On almost every day of the week, I bone three chickens. Sometimes Hilary gets into boning the chickens as well, but I really like to bone them myself. There's just something that feels good about boning a chicken, getting your hands all over it and taking care of it piece by piece. I haven't boned very many other animals, especially not a raw boning. I guess I've only boned lambs, rabbits, and the like after they've been heated up. If you don't bone, cold animals, raw, you're missing out on a fabulous thing to do in the kitchen. I recommend that you go and bone a chicken tonight. You'll thank me for it. I do, however, hope you don't get some sort of itch from the chicken, as I've gotten.

Normally I’m not enthusiastic about red beans. I find them boring and lacking anything more than a taste of red beans. Despite that, I decided that I would make red beans and rice with fried chicken for the Haitian guy with whom I share my office and play soccer. Nice guy, sort of an aloof brainiac, but enjoyable. I don’t know if he likes red beans and rice, or fried chicken, but I thought that he should. Therefore, in his honor, I decided to make that meal.

Unfortunately for him, I decided that two weeks ago and finally got around to making it yesterday. Unfortunately for him, he was in DC on vacation.

I started as usual, chopping onions and garlic. This time, off the advice of Oscar, I opted to mince the hell out of the garlic. You know, just chop, chop, chop, and chop, until you can hardly distinguish the individual pieces of garlic. Two large onions and a whole head of garlic. A few tablespoons of olive oil, in went the onions, and when the time was right, in went the garlic. When everything was smelling good, six cups of hot water, ten Turkish bay leaves, two tablespoons of dried thyme, four teaspoons of dried oregano, about an inch of Tabasco (an inch out of one of those 6” tall bottles), one teaspoon of ground allspice, another of ground cloves, two teaspoons of finely ground black pepper, and four teaspoons of salt. Stirred it up, opened and drained eight 15 ounce cans of kidney beans, and tossed them into the pot. Brought it to a boil, lowered it to a gently boil, and let it hang out for a long time.

When the liquid was about 2/3’s evaporated, I added another six cups of hot water, with six tabs of instant halal chicken broth dissolved. Cooked it all down again, until about 60% of the liquid was evaporated.

Serve that with some rice and some flakey fried chicken with tons of garlic all done up in the marinade.

Now its beans and you got fried chicken in there. When you do something of that nature with Mexican food, you need a lot of Tequila to make it good with the ladies. But I’ll tell you straight up: cook those beans, serve it to your lady, and she will like you big time!

This I guarantee.