Chicken Dinner (warning: graphic pictures)

For dinner tonight, we decided it was a good night for chicken. We've had chicken a decent number of times here, so it didn't seem like that big of a deal, but it was a bit different today.

The process:
1. Go to Mul Djej (literally: owner of chicken). There are a few close-ish to our house, and a bunch throughout town. We normally go to the one in The Village (downtown area), because that's where we do most of our food shopping, but tonight we went to the closer option.

2. Order your chicken and figure out the price. Tonight, it was two chickens (one was 2 kilos and the other was 2.5) for 75 dirham (about $7.50).
3. Mul Djej goes to work. He walks to the back of his shop area and picks up the chickens, brings them up front to weigh them for you, and then sets in on the cleaning. It's a pretty quick operation, really:

• say "bismillah," or "in the name of Allah," which is said to begin pretty much everything (a meal, a taxi ride, a class, really anything)
• cut the neck and wait for it to stop flappin' and drain all the blood
• dunk it in really hot water a couple times and put it in the defeather machine (it's a big drum that spins really quickly and sounds like a dryer)
• pull out the not-so-fun inside bits (intestine, stomach, etc)
• put it in a bag and hand it over
• (our other Mul Djej quarters the chicken and cuts out the neck and inside bits, but that's optional)

4. Bring the future meal home, clean it, soak it in vinegar, cook, and enjoy!

Simple enough, yeah? Well tonight was our first encounter of needing to break down the whole bird. With a little help from this video from Alton Brown and our two best knives, Toby jumped in and did a wonderful job getting our dinner ready!

I warned you it was graphic! This is the first time the whole head came with it. 

Here you can see our two best knives. The purple one is actually supposed to be a bread knife, but it's the heaviest one we've got and handles chicken bone nicely. The other is a tiny little ceramic paring knife that's super sharp and has yet to fail us, until today. There are two chips in the blade now, and we might need to bid it farewell. 

Mmmmm look at all those tasty inside bits for Enib later. 

Here you can also see the vinegar soaking bowl. We aren't really sure why, but we were told by multiple Moroccans to soak our chicken in vinegar before we cook it and we see no reason to challenge them. 

And voila! Now dinner is cooking and Toby can count himself as a chicken butchering expert (basically).