Dieters beware! Have you ever had a craving for a certain kind of food that haunts you wherever you go and you can’t be satisfied until you get what you want? That’s the way she felt about fried chicken. She was looking for that certain taste that only one amusement park could offer: Knott’s Berry Farm Fried Chicken.
She had tried multiple fried chicken joints in her time and nothing compared to her grandma’s fried chicken like Knott’s Berry Farm. Her desire meant they would have to leave Disneyland and go stand in another long line at Knott’s just a few miles away.
The last time she had been there, she ordered a chicken plate that came with four pieces, mashed potatoes, gravy, a piece of corn on the cob, cole slaw, and a biscuit. She lathered half of the biscuit with butter and placed the skin of the thigh on top of it with a drizzle of honey. She let it sit there while she finished up her plate, devouring the crunchy juicy morsels of the chicken meat dipped in gravy and/or honey.
She pulled off most of the crunchy skin trying in part to stay faithful to her diet, but she couldn’t resist a taste of the fried stuff. She would eat a crust of skin occasionally as the meal proceeded. Finally full, she looked down at her empty plate to see the “Biscuit Skin” taunting her. “Aren’t you going to eat me too?” the Biscuit Skin demands silently enticing her.
“Don’t you want to eat this?” she asks her husband. If he eats it, she will get a vicarious thrill from watching his eyes close in ecstasy as he bites into the sweet, savory, buttery morsel. But he doesn’t want it. She tries to get her daughter to eat it, but she is full too. She leaves it on the table to be cleared away, sadly.
But that Biscuit Skin is haunting her. She thinks about it day and night. She wishes she would have just eaten the damned thing, because now she would be focused on it until the next time which might not be for another decade.
She confesses to her father-in-law (a fellow dieter cheater) that the Biscuit Skin is haunting her. “I knew you would understand this,” she says to him. She had seen him on many a Thanksgiving roll up a piece of turkey skin fill it with stuffing and cram it down his throat in the secrecy of the hallway… away from judgmental eyes of his thin-minded wife.
Father-in-Law closes his eyes imagining the golden brown biscuit topped with butter, honey, and the crunchy thigh skin, “I would have eaten it in two gulps with no regrets,” he says. She is thankful for his blessings and the haunting diminishes. Next time, she would eat it with him in mind, as a kind of tribute. Biscuit Skin!
(First published 10/23/12)
