Tastes Like Chicken

It's the most wonderful time of the year: Mom spends three days, two nights at an East Brunswick hotel for some New Jersey Arts Educators conference. I get the whole house to myself (until Dad comes home, of course), and being the crazy kid that I am, I decided to break Mom's house rules and cook a cornish game hen. Yes, Mom really does have a "no cornish game hen" rule in the house.

I made a list of all the animals Mom won't let me cook in the house, then headed off to Super Stop & Shop — just like a regular Stop & Shop except with heat vision — to see what I could find. Rabbit, bison, eventually I found these cornish game hens. They look like chickens, only smaller and harder to find. Cheap, too: only two bucks a pound. Take the hens home, and first things first, there's a plastic bag full of bloody poultry flesh stuffed up the poor thing's butthole. Eeeewww. What could I do? I dumped the innards in a pot, added water, and made a sort of gritty cornish game hen stock that'll sit in the freezer forever.

So I chopped up the bird, basted it with a chicken soup/red wine vinegar mixture, broiled it until the skin popped. It was a lot of trouble to go through for a mini-chicken, smashing its backbone, finding the bird's wing joints, slicing up my finger. Still, after an hour of work, it just tasted like chicken.