“Mama! Who killed that chicken?!”

Sweetsie had spied the pasty-white bird, stripped of its Perdue wrapper and lounging lazily in the roasting pan, sitting atop the kitchen counter.

Wow. If that doesn’t make you feel like Mother Earth incarnate, I don’t know what will: your five-year-old sees dead poultry and wonders who done did the killin’. Wow. We are some down-home folks, for sure.

She didn’t notice the pop-up timer thingy, obviously, but if she had, she probably would’ve thought it was some odd body part, like a knuckle bone protruding from the chicken’s pudgy white breast.

I find Sweetsie’s matter-of-fact observation of our dinner’s main course both funny and encouraging: it was alive; it is now dead; someone made that happen; who? My children may be only marginally acquainted with McDonald’s nuggets, but they know that in order for them to eat chicken, someone has to do the butchering, and even without a television to teach them the ins and outs of their universe, they have had their share of real life ups and downs, otherwise known as “science lessons.” We’ve butchered our own chickens (though the PC terminology has now replaced “butchered” with “harvested”), purchased our beef from our neighbors’ (passing their house on our way into town: That’s our hamburger standing there. Hey! It’s EATING that green hose! Well, um, I guess if you bite into a piece of rubber when you’re eating your meatballs at least you’ll know what it is…), shoveled rotted chicken matter (picking out the chicken bones to feed to an uninterested Francie) onto the garden’s plants, disposed of sick and turned-mean animals, witnessed puppy births, witnessed a human birth (only Miss Becca Boo), fed dead pet fishies to the chickens, guarded (and destroyed and built) robins’ nests, endured pet bites and scratches, cried over and buried a dead puppy, gutted and dissected a squirrel, tasted fried locust, helped cut up a deer killed, er, harvested by their grandaddy, and swatted flies and smooshed potato bugs. As a result, my children are nonplused when they see a dead chicken sitting on the kitchen counter.

I take that back—when Miss Becca Boo and Yo-Yo saw the chicken, they yelled and squealed and jumped up and down for joy. They love chicken.

I shooed the thrilled kids out of the kitchen and went about preparing the bird, slipping some pieces of fried bacon into the chicken’s cavity, pouring the bacon grease mixed with brandy over the top, and then slipping the chicken into the oven to roast.

The chicken took longer to roast than I had anticipated, so the kids were plenty hungry when I called for dinner. After they ate their obligatory serving of peas and mashed potatoes and gravy, they had seconds of chicken, and thirds, and fourths, and fifths. In exasperation, I moved the chicken out to the kitchen, but they followed, sticking their hands into the cavity, pulling off the succulent morsels, searching for the wishbone, even crunching into the bones to see what they tasted like.

We’re easily impressed, that’s for certain. And we like our chicken.

Brandied-Bacony Roast Chicken
Adapted from Nigella Express by Nigella Lawson.

The bacon and brandy flavor the chicken in a mild and unobtrusive way, but as Nigella says, “It’s still what it is.” Meaning, it’s still just roast chicken. But! The drippings make the most fantastic gravy, so don’t make the mistake of overlooking them.

one dead chicken
2-4 pieces of bacon, cooked
1/4 cup of bacon grease, or whatever you get when you fry the bacon
1/4 cup brandy (I used triple sec)
the neck and giblets, reserved for the gravy
½ cup flour, approximately
salt and pepper

For the gravy:
Put the neck and giblets in a saucepan, cover them with about a quart of water, bring the water to a boil and then simmer for a couple hours, till the water has reduced by half. Remove the giblets and neck and either save them to add to the soup pot for broth, feed them to the animals, or pick the meat off the bones and cut it up to add to the gravy—you choose.

Put a cup of water in a pint jar, add the flour, screw the lid on tight and shake vigorously for thirty seconds. Pour the flour water through a strainer into the saucepan of hot, giblet-less water. Put the saucepan back on the heat and whisk continuously till it has thickened. Set it aside until the chicken is done, at which point you add the pan’s drippings to the gravy and stir some more. Season with salt and pepper, heat through, and serve.

Yield: at least a quart of gravy, maybe even a couple cups more.

For the chicken:
Put the chicken in a roasting pan, breast-side up. Rub salt and pepper over the chicken and put the cooked bacon in the chicken’s cavity. Mix together the bacon grease and brandy in a little saucepan, heat through, and pour over the chicken. Bake at 350 degrees till tender (or until the little pop-up do-hickey pops up). Transfer the chicken to a serving platter (scrape the rich drippings into the gravy), and serve.

Broth:
Collect all the bones and uneaten chicken parts, cover with a couple gallons of water, and simmer for 6-12 hours. Cool, strain, and freeze the resulting broth.

Ever since I’ve given my father the blog name of The Happy Pappy, I’ve had a niggling feeling that I ought to clarify that title. The definition of a happy pappy is “an old pot-bellied fart who spends much of the day with his apathetic arse parked in a half-broken down rocking chair on his sagging front porch, rocking methodically and spitting streams of tobacco juice at the flies that swarm the maggoty mutts lounging about his feet.”

According to that definition (that I made up) my father is not a happy pappy, or any derivative thereof. So, you ask, why did I give him that name?

