Asshole Chicken (feat. White Claw and Guy Fieri)

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Ha, ha, asshole chicken.

How’s it going? I hope you’re doing okay. We are still being very careful about being out. We’ve been watching a lot of zombie themed stuff at night. Zombies have a very strange diet.

Last week, Davida wrote a paid-subscribers only piece about making a michelada with only ingredients we had in the cupboard, and it was awesome. New subscribers can retroactively check it out via the blog version of this newsletter. Hint, hint.

I know everyone is cooped up, lonely, and scared, but I’ve been seeing some really kind gestures lately.

One of these gestures was an unexpected phone call from my friend Lisa. We caught up, and she suggested that, as an idea, I could mess around with some hard seltzer. Davida and I sometimes have it in the fridge, but I’d never really considered it as an ingredient for anything, until Lisa brought it up.

It’s not easy to come up with ideas for writing every week, but as a genius, and the greatest food writer in all of history, I did some serious thinking. Then I consulted an image that I only go to during the hardest of times.

Whether or not Tom Black Dragon knows it, he has inspired me with this stock image for years now.

Today, it would be the caption of this photo that would inspire me, yet again.

“Chef prepare to make Honey Roast Duck. His hand pick in duck’s asshole for push in spices.” Those are powerful words, and they are my secret mantra. Now they are yours too.

Then, in a vision, I saw a shining face through the darkness.

It was my dad.

He whispered into my ear, smelling of donkey sauce and hair bleach, “Come to Flavortown and check out my recipe for Big Bud’s Beer Can Chicken. It’s off the hook, and off the chain.”

I was terrified.

But I had to listen to my dad. And to Lisa.

So I decided I’d have to shove a can of White Claw up a chicken’s ass and by doing so, I’d win another James Beard Award.

I’ve never had beer can chicken, but some people swear by it.

Most people do it on the grill, but the grill I have looks like it got hit by a car. Plus, for whatever reason, the grill likes to take raw food and scorch it in under 30 seconds. Basically what I’m saying is that it’s a total piece of shit.

To start out, I made a basic spice rub for the outside of the chicken, also known as the “chicken skin.”

I had most of what Guy’s recipe called for, minus a few goatee hairs and catchphrases.

I massaged the chicken and took a sip of room temperature Natural Lime White Claw.

I briefly considered butt-chugging the rest, but I knew I had to save it for the chicken. It’s so effervescent and lively!

The recipe calls for some garlic to be pushed into the can, so I did it, then I pushed some garlic into mine.

I whispered to the can, “I’m sorry for what’s about to happen.”

I stared at the corpse of the chicken for a long time.

I was feeling a lot of different emotions.

What makes Guy Fieri’s beer can chicken unique is the addition of a strange collar of bacon.

For good measure, I made a bacon anus before I pinned the rest of the bacon on with toothpicks.

Have any of you seen the movie Hellraiser?

If you haven’t, congratulations, now you have. Davida said, “It looks like an effigy. And the end of Hereditary.”

This is easily the funniest and most terrifying thing I’ve put in my oven.

I mean, Jesus Christ, there’s so much happening right now, in the world, and in my kitchen.

By the time the meat had come to temp, the skin was still extremely pale and flabby.

This is what it looked like when I pulled it out of the oven. You know those weird collars that the depictions of those doughy-ass pilgrims always wore? It looks like a chicken bacon pilgrim.

With a little help from Davida, we managed to pull the can out of the chicken without spilling anything.

Horrendous. Horrendously mouthwatering. I suppose if you pulled a can out of my ass it’d look like this too.

Waste not, want not!

The resulting liquid from the can was white and smelled heavily like sour garlic, so with some drippings and flour, I made a rough gravy, then I considered retiring from food writing.

This is the kind of bland chicken you’d serve at Judy’s retirement party along with a nice glass of milk.

It’s my fault I underseasoned it, and the chicken was surprisingly juicy and tender, but there really wasn’t much flavor to it. Neither Davida or I really could detect the White Claw in the chicken, and not even the chicken breast where the can was crammed beneath. I thought the smelly gravy was really strange; it was sort of a thickened limey sour beer, and I didn’t care for it too much.

“I like the gravy, but it would have been better with cilantro,” Davida said.

I’m sure it would. But that’s too much flavor for Judy.

That’s because Judy sucks.

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I may not have been entirely successful today, but I’m glad I did this. Thanks again, Lisa!

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And of course, your paid subscriptions have been keeping us afloat, so thank you. They paid for the ingredients today. I love you.

Venmo: @dickholedannis

One last thing. Here’s a little essay I wrote for Chicago Magazine, on how I’m feeling right now; it’s a little more serious, but I have to pretend like I’m a real writer now and then.