Involuntary vegetarian

The ears are ringing pretty hard tonight. More like a shrill air raid than the easier-to-ignore cicadas. I was hoping this would improve, but like my saliva glands, no such luck. I actually almost choked on some chicken like damn Mama Cass today. Actually, I did choke, just not as badly as I could have. Chicken is by far the most difficult meat to eat. I'm becoming an involuntary vegetarian.

Regardless of how juicy it is, any meat product has a certain dryness to it, more inherent to the texture than the actual moisture present. Chicken is less fatty so there is little oil to help it along down the gullet. It tends to want to hang on to the back of the tongue like my taste buds are cloth to its velcro.

I did make a nice stuffed chicken. I'm a little perplexed actually. I was going to make something out of the cut-up pieces of the a whole chicken. I bought one specifically for this purpose. The problem is, the last time I bought a "roaster" chicken, I planned to roast it and if possible, stuff it. Look in the bird, no giblets. So today I get a "fryer", the kind of chicken one assumes will be cut up, since you can't fry a chicken whole, at least not without propane and a large burner. I take the bird out of the package - giblets almost pouring out of it. Extra giblets, in fact. There ain't no two-hearted chickens. I hope. I don't know too many people who serve fried chicken with fried liver and hearts and neck.

I made homemade stuffing out of white bread, mushrooms, shallots and red peppers. The red peppers made it sweeter than I would have liked, but otherwise it came out great. As long as you like chicken giblets in your stuffing, that is. I always add them. I'm selfish that way.

Once that was done and we ate, I took the carcass and made stock and then soup. Came out pretty good, but the veggies were all canned, so less than perfect.

Earlier today I designed a couple of logos for George Takei's Facebook contest.

Basically, he's trying to use crowdsourcing to get a free logo, which I have no problem with. Some people are very much against it, as it diminishes the artist's worth in the marketplace. While I don't disagree, I also don't have a lot of worth in the so-called marketplace and getting my work seen any way possible is a plus.