Early morning Chook.

Oops... last weeks...

College started at 8am with the dissecting of a raw chook. 8am is a little early for slimy raw chicken with fat, skin, bone cracking and popping. Not to mention the giblets I found when finally splitting the poor chook in half. (Giblets for those who don't know are the inside goodies like the heart etc.) I know it has to be done and I wouldn't say I'm the squeamish type when it comes to food but 8am in the morning, really? the smell of parmesan cheese was too much the other week.

We washed and dried our chook, learnt how to truss it then cut our chook into saute pieces which is 8 pieces. Four white meat and four dark meat. You usually serve one dark piece and one light piece when serving in a restaurant. Trussing is tying with string so your bird doesn't flap around in the oven or your roasting pan (also for even cooking and presentation).

When I cut my chook I took off the marylands (thigh and drumstick as one piece) first and looked for the oysters. The oysters on the chicken are located on its back, one on each side of the back bone. It's a fleshy piece of meat that sits in what looks like a little oyster shell which is part of the chickens back bone. After removing both marylands I took the drumstick off the thigh bone and frenched the bone on the drumstick. Frenching the bone is cutting the meat away from the bone to expose the bone. We also removed the knuckle but Chef explained that some chefs don't do this because the bone can split.

Next was the boobs. This is a lovely process because first you have to remove the back bone from the breast bone. You hold your chook up and cut downwards then pop the shoulder blades out and remove the back bones from the breast bone. This was not my favourite part of the whole early morning experience. I removed the boobs by placing my chefs knife on one side of the breast bone and pushing down then scraping the meat off the remaining bone. I did this for both boobs then we split them in half so we had 4 even sized pieces with the wings still attached.

This all sounds a little groosem. But I respected my chooky and my 8 peices of chicken were neatly cut and not mongolated. We made a delicious thai curry with the chicken pieces. I made a thigh curry, the boys made a boob curry - as chef put it.

We made pilaff rice to go with it and guess what? SUCCESS! The stove time was minimum so I got away with less time to burn it. We sweated onion off in butter, added the rice, stirred it so all the rice was coated then whacked it in the oven until it was done. Delicious and nutty... will definitely be repeating this at home.

To go with the curry and pilaff we made cucumber riata (chef's recipe) which consisted of yoghurt, lemon juice, salt, cumin and cucumber. Wow, yum. We jumped through different cultures and countries this lesson but it all tasted great for lunch.

Thanks for reading! Keep watching for lasagne (my favourite) & anglaise sauce (scrambled eggs? or custard?).