My mom and me out to eat. A rare occurrence because she is positive that her food is better than any restaurant could ever provide. Photo: from Amanda Burrill’s Instagram.

Mom Would Never Waste a Dead Bird

By Amanda Burrill

Oh the smells that remind you of home; bacon and eggs, roasted chicken, lasagna, chocolate chip cookies, the robin that crashed into the window and died on impact…

Artist rendition of a dead robin. The one my mom cooked started off like this.

I had an atypical culinary upbringing in Winterport, Maine.  While other kids ate hot dogs and pizza, I ate egg rolls, pho, stir fry, teriyaki beef, crab Rangoon and all things southeast Asian. It was a treat when we had hot dogs – oh my gosh, the red ones! – which probably meant we were at someone else’s house or mom was taking a break from the kitchen.  Kids wanted to come to my house to eat because they knew that the Asian lady in town had a catering business and her food tasted “different.”

Mom was born in Vietnam, where war raged from December 1956 to April 1975, so she spent ages six through 25 in a war zone. She was able to escape Saigon three days before the city fell in 1975, went to Guam as a refugee and then to Travis Air Force Base in northern California. She had one friend in the United States and somehow got down to Los Angeles and found her.

I grew up on stories of the war. I’m sure there were other stories, but those are the ones that have stuck in my mind. My dad was there too, so I got both angles of what that war was like; from the military officer and from the street-smart young woman who smuggled gasoline around South Vietnam. She always worked food into the story. In fact, she’s written a couple books on food, co-mingling recipes with memories of the Vietnam War, in one, and stories of the markets and catering jobs she does, in the others. No wonder, for me, it’s always about food.

On a not-so-obviously related note, in a dire situation, I am the one who is going to survive. My dad would take me on expeditions in the woods, especially when there was a blizzard, teaching me ways to track, and explaining what I could eat or drink. I fished for dinner at age four, mowed acres of lawn when my dad was out to sea, and killed and prepped my first chicken at age nine. I also have a tendency to eat the eyeballs out of every dead creature that lands on my plate. Yes, lobster eyes. Always pig eyes. And once you hear about a special entrée my mom made a few years back you will understand why.

My monkey-brain eating mother cooked a big, fat, “juicy” (her words) robin after it flew into our living room window and died.  She picked it up and without hesitation fabricated it as if it were a miniature chicken, but left the head on.

I don’t have a “roasted robin” recipe to share, but if you care to experiment with exotic bird, rub the carcass with rice wine, salt, pepper and five-spice powder. Wrap a curl of orange peel around a fresh clove of garlic and tuck it inside the bird’s cavity. Insert a toothpick starting from the beak through the upper back to hold the head and body in line while it roasts, in a seated position. Roast for 20 or so minutes at 350 degrees and the rockin’ robin is ready.

Mom used the toaster oven.  Once the bird was out of the oven, mom set it on a tiny platter and put a small cherry tomato on the tip of the toothpick. She garnished the plate with green herbs and then said, right as my dad walked in the door, “This is your chance to say ‘I’ve eaten wild Maine robin!’”

My dad said, “I’ll take a piece of that!” Using chef’s tweezers to hold the lower part of the drumstick, Mom used embroidery scissors to snip it off the body and handed it to my dad. “It’s not bad!” was his reaction.

So now you know why I will eat anything. This is one of many examples of culinary adventure in the Burrill household.

My dad always said, “Don’t knock it till ya tried it!”

Amanda Burrill