I had my first run in with a whole chicken last night—well, it wasn’t exactly whole, since, somewhere along the way in its journey from life to my crockpot, it lost its head, feathers, and (thankfully) most of its grosser innards.

Anyway, I usually buy the frozen chicken breast fillets (the kind you buy in bulk in a big bag) because they really don’t resemble anything that used to be alive and I have this thing about dead things; but I discovered that my cooking has fallen into a rut, so I decided to try something new once a month. This month I decided to do a whole chicken.

The first thing I noticed about this whole chicken was that it looks like its all curled up in a fetal position. Kinda cute, really, with its pink pimply skin, and the way its little legs kind of cling in tight to its body and everything. I was very tempted to name it, but I refrained. So that was my first observation.

My second observation was that the inside of a whole chicken is really gross. You can see all these reddish brown dangly things attached to the bones, and the globs of yellow fat that dangle down when you pick it up, not to mention the fact that the thing has a hole in it—I mean, there’s something disconcerting about looking a chicken in the face and seeing through to the other end. At this point, the chicken ceases to be cute.

My mom said I would have to reach inside said chicken and pull out a little bag of “innards." I wasn’t in the least bit looking forward to doing this—there’s something unappealing about sticking your hand inside a dead chicken; you kind of feel like you’re violating its privacy or something. Fortunately, when I looked down inside the chicken all I saw was a big cavity. Apparently, somewhere along the way, someone was kind enough to remove all the nasty organs that I really didn’t want to see anyway. So I just stuck the thing under the faucet and rinsed it out for a good long time.

This rinsing thing didn’t improve the looks of the chicken any, but it made me feel better about touching it (I really don’t know why, so don’t ask), even though it made the pink pimply skin feel kind of slimy. Anyway, I plopped the thing into my crockpot and noticed that part of the neck was still attached. I couldn’t think of any combo plates at KFC that offer neck as an option, so I called my mom to see if this was supposed to come off. She didn’t know. I left it on.

So that was that. I desecrated its body with butter and spices (don’t worry, they weren’t the colonel’s 12 secret herbs and spices—I don’t even know what those are; how could I use them?) and turned the crockpot on, dreading lunch the following day when I would bravely have to pick the meat off the bones to serve to my husband.

Only, someone from church invited us to lunch the next day, so chickie sat in the crockpot through lunch. By the time dinner rolled around, there was no need to pick the meat off the bones—it fell off at just the smallest suggestion of a fork touching it. And now we’ve finished dinner, and there’s a big jumble of bones and meat on the serving plate, and I haven’t the slightest idea which is which, and what parts are edible, and what parts aren’t, so I’m going to play it safe and only save the meat that I know Colonel Sanders would approve of, and the rest of the little guy will go to the big chicken coop in the sky.

So I guess what I’m kind of wondering now is this: for next month’s new thing, can I just switch brands of biscuit mix?