Serves: 5
About six years ago, just after I'd moved to the Nampa, Idaho, patrol area, the boss asked me to cook dinner after a district meeting. In those days, my signature dish was chicken caccitiore.
At the meeting happened to be one of my fellow officers who would later become my boss. This native son of Idaho, like many, was raised on a diet of "meat and taters". I'm not saying that Norris had led a sheltered life up to this point, but it would be safe to say he hadn't explored many culinary horizons!
As the night wore on and a few malted beverages consumed, Norris began to refer to my chicken caccitiore as "Chicken ala S*#T"! My daddy always taught me not to get mad, but to get even and then get ahead! I bristled up enough that Norris knew he'd got my goat.
As the years went by and Norris was promoted, he ate enough of my cooking that he reached the point of occasionally bragging about it. Now the stage was set to get even and ahead all in one fell swoop!
A couple of years ago, I came back from a fishing trip to the gulf coast of Texas with two coolers full of jumbo shrimp and fillets from red snapper, red drum, and sea trout. I called the boss and invited him and his wife to a seafood dinner."Sure" he said, "how about next weekend?"
A couple days before the dinner, I went down to a local fast food restaurant and bought a hamburger-as simple a hamburger as can be made by modern technology. I set it on a plate in the cupboard and proceeded to let it dry out a bit. When Norris and his wife Jan arrived, preparations for dinner were well on the way.
After I mixed him about three fingers of corn squeezings with some cola over ice, old Norris really began to brag on my cookin'! About five years had elapsed between the two occasions, and Norris was about to learn that I'll wait quite a while to "get ahead"! In those five years we'd shared quite a few horse patrols, boat trips, and job related camping trips with no complaints about the chow.
If memory serves me correctly, I'd prepared a dozen or so jumbo shrimp with cocktail sauce as an appetizer, fillets of red snapper poached in white wine with a little seasoned butter and lemon juice, new red potatoes boiled in their jackets and dressed with butter and minced parsley, a green salad, and sourdough garlic bread. All was set on the table except for the shrimp and cocktail sauce, and all was set for pay back time!
I walked into the dinning room with the shrimp cocktail and I set one each in front of Jan and my place settings and presented Norris with his entree! You'd have to know Norris to truly appreciate the look on his face. Have you ever witnessed the pained expression people get when they pass gas in a crowded public place or when they've stepped onto a substance in the grass which twelve hours before was perfectly good dog food? The look on his face said it all ! It had taken five years , but now I was ahead!
Our dinners almost got cold, we laughed so long! I haven't yet tried it, but I suspect for old "Mr. Meat & Taters", I could cook up some tofu along with a soy bean burger and get no complaints.
A Back Country Guide to Outdoor Cooking Spiced with Tall Tales
This _Chicken ala S*#T recipe is from the Cee Dub's Dutch Oven and Other Camp Cookin' Cookbook. Download this Cookbook today.
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