Melissa's Place

Reasons to buy Skinless Chicken

I have a big purple bruise on the knuckle of the ring finger of my left hand. I’m lucky it’s not the size of a tennis ball. I’m lucky it’s not broken. I’m lucky I can still move it, actually. For a few agonizing seconds, I was not so sure.

Here is what happened. I was reading Delia’s lovely husband’s blog about making curry chicken soup in the morning. And I decided that that would be fun. (By the way, my soup wasn’t so delicious). So I scribbled down the ingredients and tried to burn to memory the instructions and I went grocery shopping. He had specifically instructed to buy two dollar chicken. The kind with the bones and the skin. He said to skim off the fat. I was excited to buy cheap chicken. I am normally not encouraged by my husband to buy bone-in skin-on stuff, even though the cheap side of me claims that it has more flavour. Today, I did just that. I did splurge and spend three dollars on it.

When it came to the night to make the soup, I rinsed off the chicken and decided I’d have to skim a whole lot less fat if I just removed the chicken skin before cooking it. So I was perched in front of the kitchen sinks (which were loaded with dirty dishes – including hard-rimmed cups) peeling back skin which was kind of stubbornly sticking to the bones and trying not to think about the fact that my hands were going numb with the cold from the still-partly-frozen bird pieces. In retrospect, if they hadn’t been a bit numb, I think I would have screamed.

My left hand slipped from the bird leg as the skin finally gave and I estimate it was going about 189 km/h when it hit the rim of a plastic (thank GOD!) cup in the sink about two feet from the meat. Full force of trauma was placed on one knuckle and I think I swallowed my tongue. I may have half expected to see no finger there at all because my entire hand went numb and my thumb began to tingle.
I took my rings off and put them on the other hand and so I was a bit disappointed that the swelling was not proportional to the pain. Nor was the bruising to be honest. What’s the point of dreadfully injuring oneself with no one around if you’re not going to have the showcase of scars to back up your story?