Friday, November 9, 2007

Once Upon a Chicken

So, yesterday I had a mom's group thing in the afternoon that I was looking forward to. Sadie still doesn't have a real schedule, but I have been able to find some consistency with her morning nap. It's usually roughly 2 hours after she first gets up. So, when she went down, I immediately zipped to the kitchen to prepare a chicken to roast that night when I got home. Nothing fancy; I just followed a basic recipe from Cooking Light. Now, wrestling with chickens is not one of my favorite things - I'm fine with beef, pork, sausages, even lamb, believe it or not. It's just something about the fact that a whole chicken is, well... a whole chicken. Do you catch my drift? I digress. My point is that I was proud of myself.
Sadie slept for over 3 hours, so I was an hour and a half late to the mom's group and I spilled water on someone's jacket and beautiful leather handbag (thank god it was just water) so the day was not going perfectly. There's nothing like life with a baby to make you feel like you're living in a mild state of chaos at all times. Anyway, somehow the thought of my chicken waiting for me at home in the refrigerator made me feel good.
When I got home, I took the chicken out of the fridge, preheated the oven and filled the sink with a couple of inches of warm water. I figured putting an ice cold pyrex dish into a hot oven was not wise, so I put it in this bath to take the chill off. Meanwhile, I was playing with Sadie and doing various other things. I put the chicken in the oven, set the timer and sent a text message to Andrew letting him know when dinner would be ready. I fed Sadie and put her down for the night. I'm so pleased with myself at this point; the baby's asleep and dinner's basically ready. I rock!
When the timer went off, I smiled and walked into the kitchen to take the chicken out of the oven. I opened the door to see my finished product and was not amused to find that I'd left the saran wrap on it the entire time. Yup; there was melted plastic wrap all over the top of the chicken and on the sides of the dish. Nice. We just peeled most of it off and had our dinner anyway.
Andrew coined it "saran chicken", but hopefully we won't ever have it again.