Mormon Chicken*

Cranky Steve is a Mormon. That doesn't matter in real life, but I bring it up because it's sort of an important detail as far as this post goes.

Anyway.

The other day when I came into the office, Stacey was all like, Steve, are you going to give Trisha your spiel? and I was all like, whoa, am I about to be converted? because sometimes Steve likes to invite me to his worship services or whatever, but actually all that happened was that Steve's church was ordering 40-pound boxes of chicken and he wanted to know if I was interested, and then Stacey wanted to know if I'd like to share a box with her.

That's a run on sentence, yes, I know this, but I don't care. I actually shrugged my shoulders when I wrote that last bit.

Now THAT is a box of chicken.

I have food issues because I am mentally unstable (but that's what the meds are for, so no worries) when it comes to what I put in my mouth. Well, when you feel crappy most of the time,** you tend to... what?... control that aspect of your life as much as you possibly can. So I did venture to ask where exactly this chicken was from, and since I got a reasonable answer (I guess. It all seems kind of shady if you ask me), I said sure, bring on the chicken.

Incidentally, when I first told Eric about it, he thought I'd bought 20 chickens instead of 20 pounds of chicken. That was a fun conversation. That was also when we came up with the whole Mormon Chicken thing, which is pretty damn clever. (It's not bragging if it's true.)

So basically I ended up paying about $29 for 20 pounds of chicken breasts, which seems like a hell of a deal. Just please God, let this chicken not be from some industrial feed lot where a thousand chickens share a space equivalent to a small bathroom.

The boxes arrived on Thursday. Steve had an entire trunk loaded down with chicken. He'd given the spiel to half the office, it seemed, and we practically shut down as everyone tried to figure out how to split their boxes. Stacey and I decided I'd take it home and divide it up and then bring her share to work the next day, except then Steve opened up a box and discovered they were in bags (unsealed with liquid squirting out everywhere, whatever, the main bag was sealed so it's probably all totally legit), so then Stacey and I divided ours in the parking lot. That was totally disgusting and also kind of awesome.

Gross.

Fast forward to that evening, and tons of chicken on the counter. I felt a little bad about the plastic wrap, but I'm not sure how else to get it into the freezer. Sometimes it's hard being environmentally conscience.

So then Abby was like, why does Steve's church get all this chicken? and we explained the two year rule (is there a two year rule or did I just make that up?), which she thought was a little excessive (as Catholics I guess we don't worry about that sort of thing, and I'm glad because when Steve talks about his cans of freeze dried potatoes, I have to wonder how that is a good idea on any level, the freeze dried potatoes, I mean), but then Eric pointed out that all that flooding and bad weather on the east coast? The Mormons are totally set.

Huh. This wasn't really much of a story after all.

*I am NOT calling Mormons chickens.  Had the chicken been, say, from the Presbyterians, we'd have dubbed it the Presbyterian Chicken. Or the Catholic Chicken. Or the Methodist Chicken. You get the picture.  I mean no disrespect.

**Actually I've felt so good lately that I've gained at least ten pounds. Um... that was unexpected, but I cannot seem to lose any of it on my couch and sugar diet, so whatevs.