Die Chicken is boned

* Better pictures with a real camera of full meal to come


Ever since reading a review by the Washington Post's secondary food reviewer about five years ago about a boneless chicken stuffed with rice and raisins dish in suburban Virginia, I've been wanting to perfect the technique of boning out a chicken.

It turns out, ultimately, that it is far more intimidating than difficult. The trick is to watch Jacques Pepin do it on television about 40 times with a chicken sitting on your lap while waggling the drumstick, and then to leap back into the kitchen manically repeating his instructions so you don't forget them.

"Pull back the skin, and move the wing. I can feel zee articulation of the joint, and so my knife goes here. I'm in zee articulation now, but if I was not, I would just wiggle the knife, and it would slide in".

Wiggle wiggle. Slide.

"Then, put your fingers through the carcass here, and pull out like so".

Fingers in carcass. Pull meat out a chicken is surprisingly cathartic.

"Now pull all the meat away from the front of the chicken, until you see the oyster, you see? And then pull the leg up, and then pull it out like this to break it, and then cut zee sinew"

I don't see the oyster. I just see indifferentiated meat and other things that I don't recognize as meat. Where? Where?

Oh. I didn't pull the thigh hard enough. Oyster found. Leg up, like a Rockette, and then pull out and break with a satisfying crack. There are more sinews on my chicken than his. Hum.

"Scrape the meat off the thigh bone, like this, and then break the leg to pull the thigh bone out like this."

I have no idea what my landlord thought of the loud pounding which constituted my efforts to break the damned chicken's foot, but suffice to say that the back of my knife was ineffective, and I resorted to an extremely heavy stone pestle (in case you're not getting the idea, you break the bone where the leg meets the foot. This way you can pull out the drumstick, but you leave in the last joint, to help keep the skin from shrinking). And unless you actually are Jacques Pepin, scraping the meat off a thigh bone of a chicken should be done with a dull knife, not one's chef's knife. As amazing as you think you are with it, the idea that it's not going to slip and and, say, slice off your hand, is a little optimistic.

"It should not take you more than a minute to bone out a chicken".

Says Jacques. It should take 20 sweating minutes if you're me.

Travails aside, in the end I had a boned out chicken. I made a stuffing of artichoke hearts and spinach, and tied the chicken up for roasting. The result was delicious. Now, to perfect that rice and raisin mixture for next time.