Baked Chicken, Egg Nog and High Fidelity

WARNING :

If you receive an e-mail entitled "Badtimes", delete it immediately. Do not open it. Apparently this one is pretty nasty. It will not only erase everything on your hard drive, but it will also delete anything on disks within 20 feet of your computer.

It demagnetizes the stripes on ALL of your credit cards. It reprograms your ATM access code, screws up the tracking on your VCR and uses subspace field harmonics to scratch any CD's you attempt to play. It will program your phone auto dial to call only your mother-in-law's number. This virus will mix antifreeze into your fish tank. It will drink all of your beer.

For God's sake, man, are you listening!

It will leave dirty socks on the coffee table when you are expecting company. It will replace your shampoo with hair remover, all the while dating your current boy/girlfriend behind your back and billing their hotel rendezvous to your Visa card. It will cause you to run with scissors and throw things in a way that is only fun until someone loses an eye. It will rewrite your backup files, changing all your active verbs to passive tense and incorporating undetectable misspellings, which grossly change the interpretations of key sentences.

If the "Badtimes" message is opened in a Windows 95/98 environment, it will leave the toilet seat up and your hair dryer plugged in dangerously close to a full bathtub. It will not only remove the warning tags from your mattresses and pillows, it will also refill your skim milk with whole milk. Consider yourself warned.

Lounging With A Video:
High Fidelity

John and Joan Cusak, Tim Robbins, and some guy who has a name that escapes me who is extremely funny. A story of love, love lost, love misplaced and love discarded. John spends a lot of time in the rain, but a good film, funny. I recommend it.

Did You Know?
A bowl of lime Jell-O, when hooked up to an EEG machine, exhibited movement which is virtually identical to the brain waves of a healthy adult man or woman.

The B.K. Lounge Laboratory :
Magical Fruit or Bean Science?

The dedicated staff of The B.K. Lounge Laboratory has been very busy. With the diligence of a water buffalo they plowed head first into the bean pile. Asking themselves, would people like beans more if they did not have such an 'effect' on them. Our test group produced an inexcusable result.

Beans that are rehydrated should be thoroughly rinsed to cut down on the flatulence factor.

It was also noted that beans thoroughly rinsed are not nearly as funny. The decision is yours.

Take about a loaf of bread, that had seen better days, and cut it into small cubes. To speed things up we put the bread on a cookie sheet and baked it at 225 degrees, until really dry, about 40 minutes. It was like old bread magic or old bread time travel.

While the bread is drying out you need to prepare:

1/2 cup butter - no preparation needed
1 cup finely chopped celery
1/2 cup finely chopped onion
1-1/2 teaspoons of thyme
a fat pinch of garlic powder
a pinch of sage if you want
about a cup of chicken broth or water if you're lame.
salt and pepper at hand
chopped walnuts

In a small saucepan sauté the celery, onion, thyme, garlic powder and sage in butter. Keep this up until onion is clear but not brown. Just before the onions are done add 1/8 teaspoon (a pinch) of salt and about twice that amount of ground pepper.

When the bread is dry and the onion is clear it is time, to kill again, just kidding. It is time to put the bread into a bowl and lightly toss it while adding the onion mixture, walnuts and then the chicken stock until mixed. Or go to the grocery and buy some stuffing.

Sometimes this is referred to as dressing. But seeing that we do not put this on our chicken or turkey but we stuff it up it's you know what. The B.K. Lounge will refer to it as stuffing.

Now the chicken.

1 whole 3 lb. chicken. Not live.
Salt and pepper
stuffing
string
Melted butter

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees.

Take anything that might be packed in your chicken and remove it.

Thoroughly rinse off the chicken. If you happen to be making two chickens, they are quite funny on your hands.

Rub the chicken with salt and pepper inside and out.

Spoon some stuffing in the neck cavity and pull the loose skin over to the back and fasten it with a tooth pick or small skewer.

Loosely spoon stuffing into the body cavity. Using the string, tie the drumsticks to the tail and twist the wing tips under the back.

Place the stuffed and tied bird in a shallow roasting pan , breast side up.

Bake until internal temperature reaches 180 degrees. This takes 1-1/2 to 2 hours. After about an hour you can cut the string so it bakes more evenly.

Baste occasionally with butter and drippings from pan.

Factoid: Cranberries

Cranberries are grown in bogs. When it is harvest time the bogs are flooded and the cranberries float to the surface where they are raked up. Just thought you would want to know.

There are many ways to prepare cranberries, but the easiest is to put a 12 oz. bag of cranberries into 1 cup of water with one cup of sugar.

Bring this to a boil until cranberries split open and it resembles a red bubbling jelly.

I like cranberries served hot. But hey are commonly served chilled. And cranberries are excellent with chicken and stuffing. Enjoy.

Dec. 2, 1982

A tornado destroyed a home four miles south of Eastwood MO. The owners were not injured in that tornado, but ironically one was killed Christmas Eve when another tornado hit the replacement mobile home on the same site. (The Weather Channel)

"Expecting the world to treat your fairly because you're a good person is like expecting a bull not to attack you because you're a vegetarian." - Dennis Wholey

Phobia Of The Month:
alektorophobia: fear of chickens.

When I was a kid 'cluck' I was afraid of 'cluck' spiders 'cluck' that live in the end of 'cluck' apples.

Please send us your comments and we will consider them for future newsletter.

©Bryan Knox, 2000
Designed and developed at Knox Laboratory