The Chicken

This weekend we had a chicken I bought from the chicken's farmer at our local farm market. I bought lamb from her the week before, a pound of stew meat. It was delicious. David and I have that we'll try to buy most of our meet from Sonia, the farmer. This means paying more for meat and eating less of it when we do have it, which is fine. At four pounds, though, this chicken was bigger than most chickens I've bought. And it was...different. We ate it with a friend who noted, "What's remarkable about the chicken is how much it looks like a living creature." It's wings looked like they'd flapped. The largest pieces were the legs and thighs, which were huge, relative to supermarket chickens. Just looking at them, you could tell this chicken really had some free range. And the breast? Tasty but scrawny. It cooked beautifully, tasted good and made the best chicken stock I've ever cooked, and I felt like i had to make stock with it out of respect. I didn't want any of its meat to go to waste. Still, the backyard bird felt like a fairly big commitment. We've been trying to eat less chicken, and if we stick to the farmer's birds, we will.