A few days ago CJ wrote about her preference for chicken or beef or something else and came firmly down on the side of chicken:

Chicken chicken chicken chicken. Hands down.

Although I do love seafood but don’t have the chance to eat it fresh very often.

When I was growing up we raised our own beef (as in cows) and so we ate beef six nights out of seven, or at least that’s how I remember it.

I grew very tired and almost grossed out by beef and once I moved away from home it was years before I would eat beef again.

I’m sort of in between.

Sort of, but not really.

When we lived on the farm, we raised chickens and cattle and pigs (oh my!). And my father joined in with the semi-annual butchering, which I was not allowed to observe. 

After we moved to Richland, my mother kept rotating the meats fairly regularly, so in any given week we’d usually have a chicken dish and pork chops and perhaps chile con carne or maybe shipwreck or some other casserole made with ground beef. Beef for us was mainly ground beef and sometimes a roast, but never steak. 

I didn’t learn until much later that my father didn’t like steak, so we never had it. 

I also learned at school that most of the other kids seemed to think of chicken as something special, which I could never understand, but I now assume it was probably because they didn’t get it at home very often.

Anyway, I still like chicken and beef and I rarely make steak. Seafood, especially salmon, appears on my table fairly regularly as well. I would make pork more often but the flavor and tenderness as been bred out of pigs over the last few decades, and I simply can’t make pork chops the way my mother used to. The only thing that comes close to the way I remember it is pork and sauerkraut.

But here’s the thing.

As I cook for myself, practically anything that I make has to be warmed up over the next few days as leftovers or be frozen for the near future.

And I find that while I like most beef dishes as leftovers, sometimes even more than hot off of the stove, when it comes to chicken creations, I seem to lose my taste for them when I re-heat them.

I don’t know why that is, but I end up throwing away some leftover chicken dishes.