Pairings .05 🍷🧀

Comedic marriage & growing up Christian in '90s America, plus the easiest way to cook a whole chicken that will never be dry

Photo by Robert Linder on Unsplash

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“Pairings” is a series in which I share things that go well together - not only the traditional wine and cheese, but things I’ve read or heard or seen. (Content varies widely!) If you’ve missed previous installments, you can find them here:

Pairings 01. Stereotypes, Archetypes, Housewifery & Motherhood (plus Bruschetta)

Pairings 02. Exploring Exhaustion, Life Cost, and Trade-offs (plus an allergen-friendly salad that’s actually delicious)

Pairings 03. The Gifts of Masculinity, plus a recipe for World’s Easiest Pulled Pork

Pairings 04. Arranged marriages, community & the individual, and a fun way to spice up your coffee

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1. How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told by Harrison Scott Key

This was one of the few non-fiction books I read in its entirety last year.¹ If you’re not in a season of life for dark humor, you may want to skip it, but it did actually make me laugh out loud at times, particularly his chapter written in the Book-of-Job-style. 

In this memoir, Key tells the story of his marriage and its dance with infidelity. Several years into a life with 3 beautiful girls, a perfect house, and a burgeoning career as a writer, he discovers that his wife has been cheating on him with the neighbour, who is (in Key’s admittedly biased account) an exceedingly average guy. Why does she find him so attractive? Because he’s helpful. He takes out the trash, rakes the leaves, picks up an extra gallon of milk. And thus begins Key’s interior examination - of himself, of his marriage, and of his faith. 

“[This book is] about my spiritual journey through the wastelands of being and my seeking, and being alternately sought by, and quite often being urgently embarrassed of and thus running desperately away from, the thing we call God.”

Key is a fantastic writer, and while he’s not afraid to go deep, he’s happy to take the humorous way there:

“I mean, sure, in the early years she pretended to like novels and canoeing, despite her fear of drowning, and I fake enjoyed The Sound of Music. Who cared? The hills were alive with the sound of our baby making.”

Without condoning or excusing infidelity, the book doesn’t shy away from the difficult reality that it rarely happens in a vacuum: the past can hold a wild amount of influence over the present and Christian communities have a lot to answer for in how they help couples prepare for and live marriage. In fact, Key’s wife writes one of the final chapters herself.

The book gave me a lot of food for thought, particularly about how we offer marriage support within the Christian community, but one of my favourite parts was mostly a sidenote to the main plot: his descriptions of his wife’s evangelical upbringing. I wasn’t homeschooled in Alabama, but reading this made me feel seen.²

“A sheltered homeschooling child in suburban Birmingham, Alabama, Lauren was spared the more degenerate vicissitudes of contemporary American life, depriving her of the rich masterworks of Van Halen and the Gremlins franchise. She and her two siblings were occasionally allowed to view smut, such as Back to the Future, when edited for network broadcast….The family listened only to contemporary Christian music–Twila Paris, Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith– with all that swelling operatic vibrato and the slow, tortured piano of daytime drama. It is music that would turn anyone psychotic.”

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2. Comedian Nate Bargatze

It turns out that we weren’t alone in being spared from the more degenerate vicissitudes of contemporary American life.³ 

My friend (who was only allowed to watch PBS⁴ or parent-approved VHS in her childhood), introduced me to comedian Nate Bargatze’s sketch on growing up with ‘80s and ‘90s Christian parents, who were “the most Christian you can ever get of the Christian…. I wasn’t allowed to watch anything. When they made the Simpsons, it was like, I guess they’re just making R-rated TV shows now.”

Do yourself a favour and watch this clip where he recounts what happened when the popular horror movie, Friday the 13th, was being shown at a sleepover.

“I was at this sleepover one night…”

Bargatze’s also unafraid to tackle the universal experience of marital spats - unlike Key, his is a purely light take on domestic life. Has anyone else moved on past the gentle nudge for snoring, or found themselves irked with the decibel level of their spouse’s chewing? This clip will have you in stitches.

“There’s a lot of stuff I’m not allowed to do near her…”

His special, Hello World, is worth an evening viewing, dare I say especially when you need a pick-me-up. Recently he also hosted SNL:⁵ watch his opening monologue about life before the internet, and and this sketch on US weights and measures, which had both me and my British husband nodding along as we laughed.

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3. The easiest way to cook a whole chicken (that will never be dry)

If you’ve ever been intimidated by cooking a whole chicken because you want neither leathery fowl nor salmonella, fear not: this method yields moist, succulent, and fully-cooked chicken, every time, with absolute minimal effort.

You’ll need:

• a crock-pot / slow cooker

• a whole chicken that will fit inside your crock-pot

• half a small lemon (unwaxed, if possible)

• half a small onion

• 2 Tbs of salt (ideally, kosher salt)

Method: pop the half lemon and onion inside the chicken cavity. Place the chicken in the crock-pot, and rub the salt all over. (If you’re too tired, you can actually skip the lemon and the onion and the rubbing, but don’t skip the salt.)

Now turn the chicken so it is breast-side down inside the crock pot. This is crucial: the juices will flow downwards and settle there. Put the lid on, and cook on low for at least 4 hours for a small chicken (2lbs) and longer for a larger one. It’s hard to overcook, because the crock-pot won’t let it dry out. You’ll know it’s done (1) when it smells strongly of cooked chicken, and (2) when you try to lift it out, it all falls apart.

I usually pop it all onto a plate and let it cool a bit before I separate the meat from the skin and bones (the former for the cat, the latter to be saved for bone broth). The liquid that’s left in the pot is sheer lemony, chickeny, brothy goodness. Drizzle some over the meat and save the rest for a soup. You can also freeze this broth and pull it out to sip on a sick day.

Use the meat in any recipe that calls for cooked chicken; pop it on a salad; or use it for a quick, healthy bite of protein when the blood sugar is dropping.

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Tell me: have you seen anything funny recently? Any reading recommendations?

1. Thanks to Haley Baumeister with her weekly links at Life Considered for this recommendation. The sheer number of genuinely interesting things she links to is really wonderful, and also responsible for many of my “discoveries” that I end up writing about. If you aren’t already subscribed, I highly recommend it.

2. I realize that if you didn’t experience life as a ‘90s Christian kid in America, this might not be as funny.

3. For the record, I’m really grateful for being sheltered from legitimate cultural trash in my youth. I wasn’t unaware of bad things, but I wasn’t consuming them on the regular.

4. For my non US readers, PBS = Public Broadcasting Service. Think: largely educational and boring with occasionally good period dramas.

5. Bargatze is known as a “clean comic” so it was encouraging to see him invited on a show that hasn’t had many ‘clean’ skits in recent decades.