As I type this, there is a chicken head somewhere in my house. It still has eyes. And a beak, and a tongue. Also, it now has a name.

Just in case you couldn’t have gathered this from the fact that I’m even writing about it, this is a family first.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a classic Kasey misadventure to post about (remember the rabbit incident??), so on this happy Easter Sunday … here you go. Buona Pasqua!

Anyway, so Chris and I have been planning to make David Chang’s Chinese chicken soup for about a week (since he watched a video about it) and we wanted to do the thing right. Which meant making our own chicken stock, and thus acquiring a whole chicken. Normally, I’d do this at my favorite butcher’s shop in the town where the kids go to school, where I’ve bumbled through many orders in my time but have indeed purchased head-free chickens in the past. However, we had company this past week and I didn’t get around to it, and by Saturday it seemed silly to drive 20 minutes to another town when surely we had a butcher in our own town who could do the job.

So, the butcher’s shop was a bit of a madhouse when Fi and I arrived there, but somehow we got pushed up to the front eventually. I didn’t see any pollo intero there, but was pleased with myself for being able to ask if they had one available.

Yes, they did. Did I want it cut into pieces, or whole?

Intero, I answered, feeling rather pleased that I’d understood the question in the first place. ‘Am I finally getting better at Italian?’ I wonder. For once this is actually unrelated to the situation, but if you are interested the answer is no, I am not. 

(A note about why I wanted it whole anyway: I don’t really know. I had mentioned to Chris that I could have the butcher cut it up, and he told me he could do it. So, I went with that.)

Anyway, so the butcher goes into a cooler and emerges with what appears to be a large chicken. She takes it to a counter farther from me to start wrapping it when suddenly I notice …. FEET.

THE CHICKEN HAD FEET.

Obviously, I panicked just a tiny bit.

‘SENZA PIEDI, PER FAVORE. SENZA PIEDI!’ 

Naturally, basically every person in town was in the shop and the 12 or so people around me started laughing and telling the butcher ‘SENZA PIEDI’ as well.

The butcher shrugs, cleaves off the feet and wraps the thing up.

I pay and leave without further embarrassment. As we walked home, I started to wonder whether the suspiciously heavy bird might still have a bunch of innards still in it (gross!) and resolved to make Chris deal with it since it was his freaking idea anyway.

Good call, Kasey.

Enter Sunday, he unwraps our feet-free chicken to find no guts. JUST A FACE.

OUR CHICKEN HAD A FACE.

Now, I thought they killed chickens by cutting their heads off. So why did it have a head??* Also, what is the reason for having a head? ARE THERE PEOPLE EATING CHICKEN HEADS? HOW? WHY?

… I was a little grossed out.

Chris went to work trying to get the head off, but it proved to be much harder than I would have guessed. The head was pretty seriously committed to staying on the body (‘as heads tend to be,’ notes my bestie Shaina) and for some reason** we don’t own a cleaver.

Eventually, however, the two parted company and by this point the chicken had suddenly become not at all gross to 3/4 of our family. It had become fucking hysterical. Chris and the kids were basically using it as a puppet and I swear Owen and Fi were nearly crying with laughter. Also? Way too interested in the idea of eating the head itself. #nopenopenope

So, without further ado … meet “DeadHead Chicken BawkBawk.”

For the record, the soup was phenomenal. We need a bigger stockpot though, and also (apparently) a cleaver.

*If you know the answer to this question, please don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I like eating chicken.

**The reason is that we don’t often need to cut the heads off of anything.