12.06.18
How to Heal a Broken Soul Through Tender Consumption of Two Freshly Slain Hens
Perhaps you feel beaten. A cracked egg whipped into a frothy, monochromatic goo, you are ready to be cooked once and for all. Your sunny soul center has been lacerated. Stabbed. It’s leaked everywhere; your shell is spent. Lips, parted and pale with missing, thirst to be whole once again. Perhaps your throat, too, feels bound from the inside-out, as if a rigid piece of parcel twine extends from the back of your tongue, wrapped around your larynx and spilling down into your stomach. Grief tied it pretty, in a bow, but did not care to clip off the spool. It has absorbed every last drop of your lucidity, and even with the pounds and pounds of coiling desolation pressed against and scratching your stomach lining, you’re somehow famished – all you can swallow is a colossal hunger for that person, place or thing that your lips once tasted but heart still feels.
If that describes you, consume the words within these pages. Allow them to refill your core with brightness and teach you the ways of feeling the thing-passed, but without pain.
[Recipe #1: The Messy Beginning]
INGREDIENTS:
· 1 broken heart
· 8 unscented candles
· 2 freshly killed hens
· 1 table covered in plastic
· 2 sweet white onions
DIRECTIONS:
1. Splash cold water on your eyes. Pat dry. Gently tap temples, cheekbones and lips with two fingers to energize the skin and remind yourself that you’re here and you’re ready. Tap the table upon which you’ll be working, in the same manner as on your face. Awaken.
2. Light the candles and arrange them somewhere nearby, perhaps on a window sill, table or counter, while assuring that they will not be in the way of your workspace.
3. Take a moment to regard the slain, sacred birds. Appreciate the glory of their white, silky fluff and intensity of their sharp, fiery beaks. Acknowledge that death can be beautiful, and that this particular beauty can be eaten.
4. Quickly douse each hen in freezing sink water to prevent the skin from tearing when being plucked. Pat the birds dry with a towel and then remove the feathers, letting them fall like clumps of wet, incandescent snow into a waste bag nearby. Listen to the soft pa-shh they make when landing. Use a knife to pluck the ones that won’t let go, and notice how letting go feels – the firm pop of shaft-to-skin separation, the swaying of feathers as they try to combat gravity, the gentle surrendering, the relief.
5. Cut off the heads with a pair of sheers and discard. Allow the glistening, deep ruby pools to fill your eyesight. They might as well have escaped your own veins. When the heads thunk amongst the feathers think about how all things can live, die, and then infinitely transform as their cells are consumed by tongues or dirt in an endless, miraculous cycle of absorption. Let this reaffirm the infinite continuity within yourself.
6. One bird at a time, grasp the neck and pull the skin down tightly. Slit the skin on top of the neck from the backbone to the end of the neck. Be clean and respectful with your incisions, for all flesh is flesh. Separate the neck from the windpipe and crop with your fingers, cut them off and discard. Slice the necks off at the backbone and place them in a pot filled halfway with water, on medium/high heat over the stove. The broth, the liquid essence of these birds, begins to form.
7. Cut off the feet at the leg joint, pressing your knife through just cartilage, not bone. If you’re cutting bone, the knife is not positioned properly. Hold each foot in your hand, one by one. Notice how the skin just above the talons resembles fish scales. Light, pearly yellow like creamed butter. Smooth and slippery like the skin below your armpits when your own talons grasp the sheets. Think of your thing-passed while loving these feet, and then discard them.
8. Take the body of each hen, one at a time, in your hands. Feel their weight, with all their viscera still held within. Appreciate the mass of a full thing, a full belly. Then, set the bodies down on the workspace and carefully slit the body cavity and remove the vent, starting from the breast and cut vertically encircling the vent and reconnecting with your cut line.
9. Remove all the innards. Take the livers and pull off the bile ducts. Do not break them or your birds will be stained green. As pretty as this sounds, you should maintain the birds’ regal rose (soon to be golden-brown) color. Discard the intestines and kidneys and place the livers in the pot.
10. Remove the hearts. Hold them one by one, closing your eyes. Feel your own heart beating and imagine that the pulse is originating from your palms. Put them in the pot.
11. Be sure to remove all the lungs and discard them, but not before you blow gently onto them, lips soft, wet and willing, giving them some of the air back that you’ve taken. Breathe out from low down in your belly, going deep, deeper until your chest has emptied hotness onto these magnificent, red-purple lungs. Inhale through your nose and repeat five times per set of lungs. Observe how the warming of lungs and calming of your heart correlate.
12. Next, take the gizzards and butterfly them open. In this form they might as well have been found on a beach amongst clam shells, filled with sand and sweet sea debris. Chickens eat small stones that stay in the gizzard to grind their food, so they may be quite full of degenerating corn. Pick through to find these precious relics, rinse them with soap and put them in a glass dish to serve as a reminder that even the hardest, most concealed parts of a being can always be salvaged. Rinse the gizzards and admire their inner surfaces, golden yellow and coppery orange in vein-like crevices. Their facades make a pattern intricate enough for a queen. Alas, peel them off like coagulated glue on a tingling, excited palm, discard them and place the skinless gizzards in the pot.
13. Cut off the tails and discard them. As cute as they are, they contain bad-tasting yellow glands. Scrape the rest of the entrails out of the birds and clean them with water. They are now ready for marinating and massage.
14. Watch the hearts, necks, giblets and livers slowly turn in the boiling water, a harmonious dance of self-offering. Appendages spreading apart and intermingling, scents and flavors colluding. Introduce the onions, chopped, into this recital. The birds are your vessel, and this is your potion. It can cook for as long as you wish. Soon you’ll be transported and transformed.
