food: chicken madness, or why i'm a horrible vegetarian

I have eaten a vegetarian diet for up to five years at a stretch.  Three of our four kids are vegetarians.  Most of the time we don't eat meat by preference and I skip the meat department without a glance.  But every now and then at the store, I'll be hijacked by a completely unbidden, imperative need for meat.  Usually it's poultry, very occasionally red meat, and once a year or so I'll have to order liver and onions.

And it really does feel like a need.  It comes from somewhere so far down that I honestly can't tell whether it's a brain thing, a body thing, or both.  Maybe every now and then, my cells have to holler like all the Whos down in Whoville, "You need a massive dose of iron and protein, stat!" 

Although we eat fairly healthily, I'm afraid I would make a wretched permanent vegetarian because of this urgent primal cry for animal protein that grips me occasionally and won't let go.  Can't help thinking there would be unpleasant consequences.  On the plus side, I am now able to give blood for the first time in 25 years, after eating meat frequently enough that I am no longer anemic.

This week was not typical of my meat madness, but will serve to illustrate.

Wednesday:  Trying out a new local Latino market (sorry, Family Fruit Market), I came across these:

Yup, you guessed it - chicken feet.  $2-a-pound chicken feet, to be exact.  I said ohmygod sotto voce, snapped a photo, wandered around the store trying to decide whether to buy them, then figured what the hell. On the strength of my dear friend Tracy's recommendation, who insists that chicken feet are "walking bouillon cubes of chickeny flavor," I threw them in a crock pot with water, bay leaf and peppercorns and let them simmer for 24 hours.  I couldn't handle touching the creepy gelatinous feet, and was particularly grossed out by the claws, so contrived to drain the stock and dispose of the feet without actually touching them.  Apparently the Chinese and people in many other cultures love to eat them and find the gelatinous quality appealing rather than hurl-inducing.  In fact, Chinese love them so much that they recently lifted trade barriers so that they could import American chicken feet, and that's why our chicken feet are $2 per pound.

I reduced the stock drastically, down to about 10 ounces, inadvertently creating an amazingly bouncy product that friend chef Mike christened a "chicken superball."  Oddly enough, it tasted fine and had a wonderful smooth body as a stock, but it wasn't very chickeny.   I stuck it in the fridge to await further experimentation.

Thursday:  Thursday was a chicken-free day.

Friday:  While at ALDI shopping for other things, my cavemom came out, growling, unbidden, for meat...specifically, Cornish game hens.  I had to have them, and at $2.49 each, they were a bargain.  I roasted them to a turn, trying not to make whimpery hungry dog noises waiting for them to be done.  They came out like this, adorable, tiny, and succulent.  Just rubbed with salt/pepper and a little butter.  Couldn't beat it.

My husband and older son helped me out with one of them - fairly brave of my spouse, considering he swore off Cornish game hens after seeing David Lynch's Eraserhead...and now that I've just watched that clip for the first time, I understand why.  Not putting the link here is, in my view, a public service.

Our younger son was upset at the sight of the game hens, I think because they're small and cute.  All I could offer in my defense was that (1) I don't eat meat very often, (2) it's a small bird, not a baby bird, and (3) I'd much rather eat a chicken than a hot dog because at least with a chicken, you know what it is.

After dinner, every noneaten bit of the game hens went into the crockpot for a new batch of stock to cook overnight.

Saturday:  The game hen stock was nice, but I decided to toss the chicken-feet reduction in there, and then the magic happened.  Now the stock had deep flavor and incredible body.  Figured I'd let the whole thing go another day to see where the stock would end up.  A kitchen scientist/tinker, I am to the end.

Sunday:  By this morning, the stock had turned a lovely pale brown.  The original game hens had cooked away to almost nothing:  the bones were so soft they disintegrated in my fingers.  I imagine the stock will be chock-full of calcium as well as gelatin protein.  I strained the stock carefully and now it's sitting, covered, out in the snow, waiting to be defatted and turned into the most amazing, curative chicken soup ever.

Our older son said to me this morning, "So what's going to happen is you're just going to keep cooking chicken and then keep adding the bones to this stock, until it becomes a super-concentrated super chicken stock."  I laughed and said, "you know me - why stop at the point when something's done when you can keep pushing it to the extreme?"  :D

I believe in keeping our family's meat consumption to a minimum for many reasons: better for the planet, better in terms of sharing the world's food resources more equitably, better for us, cheaper, a "cleaner" way of eating, if that makes any sense.  I'm sure I'd survive just fine without meat.  It intrigues me, though, how this urge breaks through whether or not I want it to - and most of the time, when I feed that urge, I feel better.  I would be very interested to know if others have ever felt this same old pull - and how they choose respond to it.