Part 5 of a 9-part series
Another of the house rule sets which
directly impinged on me was that regarding The Family pets. The pets I dealt with were the three
dogs. A trio of some small, shaggy,
noisy, and obnoxious breed, no doubt of impeccable pedigree and ridiculous
cost. Papers or not, “Oopie”, “Doopie”,
and “Poopie” (I have no recollection of their real names) were as annoying as
can be. I tried to hide it but didn’t
like the little rats one bit.
I think Mrs. Quire saw through my
mock tolerance of them for soon they became my responsibility to feed. And feeding these critters wasn’t just
throwing some dry kibble in a bowl or even opening a can of “Stinky Treats”. Heavens no, nothing like that was good enough
for them. I had to cook for the dogs.
So now every day I would have to
prepare meals for not just the people in the house, but the pets as well. Of course, they didn’t just get a small
portion of what ever I was making for the two-legged Family members. That would have been too easy. They had to have their own menu. It was made out periodically by Mrs. Q.
including a meat, a vegetable and sometimes a starch of some sort (what, no
desert?). She designed them with the
thoroughness of a dietitian working on balancing a school lunch program.
My job was to prepare all the
components, put them on a special shelf in the big Sub-Zero refrigerator. She would then come in at their meal times,
pull out the various ingredients for that meal, cut them up into little
bite-sized pieces, and toss them lightly together. She’d then put the food into their
individualized little silver bowls and take them to where ever it was that she
fed them. Mrs. Quire made a major
production out of this, invariably spreading her little project out over most
of the whole kitchen, indifferent to anything that I was trying to get done
there. When she was finished she would
breeze off to feed the dogs, leaving me with her huge mess to deal with. My daily mantra of “This is her kitchen, she
can do as she pleases. (repeat as often as necessary)” wore thin pretty
quickly.
One of the regular menu items for
the pooches was chicken. Mrs. Quire
would always have me buy fresh (never frozen or “hard chilled”) whole
chickens. Free-range and organic ones
were preferred when available. She then
had me “Kosher” the chickens. This is a
process of salting down the carcasses for an hour or so, letting any juices be
drawn out, adding more salt as necessary.
After the Koshering I was permitted to poach the whole birds (no cutting
up was permissible) in a seasoned court bouillon (with a nice mire-poix, of
course). Once poached, the birds were
cooled and the breast meat removed. That
was the only part that the dogs got. I
was not allowed to use the rest of the meat for The Family so the household staff
got a lot of poached dark meat chicken meals.
From time to time I uesd some of that wonderful chicken stock in a dish
for The Family, but I don’t think they would have approved, if they had known.
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