Eating local loco
Erase those prurient thoughts from your mind. This really is about a PURPLE chicken and despite it being a West Coast story, no hallucinogens were involved.
It all started, as many of our gustatory adventures do, at a small Asian market. Now I know, that word choice is questionable. It is not a market for small people from the Asian subcontinent, rather, it is a small market that sells products indigenous to Asia. Problematic also because Asian is capitalized for both instances. The store lists themselves that way so I am just trying to give credit where it belongs. Man, I am falling all over myself trying to pre-emptively dodge criticism — somebody throw me a life line would ya? Yeah boy! The new awareness has got me on the ropes and is schooling me but good!
Back to the psychedelic fowl though . . . As part of our new immigrant status to British Columbia and trying to integrate, Dear Wife and I have tried to shop locally and as part of Covid entertainment, I try to purchase one totally novel food item on each grocery trip. We have circled the globe by eating fresh fruits, tried chips made of crab paste and crunched on spicy fish skins.
Seafood encourages experimentation so we have sauteed Conger eels, baked some very anatomical looking abalone and enjoyed New Zealand fried whitebait sandwiches composed of a mass of tiny fish fried together.
Sometimes a foodstuff just reaches out and grabs your attention though. Yesterday I dashed in to get some tomatoes and thought, “Why not peruse the frozen meat locker?” for something new — and there she lay . . . a poor choice of words for a dead hen, but she surely wasn’t moving. Somewhere in the world a purple chicken raises no eyebrows and they may be the same places where my eating crawfish and oysters would draw gasps. Appropriately in 1738, Jonathan Swift wrote “He was a bold man, that first eat an oyster.” and as pollution races down the Mississippi River, it is once again true of these filter feeders. I used to blanche at my grandmother eating calf brains with scrambled eggs, or my mother happily scooping marrow fat out of cracked femurs. But I still stopped dead in my tracks at the $14 Silkie Chicken. This I had to try.
I squirreled it away in the freezer for some special meal and last night I told Wife Dearest “I want some Silkie Chicken!” She looked at me as if I were making some kinky proposition then we started aping Lowell George’s Little Feat song by crooning “If you’ll be my Silkie Chicken . . . I’ll be your Tennessee lamb . . . “. Although both treatments were carnal and appetite driven, my intentions were more about the frying pan.
The Silkie’s label was instructive — this chicken is processed Buddhist style. Whaaaa??? The fact that his knees were bent backwards and inserted into his body cavity would certainly make a neat yoga challenge but really now, what kind of style do Buddhists have? No hairdo to mess with and a simple robe and sandals. Yet, I resolved at that moment to serve ole’ Purple-skin on a bed of yellow saffron rice to honor the Buddhist Monk’s robes with some freshly sliced red tomatoes (the original reason for my shopping stop) around the edges for even more color in framing. The colors really have to pop on this guy!
But what about the feet? I have enjoyed chicken foot soups before from chickens I raised and to whom I was committed to full-utilization. It is collagen rich and delicious but I know where those feet had been. It helps to know that prior to stewing, one blanches the feet and removes the outer layer of dermis. All neat and sanitary. This guy’s feet though are straight out of the Game of Thrones! I had to tug on them a little bit and cry out “GRAAwwwwKK!” Evolutionarily, birds are pretty closely related to reptiles though as evidenced by their scaly feet and legs. Feathers are just modified scales too but let’s not delve into too much science. This is about a remarkable chicken who hails from . . . Abbotsford, BC! Damn, he is a local from my neighborhood. I resolved to make a sojourn to the K&R farm at Farm Fed to interview the owner or at least a farm hand and see some live Silkies on the hoof, . . .er . . . claw.
They are free-range, wheat-fed, and Halal processed — good on ‘em! I raised and processed out of an 800-bird free range flock of broilers and 200 Khaki Campbell ducks for a while and have an appreciation for chicken production.
I can’t say I have loved every odd food we have tried however. In Lousiana K-Paul Prudholme made the giant water rat called Nutria (or “Ragoundin” as he re-labled it) taste exquisite, yet, when I tried it again years later in its native range of Argentina, I found it despicable and greasy with some distracting hairs fried in.
His head and beak and neck and breast muscles are a glorious glossy purplish hue that is so foreign to me I can’t stop admiring them. Like a rare bird or a reef fish it helps shatter my preconceptions.
I am delighted to eat my way through the visual preconceptions though. Maybe honor the bird’s leftovers with that bed of yellow spiced rice, and some flour tortillas then layer it all in with some sour cream and garlic spread to create a Canadian, Spanish, Indonesian, Mexican, Mediterranean shwarma type thing. We are eating the world, one purple bite at a time! Silkies today, durians tomorrow!
Epilogue
I made good on my promise to honor the bird. The Spanish rice turned out delicious. The crispy fried corn tortillas were done to a turn and the salsa was piquante. I pulled shreds of tender cooked bird off the breast for chicken tacos, a staple and it tasted exactly like ordinary chicken tacos to the extent I can be objective.
But all was not right in Mudville. I am an amateur ornithologist and birdwatcher. I swear that bird’s skin looked exactly like the neck wattle and legs of a black vulture. I am embarrassed to say I couldn’t escape the appearances. Visual victuals. Though the meat was white, the mesentery, skin and blood vessels were inky black and it just wasn’t chicken to me. It was something else, and very distracting. Had I been blindfolded and eating supper with Ray Charles, Hellen Keller, and Stevie Wonder, we would have been just fine but little Silkie had the last laugh through her distracting beauty.
