coming home around six and that he'd be hungry. Now up
until that day, I had always felt fairly confident in the
kitchen. After all, I love cooking and trying new recipes
is my favorite pastime. But cooking chicken for Frank
Perdue? I began to get stage fright. As I was trying to
find where the pots and pans were in his kitchen, I started
calculating that there were probably few people in the
world who've eaten chicken more times than my husband.
"He's been eating chicken almost daily for his entire
life" I thought, "he likes it, he cares about it, and my
cooking is about to be judged by a world class expert."
As I rummaged around looking for the right herbs and
spices$and couldn't find the ones I liked $ my stage fright
grew worse. "This man must be one of the world's greatest
experts on cooked chicken," I thought to myself. "He's
attended dozens and dozens of chicken cooking contests,
he's been part of hundreds and hundreds of taste testings
for Perdue products. Everywhere he goes, people know he
likes chicken and the best chefs and hostesses in the world
have served it to him." In my mind I ran through some of
the times when together we'd driven an hour out of the way
to go to a restaurant that cooked chicken particularly
well, and how he always seemed to have lists of the
restaurants he wanted to visit.
Help! My stage fright was getting still worse. The
thirty year old oven didn't seem to be heating right, but I
couldn't be sure because there wasn't any oven thermometer.
The "elbow test," which our grandmothers used to use before
the days of thermometers (you stick your elbow in the oven
and feel how hot it is), told me that things weren't right,