Chicken, chicken (skin) and more chicken.
We had nothing planned for Saturday night dinner, so Papa's Chicken it was — the leftovers of which got paired with ramen the next day. There are a million chicken places out there, some genuinely great (like Papa's), some disappointingly meh (Popeyes, I'm looking at you). Papa's main strength is consistency. I'm partial to their plain, unseasoned, crispy variant, which you can doctor to your own taste — Kikkoman and crispy chilli oil, in my case.

Then the chicken skin arrived. Two kilos of it. I hadn't even realised I'd ordered it, and it came from this online store — the only place I've found that sells it here.

As someone who has become annoyingly snobbish about meat sourcing, I had questions. Is the chicken free-range? What exactly is the quality control on how the skins are processed? Without clear answers, I just ran them under cold water over and over until my hands started to go numb. They're going to be cooked anyway, right?

The best method I've come across is to lay the skins flat on a baking sheet and roast them in batches. I've seen people on social media dump everything into a pot of water and wait for the liquid to evaporate, letting the skins render and fry in their own fat — but I think this is misleading. Unless you're using a brand-new, genuinely non-stick pan, the skins inevitably stick during the boiling phase and tear when you try to work them off with a spatula. (I used a non-stick pan. They still stuck.) That said, I do see the merit of a quick parboil beforehand to take the edge off that intense, barnyard chickeny smell.

Yes, keto people will tell you chicken skin is practically a health food. And while rendered chicken crackling is genuinely delicious, let's not kid ourselves — it's still mostly fat. We treat it as a treat.

And because the crackling had left us with a nice pool of rendered chicken fat, and we had some large chicken legs sitting in the freezer, it seemed only logical to make chicken inasal for dinner. Sort of. I didn't actually have cane vinegar, calamansi, or lemongrass — so it was inasal in spirit and appearance, if not entirely in flavour. It's been a while, honestly, and I can't even recall with any certainty how it's supposed to taste.

One last thing: there's a US lobby group that flatly declares that chicken is not a healthy food choice. Take that with an enormous grain of salt — it's an American organisation, after all, and they have their own agenda to push. As they always do.