Buy the whole chicken. You've decided to mother him, so buy the good organic chicken, though it's overpriced at three-days-before-Christmas prices, so moved were you by the sniffles from his little red nose and his despairing glances at the snow, which decided to fall just now, just as he's walking you home, like a zombie clinging to his chivalry. Toss a bunch of vegetables into your basket, along with the naked bird you will sacrifice in the name of your love.
At your apartment, free the chicken from its plastic bindings. With your biggest and baddest kitchen knife in hand, rotate that chicken around on your cutting board, attempting to find the easiest point at which to bisect it. Take a deep breath. Imagine the chicken taking a deep breath too. Congratulations, you are weird and kind of gross. Prepare, ye two, for the inevitable.
Shank the chicken right between its breasts. The raw meat and skin jiggle awkwardly. Notice how the chicken, jiggling its naked wingtips toward the sky looks like the hapless victim of a violent mugging. "Nah, man...please don't cut me man..." you can almost hear the chicken pleading. Curse.
Turn the damn chicken around on its back so it can't see The End. Give it a good hard whack on the butt to prove your dominance, for you mean to make real chicken soup, and this requires sacrificing your innocence.
This is the chicken soup your mother and her mother before her, and her mother before her, and the cavewoman who birthed your entire ancestral line made when your great grandfather^10000 convalesced from smallpox or from hunting a wild boar or something. No thin-ass broth made with one sad defrosted breast ever saved ANYONE from smallpox and certainly, you will not feed your future husband some sub-par soup, you vow, while simultaneously planning your wedding, which will be on a boat, and who are the most important to invite since the maximum capacity is 40?
Only the best! Chicken soup from scratch, chicken soup made from a whole chicken! "Oh, do you want to try my chicken soup, the one I make with cilantro? Or the Greek kind, with lemon? I can make all kinds of chicken soup, you know. It's just about what you prefer," you said, with the shrug of one who thinks she can dismember chickens in her sleep just because she used to be a food critic.
Ah, how easy it was to brag. Now you press all your weight down on that dull knife, the one you got in a $12-for-three deal on amazon.com. Saw away, foolish girl, slowly but surely, through the layers of muscle and yellow fat and pale goosepimply skin. Rue the day you didn't pack a proper Chinese meat knife, the kind of heavy duty death cleaver your grandma uses to get business done. Swiftly.
Oh god. THERE'S BLOOD EVERYWHERE INSIDE. IT'S CONGEALED AT THE JOINTS, LIKE A PUDDING.
WHERE'S THE SINK???
***
10 minutes later
Wash the chicken parts under running water.
Place the chicken parts in the pot with a good amount of salt.
Realize that your pot is too small to fit all the chicken parts. Curse. Freeze half of the damn chicken.
Wait patiently for the first boil. You need to skim the scum that comes to the surface, give it a change of water and salt that dirty bird down again, like your foremothers before you have done. Atleast you didn't have to pluck it.
Oh no, you remember something. Only a few weeks ago your lover was disturbed by sudden disappearance of the rooster living next door. The rooster started out as an annoyance, with his 5AM cockle-doodle-dooing, but then your lover had quickly gotten attached, with his big soft heart and trusting eyes. He started peeking over at that rooster. He felt for that rooster which had no hens to chase around and was all alone in its cold rooster house, in a barren backyard on an especially crime-ridden neighborhood block of Bed-Stuy where Jay-Z once worked as a chicken fryer at Crown's Fried Chicken before he married Beyonce.
The fattened rooster had been neatly murdered on Thanksgiving day. He kept looking for it days after the fact, hoping to see it alive and well.
I'm a monster, you realize with dawning horror. He's going to think I'm a monster! We'll never have our boat wedding. I'll never wear that red qipao-inspired wedding dress that I'm going to get made in Shanghai for much less money than all those silly hags spend on their dress at that snotty shop on Say Yes to the Dress!
But the chicken is bubbling. And it smells tasty. You must add the green onions. Despite all your shortcomings.
Sigh. This is the human condition.
You want to nurse him with the life-giving chicken soup your immigrant mother makes for you when you get sick. How you eagerly wanted to offer a taste of home, a drop of love.
After this fairly exhausting existential struggle, you know which soup must be made. No Greek or cilantro soup for him, no. It must be the proper double-boiled Chinese chicken soup: clear and rich with golden oil floating atop, elixir-like from half a day of boiling. Sprinkle of green onion before serving. A delicacy. But then, as a still-kinda-young person you like to flout tradition and remembering he likes vegetables: add crunchy rings of fennel and turnips for sweetness. Throw all the vegetable skins like a sexy hobo who wastes nothing.
---
To make double-boiled chicken soup, hobo Joanne version, you'll need:
A whole chicken to be slaughtered dfor love
Aromatics (green onion, an actual onion, garlic, shallots, etc.)
Vegetables, sliced or diced into bite-sized chunks
Salt and/or spices
Cook over low heat for as long as possible, or until the smells become too tantalizing and/or you run out of patience. Eat with your legs intertwined with your lover's legs, so he can never escape.
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