Eight years ago, Tina Fey was so upset about white supremacists marching through Charlottesville that she advised us all to eat a lot of cake. I’ve been doing plenty of emotional eating lately, but before that, I tried a new tactic: emotional cooking.
It was January 2020. I was about to turn 40 and had given up on my dream of having a baby. After a year of failed IVF treatments, my doctor told me our chances of conceiving were abysmally low. I cancelled all my upcoming appointments, stopped taking the fertility drugs, and began to grieve.
To distract myself, I learned how to roast a chicken. The resulting essay was published on Mark Bittman’s former site, Heated. He just reprinted it on his new site, The Bittman Project. You can read a preview below. It’s especially bittersweet for me, knowing that weeks after it was published, I became pregnant with my miracle boy. Suddenly, my life was filled with more joy and challenges than cooking ever presented. But the chicken was a start.
Roasting a Whole Chicken: An Emotional Roller-Coaster
I didn’t panic until I cut open the plastic wrap covering the chicken. Bloody juices oozed into my sink. Holding my breath, I reached inside the clammy cavity and pulled out a long, thin package of giblets. Some part of my brain knew I was supposed to preserve them for a gourmet purpose, but I couldn’t hold them for more than a second without tossing them into the trash.
I rinsed the bird under the sink and patted it dry as the recipe instructed, telling myself the worst was over. Siri had stopped responding to my dictation requests. I had enabled her for the first time this afternoon, for the sole purpose of taking notes while my hands were covered in salmonella. But all she registered was my useless opening statement: “The scariest part was cutting open the chicken.” No, Siri, that was not the scariest part.
I am 40 years old and have never cooked a whole chicken. Yes, I regularly roast thighs and stir-fry breasts and boil assorted body parts into chicken soup. But a whole bird frightens me. How do you know it will cook evenly? How do you season it? How do you reach inside it without gagging?
Read the full essay here: https://bittmanproject.com/roasting-a-whole-chicken-an-emotional-rollercoaster/