Big Breasts

Now that I have the attention of all my male readers, I will have to disappoint you with the subject matter: the size of chicken breasts. I write to you now only because I sit waiting for my dinner to finish cooking. Four chicken breasts have been in the oven for well over an hour and they are still pink inside. My family dances in front of the stove. "WHEN? When will dinner be ready?"

Well, how am I supposed to know? Chicken used to take about 45 minutes to cook, but that was in the day before they exposed the chickens to steroids or growth hormones or whatever it is that makes them so big. Resultant mutant chickens are now a good six inches thick and weigh in like turkey breasts. I may have to buy new, larger pans to hold them.

Why do we need Dolly Parton chicken breasts, I ask you? Nutritional guidelines state that we should eat the amount of meat that would correspond to the size of a pack of playing cards or the palm of your hand. Yet, they are growing and cutting meat that each piece would feed a family of four in a third world country. Heck, it would feed a family of four in OUR country.

And in our family of five, that would do it, because William is now a confirmed vegetarian. Recently, he was eating a chicken patty. We had the following conversation:

W: Is this chicken?
M: Yes.
W: What part of the chicken is it?
M: Well, they chop up all the parts to make the patty.
W: Was the chicken dead?
M: Yes, they killed it.
W: How did they kill it?
M: Likely the men in the factory cut off it's head, hung it upside down.....
W: Why did they kill it?
M: So you could eat it.
W: Do chickens have bones?
M: Yes.
W: So if you cut open a chicken, you could see the bones?
M: Yes, you could.

The chicken conversation continued for some time with William conceding that he WAS willing to eat chicken patties, but not chicken, because he didn't like eating animals. By now, all the visualization of the killing of chickens 'bout had me turning vegetarian, but don't you worry. The first smell of a good steak would shake my convictions.

You can see why we don't raise and kill our own chickens. It's hard enough to explain to him why the mom who will tend to most any hurt animal she finds, will set traps and kill mice in our house. Well, I'm going to go stare at the chicken in the oven again and see if I can get it to cook any faster. Maybe I can nuke it.