Cut What Meat Off What Chicken?

I'm a bachelor this weekend, my wife having wandered off to save souls at a women's retreat. She does that from time to time and I'm quick to seize the opportunity to indulge my repellent, baser passions - British cooking and soccer.

Last night, as I watched Norwich inexplicably lose to Blackburn, I made Cock-a-Leekie Soup. Well, to be perfectly honest, I did a lot of things while I made Cock-a-Leekie Soup. It's made by boiling a whole chicken, 6 coarsely chopped leeks, a pound of prunes and a bit of salt for 2 1/2 hours. At the end, the recipe tells you to pull the chicken out of the pot and "cut the meat off the bones and put it back in the pot." This is utter nonsense.

If I hadn't put it there with my own two hands, I'd never have known that the blob of meat and now-disassociated bones was a chicken. It was so thoroughly dissolved that it could have been anything - a chicken, a rabbit, a stoat or even a young archaeopteryx, forever lost to Mankind because I decided to eat it instead of handing it over to the Minions of Science*. As I pulled the wreckage out of the pot, the bones separated themselves from both meat and cartilage and came out almost perfectly clean. The was no cutting to be done at all.

Roman augurs would have told my fortune with these. "You will fall asleep tonight watching Newcastle thump Stoke City." Very prescient, those augurs.

While the meat was unidentifiable, the end result was amazingly good. So good that I might even try to convince my wife to give it a go. Dittos for the Steak and Kidney Pie I made the night before. With a half pound of beef kidney and a pound of suet left over from the weekend's orgy, I might as well.

* - The Minions of Science would have no doubt concluded that the existence of a live archaeopteryx rushing about in the undergrowth of the canyons of Tierrasanta was proof positive of Global Warming Climate Change and would have waved it above their heads demanding we give them more funding for research and submit every aspect of our lives to the review and approval of the State.