer to 98%.
Fried chicken was a staple of life. It accompanied you on picnics. In the days before fast food restaurants it made the trip to the beach with you as your lunch since there were few restaurants along the roads in those days.
Of course being a good grandmother, my mom fried plenty of chicken for the kids, and being good grand kids, they ate it until they started leaving home.
I keep going back to the period in Columbia, Maryland. Columbia is a pretty competitive town where everything including the gas stations are carefully packaged. Car dealerships with their sprawling lots and service areas and any business that might have something that can't be hidden behind bushes is often banished from Columbia to live along Route 1.
Perhaps eating chicken with bones which would result in an un-orderly pile of bones at the end of the meal is something frowned upon in Columbia. I traveled a lot then so maybe I missed it. Perhaps the two older kids, Michael and Erin, picked up this fear of chicken with bones then. The only mess that I know which is approved in Columbia is eating crabs, and as I remember you had to do that on your deck and your deck can't be visible from the front of your house.
Our neighbors, Robert and Diane who hail from Baltimore, have confirmed that boneless chicken breasts are more a staple of the urban Maryland diet than fried chicken.
Katie, our youngest, is totally different. Not only will she eat chicken with bones, she'll cook it. She must have been too young to pick up that urban Maryland boneless chicken thing.
Anyway, there is chicken with bones and then as far as Michael and Erin are concerned there is the nuclear chicken with bones situation. That when I slap half chickens on the grill and cook them to perfection. I have been cooking half chickens over fire since I was a Boy Scout back in the early sixties. There is nothing better than a half chicken perfectly cooked over fire. It's a real tradition in the south, often done by volunteer fire departments to raise money. I can still remember my Uncle Austin who lived in the East Bend, NC area bringing in some mighty fine chicken that he had helped cook over glowing coals.
I guess the reason a half chicken is a nuclear option is that you end up with a big pile of bones. So if you are ever driving by our house and see two young adults running from the house while you smell something wonderful cooking on the grill, we have probably gone with the nuclear option.
Come to think of it, they both prefer Filet Mignon to T-bone steaks also. I wonder where that happened.
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