fringe benefits

The season has started for the island’s mobile poultry processing crew. Now Sunday mornings are spent listening to Kool 102 and separating chickens from their insides – first the intestinal tract, followed by the liver and kidneys and heart, then very carefully the lungs – in the chilly Katama wind.

But there are worse things to do on a Sunday morning. Besides the chill and the stink, for me it’s pretty much good people, good times.

And there are some fringe benefits to being a poultry processor.

Such as chicken feet.

Which apparently you can make into stock. Stock which real cooks insist is the only kind worth eating, the kind that’s full of gelatin, that will actually form a gel. Never mind that my current chicken cookery repertoire consists solely of “roast chicken a la tom palmer.” Never mind that my to-do list at the Bakehouse might as well be titled “hustle or die.” I took some chicken feet from the bucket yesterday. I’m going to figure it out.