Re-Run Sunday: On chicken fingers, breasts & nipples

This was from last July and my quest has yet to end. I’m still seeking my first plate of tasty chicken nipples. Once again, we’re having chicken breasts, but no nipples. What happens to all the chicken nipples? I’m dying to know.

Enjoy your Sunday!

(725 words)

I always make a point anytime we’re out at some family restaurant to ask the waitress if she has chicken fingers. The answer is always yes.

“Oh, you’re being too hard on yourself,” I say. “Your fingers are ugly, but they still appear human!”

I do this knowing it embarrasses my family and ups the odds my order will now be seasoned with waitress spit.

Chicken fingers are one of the world’s most popular menu items, yet I’ve never seen a single fingered chicken. Chicken don’t even have arms or hands.

How can they possibly have fingers?

If chickens had fingers you can imagine they’d be giving us the middle one for eating so many of them.

Chicken anatomy has always confused me.

One of the most desirable parts of a chicken is the breast.

It’s the same with women. Many shallow men revere breasts, more even than the women to whom they’re attached. And how come you never hear chicken breasts referred to as chicken boobs? Is it out of respect for the chicken?

Breasts of women are referred to with many colorful nicknames. They’re hooters. Jugs. Frost detectors. Jell-o molds. Dingle bobbers. Dairy pillows. Gerber servers. Bazoombas.”

But with chickens it’s always the same delicate wordage the romance novelists use. It is the chicken breast.

Well, la de dah.

It’s a lot of deferential dignity for a part of a yard bird that’s destined to be deep fried and dipped in honey mustard.

I’ll wager no one in history has ever approached a butcher counter and said, “I’m looking for a nice juicy set of chicken tits.”

And breasted women all have nipples. Us dudes, too. And for every human breast there’s at least a little nipple.

So chicken have breasts. Women have breasts. Women have nipples. How come we’ve never heard of a nippled chicken? Is it a delicacy? I’d imagine chicken nipples would make a tasty snack.

The Nippled Chickens would be a great band name, too, I think.

Given gourmet eating trends, you might soon see chicken feet at a food truck near you. Chicken feet are very popular in China, Korea, Vietnam, Mexico and parts of the Caribbean.

Me, I don’t care how exquisitely you prepare the dish, I’m nervous about eating the feet of any animal that walks barefoot through where it poops.

So I’m fine with chicken wings and fingers. In fact, the so-called chicken “finger” is actually the tender white meat under both sides of the breast bone, the pectoralis major.

I’m going to order a set of breaded pecs at the KFC drive-thru next time I’m there just to enjoy the confusion it causes.

My mother’s absolutely nuts about chicken fingers. She’s 81, has dementia, and recently called me at 11 p.m. to say she had an emergency: She was out of wine and toilet paper.

I asked if she had enough of the one would she not need the other.

But for the last two years or so she just craves chicken fingers. It’s all she’ll eat. She without fail orders them out in restaurants and insists I bring her a big bag or two from the frozen food coolers during my weekly grocery visits.

That’s how I became acquainted with the newest trend in chicken part consumption. There’s now a chicken nugget that comes in what is described as “fun dinosaur shapes.” Mom says they’re great.

It’s almost enough for my sanity’s sake to consider becoming a vegetarian and I would, but I know I’d miss steak-shaped beef too much.

I can only guess fun-shaped food is for kids so refined that deep-fried microwaved nutritionally desolate crap must have an aesthetic appeal before he or she shoves it a down their throat.

I don’t know what’s so fun about dinosaur-shaped food. Haven’t these kids seen “Jurassic Park?”

If dinosaurs ever come back — and, you watch, that’ll be yet another result of catastrophic climate change — whole generations of chubby children will march right into their rapacious maws tragically thinking anything that fun shaped is sure to be friendly.

So I’m hoping introducing novelty items to Mom’s diet doesn’t backfire next time we dine at some family restaurant.

I wouldn’t want her stealing my thunder when I ask the waitress if she has fun-shaped chicken breasts.

Related . . .

Wingin’ it at The Pond

Breast facts, by the book

Mom’s hip nipples & Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Mom’s making crazy contagious by a nose

Hillary Swank & all my neighborhood nipples

Wingin' it at The Pond

I’m convinced homelessness will be eliminated when Habitat for Humanity begins using discarded chicken wing bones to construct residential dwellings.

This occurred to me yesterday afternoon when I watched one of the Regular Joes run through a plate of hot wings like his pants were on fire, which I suspect they were about 20 minutes after he’d consumed them.

As I’ve pointed out before, there are six Regular Joes in my bar and they’re all conveniently named Joe. It’s as comforting as it is confusing.

This is the manliest of the Regular Joes. He constructs and repairs 1,500-degree furnaces in the local steel mill. He’s so manly even dweebs like me begin to feel marginally manly when he lets us sit within four bar stools of him.

He’s the kind of guy who douses things like bananas and ice cream with Tabasco so it’s always fun to watch him ramp up a menu item that’s already described with the adjective “hot.”

First he applies a 40-second dusting of pepper so thick it begins to eclipse the sunset-colored wings.

The real fun begins when he reaches for the Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce. It’s a kind of rectal rocket fuel favored in Thai restaurants where they want to kill off their customers.

It has a banty rooster on the label and when Joe squeezes the bootle you can almost hear the rooster scream. He shoots a pencil-thick stream of the stuff all over the plate until the appetizers resemble a hearty sort of soup.

Then he begins to do what looks like orally dry clean the bones. You don’t want to tell a guy like Joe this but, man, the guy really sucks. I’m always surprised when he doesn’t eat the bones just to teach them a lesson.

Four minutes later and all that’s left is a pile of bleached bones so white it looks like they spent a month in buzzard country. We instinctively begin inching away in case he’s still hungry enough to seize one of us by the neck and squirt Srirachi up and down our arms.

I’m mystified by our national wing mania.

Hooters Restaurants estimates it sells more than 30 million pounds of chicken wings each year, which is odd. I thought people went to Hooters for breasts.

And how did a meal as messy as chicken wings become a finger food?

The same restaurants that hawk chicken wings -- and there’s a joke in there somewhere -- would eject any customer that ate spaghetti with their hands, but it wouldn’t be any messier than eating sauce-slathered wings.

And the concept of flying chickens always confuses me. Is the chicken evolving into a flying bird? Or did it once have the ability to fly and is losing it?

Certainly, there’s no danger of ever seeing airborne chickens again, not with us gobbling all their wings.

I guess a chicken can fly, but it can’t be very far or very high, not without the assistance of a Joe-sized slingshot.

My 10-year-old daughter can step over chicken fence and I guess chicken fence was designed by crafty chicken farmers to contain wanderlust-stricken chickens.

I might not mind it so much if it wasn’t for the waste. I see all those bones and the recycler in me becomes restless.

Native Americans, as cited here from this June 29 post, used every bit of the buffalo they slayed. We nibble at the measly meat and pitch the bones.

Cluckbucket.com says if you lined up all the wings Hooters sells every year it would encircle the earth at the equator, a pseudo-fact which, if you’re like me, is already beginning to brain barnacle for future useless retrieval.

That sounds like a lot of fun, but lacking in any practical application.

That’s why I’d like to see my idea of using chicken bones to construct residences for the homeless.

We can call it “Bones for Homes.” I think it’s an idea that’s bound to really take off.

Yes, take off like a chicken.