Jill's Journal: The wishbone
Every family has their thing.
For ours, my dad’s favorite pieces out of a pan of home-baked bars or cakes were the corners. Based on my own personal lifetime of bar- and cake-eating experiences, it’s the “crunchiness” of the corner pieces for bars, and perhaps a little extra frosting when it comes to cakes.
As one may expect, once my brother and I realized that our dad favored the corner pieces, well, they became ours, too.
I equate it to growing up in a Minnesota Vikings fan home. And, being a native of the 10,000 Lakes state, I’m still a dedicated fan of the Purple People Eaters. (Maybe next year, maybe next year.)
The Meier family had other “quirks”, too.
Like Sunday night popcorn supper nights that brought us together in the living room gathered around the TV to watch whatever flick “The Wonderful World of Disney” was airing that week. And without fail, a dish of ice cream to top it all off. Obviously not the healthiest of menus, but Sunday dinner was usually a meat-and-potatoes ordeal, so popcorn night – which dad always took the lead on – was a way of life.
And when chicken was on the family’s Sunday dinner menu, the story behind the bird on the platter, stirs up a memory of just how it got there. Back then, my grandparents on my dad’s side of the family raised chickens, and every year, we all came together for a mass day of butchering chickens. (To be clear, the parents did the dirty work and us kids, well we played and played until the last feather had been plucked.)
If you’ve ever wondered where the old saying, “Running around like a chicken with their head cut off,” all one needs to experience is a mass chicken butchering day on the family farm to satisfy their curiosity. Although headless, I can assure you that the birds still had a lot of life left in them.
As a kid, it was easy to sense when butchering day was on the horizon. For weeks, mom would wash out our emptied half-gallon milk cartons. Back then, milk cartons were made from a combination of cardboard coated in a layer of plastic, and were repurposed for two uses: 1.) As freezer containers for the butchered chickens, or where food scraps went.
While it may sound “crude,” the butchered chicken always included the neck, gizzards and the heart, the latter of which was simply a single bite, easy to pop in the mouth, chew and move on to the next bite.
Whoever was first to claim it – “I get the heart” – usually got it.
Again, my brother and I certainly didn’t come out of the womb knowing one day we’d call out “dibs” on fried chicken hearts. That, too, was learned around the dinner table.
There was also another part of the chicken that my brother and I often fought over: the wishbone. Why we fought about it, I’ll never know, as it obviously took two to break it to determine who would be granted their wish. As I learned online, if you happened to have the thicker side of the bone in hand, your wish stood a better chance of coming true. What Google didn’t acknowledge was the strength of a big brother had over his younger sister.