Well, it wasn’t really me that gave him that name. We’ve all, my mother and brothers and I, always teasingly (my mother’s teasing sometimes comes with a side-kick of sarcasm: Just because you’re in West Virginia does not mean you have to drop the “g” from words!) called him a happy pappy, mostly because he adored the steep, dark West Virginian hollers where we moved when I was ten years old. And because he’s a homebody who likes to chat with the neighbors, muck around barefoot in his garden, raise a couple steers and a handful of chickens, eat windfall apples, make his own few quarts of maple syrup, and sit on the front porch’s rocking chairs and shoot the breeze with guests. (I had to put the front porch piece in there, though he likes the side porch just as well, I think.)

Those traits aside, my father is nothing like a happy pappy. He rides his bike the seven miles to school and the seven miles back, he reads all manner of scientific tomes, he doesn’t smoke, drink, or chew, and there’s not an idle bone in his trim body.

To better illustrate how happy pappy my father is not, I’ll share one of my favorite stories (adapted from our book) about him, a story that makes me puff with pride to be his daughter.

My father loved our little cabin tucked down between the mountains in Tucker County. He thought it was Eden, and gloried in the jungle woods, pristine waters, and wild creatures—bobcats, fishers, bears, even cougars (it was rumored). The roadsides dropped off sharply into oblivion. Against the black night sky, the stars actually twinkled. The creek roared after a heavy rain, crickets cheeped in the summer, but the silence, otherwise, lay vast and undefiled … until one Sunday right around lunch time when we suddenly heard a tremendous commotion—the sound of motors—wafting our way from somewhere in the blue yonder, and we dropped our jaws. Jimmy Dove’s place, maybe? My brothers rushed out to investigate.

And then, because it was time to eat, my dad set off to round them up. I finished sprinkling powdered sugar on a gingerbread and putting applesauce in a dish (I have a knack for remembering the mundane) and took off after them.

My memory is fuzzy (used it all up on the story’s edible components, I guess) but I have a clear picture of arriving at the stream just in time to see my enraged father tear into the icy cold water churned brown by the joyriders, slapping it with his fists and screaming, the damn damn damns pouring from his throat, cursing the trespassers’ assault and destruction. He sounded absolutely and positively stark raving mad.

One by one the riders cut their motors and sat there, bobbing stupidly. As suddenly as he had started, my father stopped screaming, turned and climbed back up out of the creek, picked his wallet and keys up from the bank where he’d tossed them, and after a few words with Jimmy Dove, we (him, dripping wet, and me and my brothers, semi-dazed) headed for home.

He was hoarse for the rest of the day. We were in awe.

I promised you a snickerdoodle recipe, didn’t I? I think I best deliver it now, before too much time elapses and I forget that I ever promised you anything.

One of the first things I did, back when we went on that two week-long dairy free experiment, was to mix up some cookies for Sweetsie, something she could eat while the rest of us ate our milk-infused pastries. I picked through my cookie recipes and chose several that looked like they would be easy to swap out the butter for non-dairy subs, and finally settled on snickerdoodles.

I normally don’t like snickerdoodles because they seem so plain—not soft, not rich enough, just blah. But these, well! Maybe it was the recipe, or maybe it was the butter substitutes (lard and coconut oil), but there was nothing blah about them. With a hint of coconut and a touch of nutmeg and cinnamon, the flavor was simple and elegant and not one little bit dull. And the texture was perfect—thinly crispy-chewy—making me want to crunch my teeth into them, over and over and over again.

Now granted, I didn’t fall in love with them immediately. At first I thought them too greasy and without sufficient kick, but Mr. Handsome said good things about them (and as I’ve already explained, it’s rare indeed for Mr. Handsome to volunteer complimentary information about my cooking), so I reconsidered. Perhaps it was a case of the Cook’s Perspective Problem, I thought—you know, sometimes when you’re the one spending extended periods of time measuring, stirring, and tasting, the final product just doesn’t taste as good to you as it does to others.

And wouldn’t you know, that was the case! By the next day, after the cookies had a chance to mellow and I had a break from the kitchen, all my reservations were tossed to the wind—I was deeply and irrevocably in love with them.

Snickerdoodles
Adapted from The All-American Cookie Book by Nancy Baggett

These are the ideal cookie to eat alongside butterscotch pudding, or any pudding, for that matter.

I even used the cookies as a substitute for my standard oat-butter topping for fruit crisp—I simply whacked several of the cookies to pieces with a rolling pin and sprinkled the crumbs on top of the fruit—just so Sweetsie could eat some, too.

2 2/3 cups flour
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1/4 to ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
4 ounces lard
4 ounces coconut oil
1 3/4 cups sugar
1 ½ tablespoons light corn syrup
2 eggs
2 ½ teaspoons vanilla
1/4 cup sugar mixed with 1 ½ teaspoons cinnamon, for topping

Cream together the lard, coconut oil, and sugar. Add the syrup, eggs, and vanilla and beat some more.

Stir together the dry ingredients (flour through nutmeg) and add them to the creamed butter.

Let the dough rest for about ten minutes (to allow it to firm up a bit) before shaping into small balls. Roll the balls in the cinnamon sugar mixture, set the cookies on greased baking sheets, and bake them at 375 degrees for 8-11 minutes—the edges should be lightly browned and the centers should still be pale, but set. Allow the cookies to rest on the cookie sheets for two more minutes before transferring them to a cooling rack.

These store well at room temperature (probably because of the coconut oil), but they can also be frozen in an airtight container of some sort.