AUNT JUDY, please close your eyes when you read this story. For this is the story of the chicken that killed Grandpa.
Well, the chicken didn't actually kill Grandpa, but the morning after Sam Silk suffered a fatal heart attack in 1971, my mother said, "It must have been the chicken."
"The chicken" was Rosa de la Garza's Texas chicken, a recipe my mom had clipped from some magazine or other and Scotch-taped onto a page in a big orange plastic binder that held all her favorite recipes.
I grew up with my two younger brothers in the San Fernando Valley, but my mom, Joan, a passionately devoted cook and eater who has a list of things she won't eat as long as your arm (brown soups, risotto, tofu, arugula -- in fact, salad in general -- hummus, tahini -- in fact, anything from the Middle East, anything Greek, anything breaded or fried), refused to entertain the idea of eating or exposing us to Mexican food when we were kids, claiming that "good Mexican food" was an oxymoron. She also maintained that "yogurt makes you go blind."
And so, though she was immediately attracted to Rosa de la Garza's Texas chicken when she clipped it from that magazine, filled, as the recipe was, with wonderful late summer vegetables -- zucchini, fresh tomatoes and corn cut off the cob -- Joan was bothered by the tiny matter of two jalapeno chiles. She had never before cooked with jalapenos, or as they were referred to in the recipe, "small hot green peppers, chopped (optional)."
That "optional" got under Joan's skin too. She made the dish the first few times without the jalapenos and then, I don't know, maybe she was swayed by the sight of jalapenos in the produce section. In any case, one night, the night Grandma and Grandpa were coming to dinner, she decided to make the chicken with the jalapenos.
That, she said the next morning, was what must have killed Grandpa.
Still, the jalapenos stay
THE years passed, and the lethal lore of the dish never got in the way of our enjoyment of it. Joan made it every couple of weeks during the blissful, long summer squash season, referring back to the recipe in the orange binder every time, though she did start riffing on it, adding chopped ginger, a little more garlic, and crooknecks and pattypans to keep the zucchini company. She insisted on going to Maria's corn stand, on the corner of Hayvenhurst and Burbank, for the best corn.
