Day 154: Gizzards

Ian's and my favorite bar in Pullman is an interesting place. It has the standard plethora of alcoholic paraphernalia on the walls, windows, and ceilings. It's the home of a weekly dart league. We like to sit on the carpet-covered bench seats and play trivia. Any Pullmanite knows, from this description, that I speak of My Office.

Yes, My Office--so when your wife says, Where were you? You can say, I was at My Office, and she'll think you were at work! Ha ha!

Anyway. My Office actually has pretty good food--mostly deep-fried, of course--but we like to walk down there every once in a while, get some fries, a burger, and a beer, and play the trivia game until we get bored or someone reeking of cigarette smoke sits next to us (as happened last night). But we rarely sample around their menu. Mainly because it's all standard bar food--except for one item that I previously would not have dared try: chicken gizzards, deep-fried.

I've seen a lot of old men order the chicken gizzards and the waitress didn't bat an eye, but for some reason when I ordered them I expected a reaction. Like, REALLY? But she was very cool. She took my order, told me I should get them with ranch dressing because ranch is good with everything, and I had to agree. I figured, I've become an eating champion. How hard could this be?

Let me put it this way. People told me I would have trouble with the chewiness of squid. I had no trouble at all. But the chewiness of a chicken gizzard--I couldn't even get my teeth through it. The breading, yes. The gizzard, no.

The taste of the chicken gizzard, though not the most pleasant (Ian thought it was wretched, I just thought it tasted like old meat) didn't get me so much as that dang texture. They're practically inedible, by design. The men who order them so often must have iron dentures or something. Anyway, we gave up on the gizzards pretty quickly, and ate a regular meal.

Now, having ingested at least a small quantity of gizzard, I figured I should look up what exactly a gizzard is. I know I've removed them from turkeys, but they've been already detached and generally in a plastic bag. Apparently a gizzard is a sort of stomach where a chicken can grind food with stones it's previously swallowed. They do this because they cannot chew. They're so tough because they're line with special proteins, because chewing your food with a stomach full of rocks is probably not the most delicate of processes.

So now I've had chicken gizzards, and I know what they are. How enlightened am I?