hungry poodle

I remember once watching a TV show with Julia Child and Jacques Pepin. The two old friends were comparing their methods for roasting chicken and they got into a friendly argument over whether it was necessary to wash the bird. Julia insisted that it must be done, but Jacques said it was unnecessary, that cooking it properly got rid of the germs. Turns out he was right.

Common Kitchen Mistake*

New research shows that washing raw poultry actually increases the risk of food poisoning because of the likelihood that in washing the flesh you’re spreading bacteria in a radius of up to 3 feet.

According to the experts, properly cooking chicken gets rid of any germs that cause food poisoning. Washing chicken in tap water only sprinkles germs around your kitchen and increases your chances of ingesting them.

By the way, most people think that salmonella is the big problem, but it’s not. It’s a bacteria called campylobacter, the most common cause of poultry food poisoning that causes diarrhea and stomach cramps.

The study stated that three-quarters of us are chicken washers, proof that might doesn’t necessarily make right, and that our mothers didn’t know everything. (Don’t worry, Mom, no matter what they say I’m still putting the avocado pit into the guacamole to keep it from turning brown.)

(*OK, so we ARE talking about dead, raw chicken here, not live birds as pictured. At least in terms of visuals, I believe that live trumps dead any day.)

“Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Louis Pasteur, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson and Albert Einstein.”– Jackson Brown Jr.

Rush Hour, London Underground

Most likely the number-one excuse of people who don’t eat healthfully is that they don’t have enough time. They work long hours; they have a long commute; they have to drive the kids to a myriad of activities(the ones we didn’t participate in when we were kids). They simply do not have the time or energy to shop for real food, let alone take it home and cook it.

My answer to that is the above quote, from the author of “Life’s Little Instruction Book”. It’s another version of the “no whining” theme I’ve been advancing lately.

Here’s what I think: when we really want something, we make time for it no matter what. You want to watch the latest episodes of “American Idol” or “Desperate Housewives”? My guess is that you’ll find the time to plop your butt down on the couch (with some buttered popcorn) for an hour to watch them.

If you really want to eat healthfully, you’ll find the time to stop at the store for some chicken and veggies, and you’ll even learn a few quick, delicious, go-to recipes to make with them. Or you’ll make PB & J sandwiches for the kids instead of taking them through the artery-clogging (yes, even for children) drive-thru.

Tough love hurts at first, until you figure out what’s behind it (hint: second word in the phrase).

Bride's gown by Poochie; Groom's jacket purchased on eBay from the Liberace estate.

Summer weddings can be a challenge for a dieter, with the buffet lines and all that champagne and wedding cake. What’s a Weight Watcher to do? RSVP in the negative and miss out on all the fun?

Of course not! I advise simple moderation: a glass or two of champagne, and perhaps just a kibble, er, I mean nibble, of cake.

After all, wouldn’t you hate to miss out on this special day? Let’s raise our glasses in a toast to Fifi and Lance: may your lives be littered with oodles of poodles.

You say you hate to schlep to the store several times a week to buy fresh vegetables, boneless, skinless chicken breasts and skim milk. It’s such an inconvenient, repetitive chore, and today’s supermarkets are sterile, cavernous warehouses with literally miles of aisles to traverse, on foot no less.

And then when you get home, what do you have? Raw food that you have to cook! Another affront to your limited free time. And don’t you just hate to touch raw chicken?

Chicken breast, bone-in, skin and feathers on

OK. Reality check time. You knew it was coming, didn’t you?

A mere two hundred years ago, if you wanted chicken for dinner, here is what you had to do. You had to go outside and catch this bird and wring its neck. Then you had to “dress” it, a euphemism for all the disgusting things butchers do to dead birds before they shrink-wrap them for the aforementioned twenty-first century superstores.

Cooking the chicken involved another whole laundry list of chores: cutting firewood in the forest, lugging it home and chopping it into logs, setting a fire in the kitchen fireplace, threading the chicken onto the rotisserie, if you had one, or putting it in a big hanging iron pot over the open fire and boiling it with vegetables while you relaxed and…wait, who’s kidding here, there’s no relaxing!

Produce department, circe 1750

Another pesky chore has entered the picture. The vegetable garden. You had to have one of those as well, and to my knowledge there were no gardeners back then. You were on your own with the planting, howing, weeding, harvesting, canning tasks.

And when it  comes to the canning, we have to start all over again with the firewood and the chopping and the fireplace and the boiling. Yada, yada, yada.

It’s no coincidence that the only creature who’s reclining in this picture is the dog, further proof that dogs are smarter than we give them credit for.

It may seem trite to compare food preparation from 200 years ago with today, but I think there’s an important lesson here. We’ve come a long way in a relatively short time; perhaps we haven’t actually stopped to consider how much better we have it now.

I’ve thought about this a lot lately, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I would much rather go to the supermarket and buy my chicken (already dead and wrapped in plastic) than to have to wring its neck in the back yard.

If you continue to complain about having to grocery shop, you’re going to sound like a whiner. Whining is for poodles, not people.