Elvis Costello, Exploding Glassware, and KFC

The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival was this weekend in Golden Gate Park. There were five stages full of a wide variety of acts, including Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Billy Bragg, and lots of other people I know of but don't ever listen to. It was all free, though, so when we saw that Elvis Costello was performing Sunday afternoon with T-Bone Burnett, we decided to go, however briefly.

As I expected, his set consisted mostly of old country songs, like "She Thinks I Still Care" and the like. It was good, sure, but I thought, just maybe, he'd play something from one of his 20 or so albums of original material. (I read this morning that Costello popped up on various stages on Friday and Saturday, including performing one of the very first sets of the festival on Friday, where he played a handful of his own stuff -- oh well.)

When we got home I set about making a roast chicken with a Moroccan spice rub, something I'd successfully done a couple of times before (I blogged about it, somewhere months ago). It's a basic recipe. Once you prep the chicken, you roast it for 20 minutes, then add a cup of water, then continue roasting until it's done.

The first couple of time I made it, I added potatoes and onions to the baking dish. This was good, but by the time the chicken was done, the sides were going on charred. This time I decided to add them when I added the water after 20 minutes.

For some reason, though, when I took the dish out, put it on the stove, and added the water, the glass just exploded. I mean, glass embedded in the chicken, glass on the counter, stove, and floor, glass cracking and popping. There were no physical injuries, just the psychological damage from having to throw away a chicken. It seemed really wasteful but, first, it had glass all over it, tiny bits of glass and, second, we'd just lost the only dish large enough to bake a chicken in.

So we decided to go to KFC. Why? In hindsight, this seems like a poor decision. But we'd gotten these coupons in the mail and they made KFC look really good. There's one about 6 blocks from our apt, in a little Chinatown (there are a few Chinatowns in SF). I hadn't had KFC in years, but remembered loving it as a kid. I stopped eating there out of principle after hearing about how badly they treat their chickens, but hunger won out last night (plus, I think most of the chicken we eat comes from mistreated birds, KFC just gets a lot of publicity for it).

Well, there's a new reason not to go to KFC. It's nasty. It was the fattiest, slimiest chicken I've ever had. I don't remember it being that greasy. Even the biscuit was subpar. We split some popcorn chicken, and that was decent, but overall, I'm done with KFC for good, or at least another 7 or 8 years.