Take that, Laura Ingalls Wilder

I just wrestled with a whole, raw, 5-pound chicken.

And I won.

Most of my life I've been intimidated by raw meat. My mom is mostly vegetarian, so while I learned lots in the kitchen about cutting butter into flour for biscuits and how to stir fry veggies, meat is sort of an enigma.

I mean, if you cut up raw carrots or broccoli, they don't bleed all over the counter.

And this chicken I brought home from the meat counter, it was covered in skin! SKIN!

The plan was to make chicken noodle soup from scratch. My church is having a soup potluck, and I figured as an adult, married woman I should tackle one of the great mysteries of the kitchen: where does chicken noodle soup come from if not the can?

So I unwrapped the gangly chicken in the sink and stared it down.

AUGH!

I called my grandma.

Her chicken soup is always the best.

And I got her answering machine. I was truly alone.

I decided I had to do the deed and started ripping the skin off the pale beast. It was so...stretchy.

By the time I got done cleaning the bird off, it looked less like poultry and more like an infant.

I'm supposed to put this in a pot of water and boil it?

But I did it.

And, miracle of miracles, it worked.

I have no plans to spend a winter in a sod house with no electricity, and think again if you suspect I'll take a bath in the kitchen in a tub of water already used by five other people.

But you'll just have to come to the church potluck this weekend to see how the battle turned out between me or the 5-pound raw chicken.