Carving a Chicken...Or Why I'm Glad I'm Not a Surgeon

Confession:  I did not make this chicken.  I bought it at my local supermarket.  The beauty of a rotissere chicken is you only need to heat it up, it's delicious and you can use the leftovers for so many delicious meals.   Despite all it's magic, I've been avoiding buying one for embarrassing reason that I'm afraid to cut it.  I bought one once and had such a hard time cutting it that I ended up just pulling bits of chicken off with my fingers and wasting half the meat.

Well not this time. I'm going to get over my chicken cutting anxiety.  I brought out my new cookbook (How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman) and turned to the chapter on carving a roasted chicken.

The directions seemed easy enough but it seemed to forget something...chickens have bones.  Cutting straight down the middle of the chicken proved to be too much for me and I just ended up making a huge mess.  Once I got the chicken into two half I thought I could relax but the only easy part of this chicken was cutting off the legs.  Everything else was very very messy.  Let me just say...I am glad that I never became a surgeon.  No one wants to end up like this:

I definitely need to work on my knife skills more but the chicken still tasted delicious.