L.R. Burt

Purple is the color of royalty.  Does turning your chicken purple make your meal Chicken a la King?

Last night I reached new heights in culinary capers. No dinners were ruined, for once, but I did manage to dye our  chicken purple. Deep, vivid purple.  Like a bruise.  Actually, by the time I’d finished cooking the chicken, it looked like something from one of Francesco Redi’s science experiments with spoiled meat and maggots.

Fortunately for me, in this household, taste counts for more than presentation.

So, how did I manage to dye our chicken purple? That is the question…

I was cooking chicken and bell peppers, as pictured here, when I first tried the recipe about three weeks ago:

Lovely, yes?  It tastes as good as it looks.  And last night it tasted just like it normally looks, even though it didn’t look at all like this, being purple.

You see, the recipe calls for a red onion.  The particular red onion I got this week was much more purple than red, even when it had been peeled and diced up in the food processor.  As the chicken cooked with it in a skillet, the onion’s color bled onto the white meat.  There was absolutely  nothing I could have done to prevent this happening, and, as it didn’t alter the flavor in any way, we topped our white rice* with red, green, and yellow bell peppers and purple chicken. It was quite a colorful meal, to say the least.

*Incidentally, while I was busy turning our chicken purple, I nearly botched our rice as I haven’t done since I was a new bride, by absentmindedly leaving out a cup of the water.  Fortunately I was able to save it by adding water and cooking it for ten minutes longer.

And yes, this was microwavable rice; I’m an even bigger failure at stove-top rice than I am at microwavable.

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chicken, kitchen catastrophes, red onions, rice, there's no scope for the imagination in cookery