The Revenge of the Wal-Mart Chicken

Some years ago—never mind how long, precisely—while working for a lab in the small city of New Hartford in central New York, it happened that I was dispatched to our location in Herkimer, also known as “the Valley”, there to do some IT stuff. In those dark times, New Hartford had no Wal-Mart Super Center, but the Valley did; and so when my friend in the IT Department heard I was going to the Valley, he entreated me to pick him up a bag of “Wal-Mart Chicken” for lunch. Being the accommodating type, I readily assented; and so I did go down into the Valley, and I did do the IT stuff, and then I did head off to the Wal-Mart Super Center to get the Wal-Mart Chicken. Not being a regular Wal-Mart shopper, I did not know where to find said chicken. All this time later, I can’t recall exactly how it happened—bad advice from a store employee? Random wandering?—but I ended up in the frozen foods section, where, lo! There were bags of frozen chicken bearing the Wal-Mart name. And so I bought a bag of the frozen chicken and returned to New Hartford in triumph. Or did I? For as I entered the IT Department with the bag from Wal-Mart, my friend did make note:

Friend: “I don’t smell any Wal-Mart chicken.”

And only then did I learn that “Wal-Mart Chicken” does not refer to a bag of frozen chicken bearing the Wal-Mart label; it refers to hot, cooked chicken under a broiling lamp, along the lines of this:

The rest of the IT Department thought this was a pretty hilarious prank I had pulled on my friend, but he defended my honor. Sort of.

Friend: “No no no. This is what he thought I wanted. Jim is too cheap to spend $12* to play a joke on me.”

Despite my friend’s disappointment, there were no hard feelings, although forever after, a WAV file of somebody saying “Do I hear clucking? Did somebody bring a chicken in here?” might be played in the IT Department whenever lunch was discussed.**

Anyway, the reason I’m bringing up the Wal-Mart chicken all these years later is because of another, more recent, shopping misadventure. Two misadventures, actually, both involving a recipe I was making, Bihari Kale Chane Ki Ghugni (hereafter referred to as BKCKG), which is a chickpea curry, as well as the sort of thing that everyone who knew me as the kid who lived on peanut butter & jelly, hamburgers, hotdogs, and plain pizza is still stunned that I will make and eat now.

The first misadventure involved the grated, toasted coconut, which is supposed to go on top of the dish after it’s finished. Normally I do the grocery shopping for the recipes I pick out, but lately, my wife has been going to our favorite store, Frazier Farms, on Thursday or Friday, in order to take advantage of sales that they run there on those days. On this occasion she picked up some of the ingredients I needed for the BKCKG, including the grated coconut. Or at least, the coconut.

Me: “What’s this?”
Wife (puzzled): “It’s a coconut.”
Me: “Yes I know it’s a coconut, but what’s it for? Is it so I can take the two halves and pretend to be riding a horse?”
Wife: “No, it’s for your recipe. You need toasted grated coconut.”
Me (beat): “Yeah, I was just going to buy shredded coconut and chop it up and toast it though.”
Wife: “Don’t you think this will taste better?”
Me: “Not that much better, for the work involved.”

My wife was confused as to why I thought there would be a lot of work involved in using the whole coconut.

Wife: “Have you opened a coconut before?”
Me: “No. All I know about opening a coconut is that in that one cartoon a squirrel or whatever it is tries everything it can think of to open a coconut, including dropping it off the Empire State Building, and when the coconut hits the sidewalk it pile-drives the street into the ground.”

https://dai.ly/x8gt1up

Me: “I’ll just buy shredded coconut.”
Wife: “Opening a coconut can’t be that bad. I’ll look up how to do it on YouTube.”
Me (dubious): “Okay. But you have to do it for me.”
Wife: “Okay.” (pause) “Does this remind you of when you bought your friend the frozen Wal-Mart Chicken?”
Me: “Yeah, it does, now that you mention it.”

Anyway, my wife found some instructions that said to freeze the coconut, then you could whack it with a knife and it would come apart easily and the shell would separate from the meat. I’ll tell you a little later how that worked out.***

The second incident involved the instructions for the recipe where you’re supposed to fry some of the ingredients in mustard oil to start with. I dutifully stopped by our local Middle Eastern/Asian/Mediterranean grocery store to pick up mustard oil, along with a few other ingredients; but when I got it home, my wife noticed something about it that I didn’t.

Wife: “This says ‘For External Use Only’.”
Me: “What?”

And so my wife scurried off to the Internet to discover what the deal is with mustard oil. It turns out the oil has a high amount of erucic acid in it, which is associated with myocardial lipidosis**** in rodents, and which prompted the FDA to ban its use for cooking in the USA.

Me: “All right, so they slapped an ‘External Use Only’ label on it, but I guarantee you people are still buying it and cooking with it.”
Wife: “You could just fry some mustard seeds in olive oil instead.”
Me: “Okay. I guess I could take this one back …”
Wife: “Hang on, it says something on the back label.”

What did it say on the back label? Well let’s take a look.

Wife: “It’s used as an ayurvedic massage oil! Interesting …”
Me (pretending to be wife speaking): “‘No, that’s okay, you don’t need to return the big bottle of massage oil.'”

So anyway, we kept the banned mustard oil for external use only*****, and ordered a non-banned variety (made from a different kind of mustard seed) online to use instead. Then Sunday evening rolled around and I started cooking, which meant it was time to open and grate the coconut. My wife retrieved it from the freezer, got a knife, and went to work banging away on the coconut.

Wife: (bang bang bang bang bang bang bang)

Five minutes later:

Wife: (bang bang bang bang bang bang bang)

Five minutes after that:

Wife: (bang bang bang bang bang bang bang) “YouTube lied. This isn’t easy at all.”
Me (feigning shock): “YouTube lied about something?!”
Wife: (bang bang bang bang bang bang bang)
Me: “Do you need a hammer?”
Wife: “No.” (bang bang bang bang bang bang bang) “Maybe.”

So I went and got her a hammer out of the garage. This hammer also had, where you would usually find a claw, an actual hatchet, which I thought might come in handy. At this point she took the coconut and all accessories out onto the front step to work on it there. The front step is made of concrete. This will be important later.

Wife: (bang bang bang bang bang bang bang)

She eventually returned to the kitchen with a jaggedly-opened coconut.

Me: “Did you end up using the hammer?”
Wife: “No, I put the coconut in a bag and kept slamming it against the corner of the front step until it broke.”
Me: “The step, or the coconut? Or both?”
Wife: “Just the coconut.”
Me: “I imagine it was good for getting out your frustration with the coconut.”
Wife: “Oh yeah.”

So at this point she just needed to scrape out the coconut meat so she could grate it, but YouTube had lied about this part too, apparently; the meat was sticking to the shell quite stubbornly. She finally managed to accumulate a sufficient quantity to toast and then sprinkle on top of the finished dish. More or less.

Wife: “I hope this is enough because it’s all you’re getting.”

So remember, kids: When it comes to opening coconuts, hunting safety, and the like, Looney Tunes should be your go-to resource, not YouTube.

* Or however much a bag of frozen Wal-Mart Chicken cost back then
** It was 20 or more years later that I discovered where that WAV file had come from, namely, this scene in the Western movie The Quick and the Dead. When I notified my friend that I had finally learned the source of the audio, his response was, “That sure took a while.”

*** You can probably guess.
**** I don’t know what myocardial lipidosis is, but it doesn’t sound good, does it?
***** Which did prove to be highly effective for massaging my wife’s shoulders while subjecting her to an episode of Carnival Row.