Make Your Chicken Comfortable

I hadn't planned on making dinner tonight as we are going to see the Russell Peters show but, as timing has it, we decided it would be easier for us if we just ate dinner at home before scooting childless out the door. So my original plan of wieners and cheese shells for Loki has been replaced by an equally comforting but less grossitating family meal.

This raises two questions:

1) Why would I serve my kid something that I consider grossitating?

a. Because he really likes it
b. Because it's easy
c. Because really they're 100% organic beef wieners and organic shells & cheese so how bad for him could they really be?
d. Because it is part of childhood to eat weird crap your parents make
e. All of the Above (ding ding ding).

See when my parents were going out on Saturday night, I was left home in front of the Muppet Show (or in later years, Golden Girls) with a plateful of crinkle fries and oven-baked clams (I can't even find those anymore...they were delicious!). Or, the occasional TV dinner with that very exciting brownie ending that tasted sort of like a slab of clay. Those are great memories and I cherish them.

2. What counts as comfort food in a mixed-culture family?

I have discovered that comfort food is purely subjective and our dinner tonight is a case in point. Both Herb and I indulge nostalgic longings for the appendages of our fine feathered friend, the chicken. Only, for me the appendage is more of a metaphor - the chicken "finger" - where as for him it is grotesquely literal - the chicken foot.

How someone develops warm and fuzzy feelings about a claw covered in corn meal and chicken crap, which is hacked off, boiled, and coated in some kindof sickly red sauce is perplexing. But there's nothing pretty in the hook to plate story of the gefilte fish either, so we'll leave that alone. I think Herb's chicken foot fetish might go back to the big exciting trips to the city for dim sum that his family took when he was a kid to escape the wonderbread and mayonnaise culture of the small Ontario farm town where they lived. I can't imagine that his mom made these ghastly things at home - not that she couldn't, but where would she have gotten the necessary parts? Hardly the thing you find sandwiched between plastic and Styrofoam at the local Listowel grocery store. I guess she could have procured them directly from the farm - they were accessible enough - but I just can't see my mother-in-law knocking on farmer Brown's door for a few spare talons.

That being said, we never ate chicken fingers at home even though we certainly could have. Maybe it was the upsetting breading to chicken ratio (3:1? 7:4?) that made them off limits in my mother's kitchen. In any case, chicken fingers were reserved for very special occasions - like my annual birthday trip to Ruby Tuesday at the very glamorous Owings Mills Mall (it actually was glamorous once, really). I ordered them with french fries, dipped them in honey mustard, and got a full-on ice cream sundae for dessert. They also had a salad bar which was the length of the entire restaurant which I think is why my mom took us there. I have no recollection of what she ordered by I'm guessing a glass of white wine and salad as those are her two primary food groups.

So perhaps our chicken digit attachments stem from the same source (if not the same anatomical part) - the sense of occasion, of indulgence that comes with eating something usually out of reach.

Wow, that's deep and beautiful. But there's no way on god's-green-earth that I am ever cooking chicken feet.

So tonight's menu is:
- Sesame coated chicken fingers w/ plum sauce
- oven-baked fries
-steamed broccoli