The Word Nerd Wonders: What am I eating?

It's no secret that I'm a lazy cook. It's not that I don't like to cook, but the fewer steps involved in preparing a meal, the happier I am. This doesn't mean a dish has to cook quickly; I don't mind keeping an eye on the stove while something simmers or visiting the oven regularly to baste chicken, but those are things I can do while multitasking. Chopping and peeling and fileting require time and focus (it's not good to multitask when a knife is involved), plus extra dishes, and thus I do my best to avoid them.

My favorite way to cut down on cooking effort is to get meat that is pre-trimmed and pre-sliced (or cubed). Handling meat is slimy and messy and maybe-bacteria-laden, so I'd rather just take a package of pre-cubed meat and dump it in the pot. I'm not being lazy, I'm just being hygienic! This is especially crucial when I make a favorite recipe I have for pork-and-squash stew. It's really best to use fresh vegetables, so I already spend close to an hour chopping up onions and carrots and peeling and dicing potatoes and butternut squash when I make this. I really don't want to spend extra time trimming and cubing pork as well.

So on the rare occasions I make this tasty-but-time-consuming dish, I look for pre-diced pork. And one day I was at the grocery store and couldn't find it, so I asked guy working the meat department, "do you have any of that lazy-person's, er, diced pork for stew?" And the guy looked at me and said, "You mean Pork City Chicken? I think we have some over there."

I froze. PORK CITY CHICKEN? I forgot that I needed to find it for dinner; why the hell was it called PORK CITY CHICKEN? I asked the guy, and he said "that's just what we call it." (Sigh. I was hoping the butcher was a closet etymologist, but you can't find everything at Kroger.) So I picked it up and added it to my cart. PORK CITY CHICKEN, the package actually said. I took it home and began preparing stew. PORK CITY CHICKEN, the package taunted. It made no sense. It was pork, but if that was the case, why did it appear as a modifier to "City Chicken"? What was the "city" doing there at all? Did it mean something like "chicken-style pork," and if so, why not just say so? Since I didn't have to spend a lot of time with the pork, I soon stopped obsessing, looking at the mound of potatoes and squash I still had to peel.

Still, every time I bought meat for the stew it preyed upon my mind: PORK CITY CHICKEN. I made it just last week, so now, for your edification and mind, I have finally looked into the possible meaning of PORK CITY CHICKEN. While the origin hasn't been confirmed, the term "city chicken" became prominent around the time of the Depression, when chicken was more expensive than lesser cuts of pork or beef. Thrifty cooks would purchase these cheaper cuts and prepare them in a way that imitated chicken: cubed and breaded, or ground and made into the shape of a drumstick. According to the food timeline site I visited, recipes for "city chicken" seemed to be most prevalent in the Midwest, especially Pennsylvania, with appearances in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois.

So there's my answer: "city chicken" means cubed mock chicken, so PORK CITY CHICKEN is "city-chicken-style pork," only with fewer letters on the package. Since Kroger is mainly local to the Midwest, someone there decided to use the old term, even though it's been nearly 80 years since the Depression. (Maybe they knew this latest downturn was coming, although chicken is now cheaper than pork, so I'm not sure that makes sense.) In any case, I have solved this "fowl" mystery, am ready to start "bacon," and hope you enjoyed coming a-loin for the ride.

Photo of the Week--10/5/09

Here's the next in my series of "people and places" photos. We took a trip to Italy in January 1999, so it rained a bit, but it was still a pleasant place to visit. We spent some time in the Roman Forum, ruins of the ancient city of Rome. We wandered around and noticed there were quite a few cats who seemed to live there; then we saw a "cat lady," someone who comes to visit and feed the cats. So although these cats are not pets, neither are they feral; they're friendly enough, and this one sat quietly as Boy posed for a picture. (You can tell by his fake smile that even then he hated posing for me ... it's as almost as if he knew they would end up here, heh heh heh.) If there was a cat on our trips, I usually managed to take a photo, so expect more in my "people and places" series, because cats are people too.

Third quarter book report (2009)

Summertime, and the reading is easy, right? Well, let's see if I managed to squeeze in any reading among all the sunshine and camping and writing about incredibly boring companies.

Key: C: Children's; F: Fantasy; H: Historical; Hr: Horror; M: Mystery; MG: Middle Grade (ages 8-12); NF: Nonfiction; P: Poetry; SF: Science Fiction; SS: Short Stories; YA: Young Adult (age 13+); *not in the last ten years at least; ^for work.

07/04/09: Dante Aligheri, The Inferno (P, 1)
07/06/09: Scott Westerfeld, The Secret Hour (YA, SF, 1)
07/09/09: Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honor (SF, 10? 15?)
07/11/09: Bujold, Barrayar (SF, 10+)
07/12/09: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (C, F, 1)
07/14/09: Westerfeld, Touching Darkness (YA, SF, 1)
07/18/09: Westerfeld, Blue Noon (YA, SF, 1)
07/26/09: Goethe, Faust, Part One (classic, 1)
07/29/09: Max Brooks, World War Z (Hr, 3)
08/01/09: John Green, Paper Towns (YA, 1)
08/02/09: Bujold, The Warrior's Apprentice (SF, 10+)
08/03/09: Bujold, The Vor Game (SF, 10+)
08/04/09: Bujold, Brothers in Arms (SF, 10+)
08/06/09: Neil Gaiman, Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists (F, graphic novel, 1)
08/07/09: Richard Preston, The Demon in the Freezer (NF, 2)
08/08/09: Bujold, Mirror Dance (SF, 10+)
08/09/09: Bujold, Memory (SF, 10+)
08/09/09: Bujold, Komarr (SF, 10+)
08/11/09: Bujold, A Civil Campaign (SF, 10)
08/13/09: Bujold, Cetaganda (SF, 10+)
08/14/09: Goethe, Faust, Part Two (classic, 1)
08/15/09: Bujold, Diplomatic Immunity (SF, 8)
09/04/09: ^Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History (NF, 1)
09/11/09: ^Carl Bernstein, A Woman in Charge (NF, 1)
09/21/09: Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (classic, 1)
09/24/09: John Green, An Abundance of Katherines (YA, 1)

I didn't include the medical thriller by a nameless best-selling author that I quit halfway through because the characters kept getting more and more cardboard, the dialogue kept getting more and more didactic, and the plot had been given away by the prologue, so why keep on? In any case, you probably notice the major speed bump I hit in late August, called Anna Karenina. While normally I could plow through a novel of 800+ pages in ten days, I got swamped by assignments and didn't have as much free time for reading. It took me four weeks to finish Anna, which I read in bits between scanning biographies for work.

So I only read 26 books this quarter, and the number would have been really really small if I hadn't had my annual indulgence into Lois McMcMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series, my favorite books in the whole wide world. (And a new volume to come in 2010!) Now that school (and rehearsals and chauffeuring and rehearsals and teaching) has started up again, I fear my reading time will decrease again. But since I'm done with "remedial reading," for the year, maybe I'll get more out of my reading time. Check back in three months to see.