[Recipe #2: Seasoning with Touch]
INGREDIENTS (doubled, for two hens):
· 4 tbsp jarred green peppercorns, drained
· 2 small slivers garlic
· 1 tsp ground cinnamon
· 6 tbsp butter
· 2 tsp salt
· 3-4 bay leaves
1. Crush the peppercorns, using a mortar and pestle. Work the garlic and cinnamon into the pepper, then the butter and salt. As you do this, think about how your tools perform like the swallowed stones in the birds’ gizzards, the ingredients like the ground corn. This act is an ode to the innerworkings of the gizzard and proof of how your hands can utilize a tool, transforming solids into glimmering dust and lipids into celebrations.
2. One hen at a time, lift the skin of the body, pressing your fingers inside. Search for a pocket beneath the breast, near the wing. Finger it, feeling the walls of plump, pink muscle slide along your fingertips. Then, holding the breast in your left palm, tenderly push for the spine. Loosen every area, separating the skin and membrane from flesh, and push in the cinnamon butter. Spread it lusciously. Leave no part untouched. Let your fingers act like lips, spilling love into this entity with every lick. Love, in the form of butter, sweet and sumptuous.
3. Score the drumsticks and thick parts of the legs using a small sharp knife, so that spices will penetrate. Scar them kindly, as if you’re doing surgery on angels.
4. Preheat the oven to 350°F and place the rack on the middle notches. This hot basket is a portal, a place where alchemy exists, where the hens and your heart shall turn from bleeding pink to robust, gleaming gold.
5. Set the chickens and bay leaves snugly in shallow baking dishes. They must feel swaddled and coddled, as you do when you can’t get up in the morning. Every being, dead or alive, should experience this at some point – it’s part of residing in a universe where everything surrounds and embraces something else. Note that this comfort can only be truly appreciated when it is temporary, so rising is important in order to feel it again. Congratulate yourself on parting with your shelter of pillows today and feel content that you’re bequeathing that relaxation onto these creatures, every part of whom you love.
6. Roast the chickens, uncovered, for 1 to 1 ½ hours, basting intermittently with the juices. Observe how these liquids change over the course of cooking, in color, texture and smell. Realize that you thirst for them and that they are bubbling for you. But you are patient and giving, so you bathe the birds in them instead, watching them glisten as they drink and regurgitate their own nectars.
7. You’ll know they’re done when the skin is beautifully golden and crisp. Let them sit for at least 10 minutes before carving. As you wait, stand directly above the transformed birds and acknowledge that you, the alchemist, used your willpower and appendages to convert them. Breathe in their pungency, allowing the savory to absorb into your skin and hair and dance across your patient tongue. Feel the steam sticking and liquefying onto your face, caressing your cheeks and cupids bow. Your pores open and welcome it all.
[Recipe #3: Serving to Induce Ecstasy]
INGREDIENTS:
· Any number of loved ones as dinner guests
· 1 set table
· Soothing jazz music
· 1 carving knife
· 2 lemons cut into quarters
1. Remove bay leaves from the pans and discard.
2. Carve the hens in a room separate from guests. Take your time. Regard how their wounds have hardened and healed. They no longer ooze blood but rather sweet, salty juices that have been fortified and evoked by your tender, butter-covered fingertips, whose prints absorbed the liquids back. Cutting carefully, focus on these liquids that spill from the tender, white flesh and join their sisters in the pan below.
3. Place the sliced meat on a platter and add the leftover bones to your simmering broth. Pour the juices left in the pan into a sauceboat.
4. Turn on the jazz music and announce to your guests that the meal is arriving. Bring the chicken to the table, along with the sauceboat and lemon wedges. Absorb the eyes that gaze over you and your triumphs. Place the crucified chicken in the center of the table, the accoutrements on either side. Watch as the corners of your guests’ mouths turn upwards and start to water. They thirst for this beauty you created.
5. Allow them to serve themselves. Watch as they pile their plates high with golden, moist flesh, pouring the juices over and making sure every bit is wet and euphoric. Observe as the color in their cheeks heightens, their foreheads dampen and chins drip with sweet chicken juice and saliva.
6. Then, fill your own plate. Taking pieces of dark and light meat, wing and breast, the soft, circular oysters from underneath the body. Take the crispiest and the fattiest of skin. Indulge in everything. Cover it in buttery, luscious juice from the sauceboat. Pour a little into a spoon and begin with that. Introduce yourself to the birds that you’ve lovingly prepared for hours by consuming their potion and heightening your transformation. Say, “Oh yes,” out loud, joining the symphony of chews and licks that accompanies the jazz. Slurp. The buttery cinnamon and peppercorn collide with your taste-buds and swim around each ivory tooth, until they reach the back of your tongue and slide beautifully, slowly downwards, and you realize that they go smoothly because the twine is gone. Your larynx is free, and your throat welcomes the gentle warmness. Bite. The tender, flesh of chicken fills your mouth, its liquids erupting as you chew, absorbing every spice, every minute flavor. You allow it to slip back, going deep, deep down and filling your hungry core. Your body quivers. You may forget where you are. Tears, made of butter juice and golden flesh, softly kiss your cheeks.
7. Realize that you have let go of the thing-passed. It flickers in your mind for a second but is immediately replaced by taste of splendor on your tongue, by the amorous gazes of those around you, by the pride in your own hands, by the comfort and love that you now know you can evoke in yourself.