Oven Barbecued Chicken
Many can recall with fondness the smells and tastes of Mom’s kitchen: the warm aromas wafting from the oven, enveloping you like a blanket as you stomp the snow from your boots. Of all Mom’s culinary specialties, Oven Barbecued Chicken comes back to me the most clearly, and with all the horror of a recurring nightmare.
What’s wrong with Oven Barbecued Chicken? EVERYTHING.
Let’s start with the oven: lots of yummy stuff comes from ovens, but none of it is barbecued. Smothering something in ketchup does not make it barbecued.
I have nothing against ketchup: it’s great on french-fries. I’ll even accept it on a burger, so long as it’s someone else’s burger. But ketchup has no business on chicken — and I mean chicken in any form. If you’re one of those degenerates who slops red goop on their scrambled eggs, then yes, I am talking to you.
And if you can get past the ketchup (and slither through the stringy onion slices), then there’s the chicken: bone-in, skin-on bits-and-pieces that nobody else wants. Food on your plate should not be an anatomy lesson: “Thigh bone’s connected to the — cartilage. The cartilage’s connected to the — slimy bit.” I feel no need to remember where our meat “comes from”; as far as I’m concerned it comes from the grocery store in clean, shiny Styrofoam packages.
Now, you have to feel at least a little sorry for Mom. She somehow managed to raise and feed three girls: one wouldn’t eat potatoes, one wouldn’t eat rice, and one wouldn’t eat pasta; and this was back in the olden days, before quinoa and couscous were invented. Maybe Oven Barbecued Chicken was payback. Or maybe she’ll read this and be horrified.
Maybe we’ll just keep it our little secret.
This is a little something I submitted to the Canada Writes Edible Non-Fiction Challenge back in January. I, er, didn’t win. I’m not sure it was quite what they were looking for, but it was fun to write all the same 
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What do YOU remember from Mom’s kitchen?
Other places I ramble
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9 Comments
Ketchup on eggs is yummy only when accompanied by hash browns. I have two kids who love/ hate opposite foods; I wonder what the third has in store!
NO! You’re one of THEM!!!! ARRRRGGGHHHH!!!
PS. I still love you anyways. But as for the third – how do the Monkey and Firefighter feel about starches?
The monkey loves potatoes, the firefighter does not. The firefighter loves bread, the monkey does not. The monkey loves crackers, the firefighter does not. You get the idea
Well, all I’m sayin’ is, don’t expect overlap with a third
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Hilarious! My mum (and dad) were unadventurous when it came to meals. I didn’t even eat spaghetti bolognese until I was at a friend’s place aged 16 or 17! Let alone dine out etc…
I always thought it was funny that after we’d left home mum started branching out a bit with stir fries and tried a lot of new things! (Perhaps it was just that I grew up in the 70s – and was a meat and potatoes gal!)
Deb
Yep, it was a function of the time, I think. I know here, and I suspect it was the same down there, the most exotic restaurant fare was “Chinese Food”; you know, the stuff that nobody from China would actually recognize.
Mind you, I think that made it a bit easier, too. I don’t feel like I can serve the same nationality two days in a row – even though the kids would be perfectly happy with apples, cheese, hummus and yogurt 3 meals a day, 7 days a week.
Sounds a bit like my mom
LOL I grew up on microwave meals 