Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner

When life feels too demanding for meal prep, Sam Woulidge turns to her freezer supply of chicken for easy midweek suppers

- Sam Woulidge

My father said he stopped liking chicken the year my mom bought 100 frozen chickens at a very special price from a contact of my uncle’s. I must have been very young because I cannot remember Our Year of the Chicken. I definitely don’t recall in any negative way a surplus of poultry in our home in the late 70s. But I will never forget the industrial quantities of frozen chicken schnitzel Marie kept in the freezer for emergency suppers, unexpected visitors or hungry students who descended on her home when my friends came to visit over weekends and holidays in the 80s. I also remember once eating a deboned chicken that she had prepared at a cooking master class. “Life is too short to debone a chicken,” she declared afterwards and forevermore that became our mantra in much the same way that Shirley Conran declared “life is too short to stuff a mushroom”.